Colleen Flood*
Linda W. Cohen, APR, founder and CEO, The Caliber Group, Inc., and Michael Barber, director of digital strategy, Cohn Marketing, recently presented on Mobilizing Your Firm for a Smartphone World at the 2012 Counselors Academy Conference.
It seems like everyone wants to learn how to integrate mobile in to their communications strategy, engage with consumers using smartphones, and strengthen their capabilities portfolio. Marketers are now putting the majority of their efforts into mobile and with good reason.
- The average amount of data consumed by consumers is 46GB per day.
- For smartphones, that is 65 minutes per day.
- By 2013, over 50 percent of web traffic will be through mobile devices.
- It is predicted that mobile email will overtake webmail by next month (June 2012).
- Mobile search is up 400% on Google.
- Fifty-eight percent of adults are likely to make a purchase on a smartphone.
Their roundtable offered some compelling statistics for the use of smartphones and mobile marketing, but it seems that many marketers struggle to get a handle on things as consumption shifts. Cohen and Barber discussed some of common mobile marketing “mistakes” and offered some potential remedies.
Mistake One – Combining Social Media with Mobile
Don’t try to be all things in the mobile space. Instead focus on your strategy, creative production, and service-based applications. From there, start and move outward. Choose partners to work on other services. Then extend current digital services across mobile. As for finding the right partner,
- Know what you don’t know and seek partnerships accordingly.
- You cannot teach marketing strategies to a mobile strategist. It is easier to teach mobile to marketing not vice versa.
- Attend mobile conferences that are tech and brand focused.
Mistake Two – Thinking Your Agency is Going to Make Quick Money on Mobile
ROI comes from multiple places. Understand where mobile dollars come from.
Mistake Three – Not Using Tools Already Out There
Why recreate the wheel? HTML 5 allows developers to create one site that will work on multiple platforms. And there are a number of tools already out there designed to create and enhance mobile efforts.
- Mobify.com – mobile web tools
- Torsion Mobile – Mojaba
- TheAppbuilder.com
- Snaplab Media – QR Codes.
- Mogreet – MMS Tool
And don’t forget to leverage old mobile phone tactics.
Mistake Four – Doing Mobile Just Because
This one is pretty self explanatory. Why waste time and effort if it doesn’t fit into your overall communications strategy and align with business goals and objectives?
Mistake 5 – Pricing and Selling Like an Agency
The key to selling mobile is to educate your clients.
Additional Tips
In addition to these common mistakes, Cohen and Barber also suggested that marketing professionals look out for developing trends in the mobile and smartphone space.
- Natural User Interface
- Speech Development (e.g., Siri)
- Connected Devices (e.g., the mobile cloud)
- Network Maturation (e.g., How much data can we process as adoption rises?)
- Socio-economic impact
How are you mobilizing your firm in a smartphone world? Please share your thoughts with me and the readers of BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.
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*Bio: Colleen Flood has been a sales consultant with BurrellesLuce for over 12 years and is eager to become a more integrated part of the social-public relations community. She primarily handles agency relations in the New York and New Jersey metro-area. She is not only passionate about work, but also about family, friends, and the Jersey Shore. Twitter: @cgflood LinkedIn: Colleen Flood Facebook: BurrellesLuce
