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There’s no question that mobile is a board-level issue for the big players in the media, entertainment, gaming, retail, travel and financial services sectors.  

Market leaders and challenger brands realise mobile’s strategic importance in business success: consumer behaviour has shifted throughout the purchase cycle thanks to mobile and tablet adoption. If you doubt this, look at your own web log files and track the proportion of visitors now accessing you via their mobiles. Consumers are leading the charge, and companies must match their demands. 

Yet in a survey by the CMO Council, only 16 per cent of brands said they have developed a mobile strategy. The Engage at Every Stage survey of 250 global marketers from brands including Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, JP Morgan Chase, and Unilever looked at how brands view their mobile marketing initiatives. Only 14 per cent were happy with their mobile strategy. 

 The strong majority of companies have yet to optimise their sites for mobile, and most still approach mobile in a piecemeal, tactical way; rather than grasping the opportunity to transform their businesses, and integrating mobile into their broader business strategy.

 There’s no blueprint solution when it comes to mobile strategy. Every business is faced by a unique range of factors: digital value proposition; content and assets; how mobile influences purchase decisions; competitors’ use of mobile; internal IT and data processes; and mobile knowledge and capabilities. In this article, I’m asking six key questions. They should challenge your existing mobile strategy, if you have one. And if you don’t, these questions should help you shape your approach.

1. Who are your mobile consumers?

Let’s remember the most important person in your mobile strategy: the consumer. Do your research and understand their mobile and tablet ownership and usage patterns? If you know your target audience is rich in tech-savvy digital natives, you’re likely to win with most mobile technologies. If they’re ‘digital migrants’, whose knowledge of mobile is limited to SMS and web browsing, you’re unlikely to win with apps, and you’d be unwise to assume they trust mobile payments or NFC.

Whatever the target audience, think about the fundamental differences between desktop and mobile: the device itself, consumer intent, and context. And remember to harness mobile’s greatest strengths: personalisation, location-awareness, and immediacy of message and response. 

2. What are your business objectives?

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Too often, mobile under-delivers against its potential, as the technical solution comes first, and the business benefit is conspicuously absent. When you consider that most C-suite execs  fall into the ‘digital migrant’ bracket, it’s critical to pitch mobile in terms they will understand instantly. Are you using mobile to drive frequency of engagement? To up-sell and cross-sell new products and services to existing customers? To win customers and market share from competitors? 

Mobile has massive potential to improve business performance by creating a new sales channel or making operational efficiencies, and we have a broad range of analytics tools to track mobile performance at different stages in the customer journey funnel.

3. Have you developed the business case to underpin your mobile strategy?

Mobile has revolutionised the fortunes of a few industries – media, entertainment, gaming, retail, travel – and others will follow. For these industries, the question is how extensively mobile should influence their business processes. A ‘head in the sand’ response to the mobile challenge prompts a hasty path to the gates of the administrator.

For businesses yet to realise the impact of mobile, there’s a need to justify investment, hiring dedicated people, or reallocating and retraining others to deliver mobile solutions.

• I recommend six steps to help develop the business case for mobile.
• Define the scope of mobile marketing investment
• Review current and predicted future consumer use of mobile channels
• Benchmark competitor use of mobile
• Create mobile return-on-investment models for investment options
• Select and prioritise mobile options and create a mobile roadmap
• Write the business case

4. How do your customers engage with you via mobile?

Start developing your strategy by thinking about the different situations in which consumers use mobiles – not by thinking about mobile sites or apps in the first instance. 

Mobile works in situations such as following up on a TV ad, searching for a restaurant, scanning barcodes or action codes in a store, or simply reading emails on the commute to work. Don’t think about smartphones; think about smart users. Ask how your early adopters are using smartphones and tablets in practical and innovative ways. How many mobile touchpoints and opportunities can you identify to interact in new or different ways with your customers?

Translating the strategy into practice requires a mobile plan that defines the options for reaching, interacting, converting and engaging your mobile audience throughout the customer lifecycle. You should use the plan as the basis for specific goals, agree KPIs, and use it to justify budget allocation.

5. Are your stakeholders aligned behind the mobile vision?

To realise its full potential, you need to build consensus for a top-down mobile agenda. It’s simply not enough to expect a mobile champion or mobile task force to introduce and execute the company’s mobile agenda without board-level support. Think about the number and range of senior stakeholders who can feel highly threatened by the mobile revolution. These stakeholders, who usually match the 45–54 or 55+ demographic profile, may see the disruptive threat mobile poses, but lack the knowledge base to take advantage of the opportunity to gain competitive advantage for themselves and for their companies.

When you consider the power of mobile in activating customer response to other marketing activity, providing a conversion channel to sales, and long-term engagement, you can see how many key stakeholders need to understand and buy into the mobile vision and assist its execution.

Getting agreement in a small organisation is relatively straightforward, but what about a larger company? Board or senior management support for the mobile team mitigates this risk. Working in concert, and following a single mobile agenda, carefully selected stakeholders can accelerate the productivity of the mobile champion or mobile taskforce. 

6. Have you built a mindset of ‘test, measure, learn, adapt’?

As we know, smart online businesses constantly improve their site designs and content to help improve customer journeys and experiences to grow sales. The same principle applies to mobile. Conversion Rate Optimisation focuses on improving the returns from sites and apps through a structured approach – blending customer research, web analytics, and competitor benchmarking. It involves a change in mindset in applying web analytics from reporting to analysis and constant improvement.  

Remember, mobile provides a detailed data trail for time- and location-based tracking. Furthermore, as we don’t share our handsets, one mobile phone has one user, so we can link every mobile interaction to one named individual.  This allows micro-targeting on a level other channels cannot match, and an excellent opportunity for A/B and multi-variate testing for all your mobile messaging, offers and ads as the basis for constant performance improvement and superior ROI.

Food for thought

Mobile strategy is a complex beast, and the ideal solution will be unique for every organisation, But considering these key questions will help your mobile team formulate your purpose, and set you on your way to harnessing mobile’s power to transform your business. 

Rob Thurner has written two books on mobile marketing best practice. His latest – Mobile: futureproof your business today – is available for download. The book is co-authored by Dr Dave Chaffey.