CMO.com: Real Mobile Marketing Agility Requires Relevance [Blog]

The ability to incorporate new information and deploy personalized campaigns to a consumer’s preferred device in real time is easier said than done. A platform from which to quickly deliver timely content to target audiences will help, yet it is only half the equation to true mobile marketing agility.

As has always been true in marketing, the mechanism for getting in front of an audience is always subordinate to the content you are presenting to that audience. It doesn’t matter how you put something in front of a consumer--or how quickly you did it--if what they are seeing and interacting with isn’t effectively influencing a specific desired action.

Mobile Marketing Must Be Relevant
The key to effective marketing is relevance. For many businesses, relevance is supplanting reach as a marketing priority. While major consumer brands can assume that achieving strong reach through a high number of impressions (for instance, through a TV commercial) will eventually result in a purchase decision, most companies need to show clear, immediate results in order to validate the costs of rolling out a specialized campaign. Those results, more often than not, come from talking to consumers about the topics they care about, when they care most, through the channels and formats they prefer. Relevance, in other words.

This thinking is behind the explosive growth of hyper-targeted, sponsored social updates, personalized, programmatically served online ads, and, yes, mobile marketing agility. When we talk about mobile, relevance becomes even more essential. Many consumers now perform hundreds of functions and interactions through their mobile devices on a daily basis. Mobile devices are almost always by our side and are increasingly used in nearly every aspect of our lives, from socializing to shopping to producing and beyond.

With the vast amount of content audiences are already consuming via mobile with the speed and accessibility they demand, relevance has become core to effective mobile experiences and must be optimized on a granular level.

Consider the different ways we use mobile and our expectations around those uses. If I’m on my smartphone while shopping in a store, I’m probably looking up product reviews and searching for promotions. But if I’m on my tablet on my couch at home, I’m likely browsing or playing a game. As a consumer, my needs and preferences are very different in either situation, and the context of these situations is of the utmost importance.

When striving for relevance in mobile, context is king. How does your intended audience use their mobile devices?

How does the message you want to reach them with fit into those uses? What are the factors that create a sense of timeliness to the message you are developing? With that in mind, relevance can only be ensured through a ground-up, granular approach to creating mobile content.

Factors To Consider
Here are a few things to think about:

● Content and timing must be consistent with context: A coupon delivered via push notification to a user reading a tablet at home will likely be annoying, but that same notification could provide value to a customer receiving it while in a store. Your messages must make sense for the situation someone is in at the time they receive it.

● Relevance increases alongside interactivity: Consumer expectations for mobile experiences are getting higher. Email landing pages that are not optimized for mobile--or landing pages that take more than a few seconds to load--affect user interest and will lead to drop-off. Relevant mobile campaigns achieve the basics of mobile performance (page load speed, ease of interaction) to delight their users.

● Consider the cross-screen journey of a modern consumer: If you’re offering email coupons, that coupon must be easily redeemable across every channel, whether that’s a store or a smartphone or a computer. If not, your campaign isn’t relevant to how real consumers actually prefer to shop.

Mobile marketing agility isn’t just about the volume of impressions one can achieve, but about the quality of impact those impressions have. Brands that want to take advantage of the power of relevance should revisit the tools and techniques they are using. Any campaign can be optimized for mobile-specific capabilities to enhance user engagement and improve the overall customer experience.

Read the artice on CMO.com