Mobile Marketing – Third Screen Life Arrives!

A ‘Third Screen’ wave is underway, transforming online marketing and offline interaction; mobile access is anywhere, anytime, when you want. But beyond the early adopters, will business be now savvy enough to recognise opportunity or wait too long to see if mobile apps can play a long term marketing role before investing?

The professional website design and marketing practitioners are often best placed to quickly evaluate the viability of emerging web technologies and software platforms. It is their job to inform and advise their clients how to formulate best practice marketing strategies to engage niche market audiences.

The rapid emergence of both mobile and tablet technologies is creating a new communication potential, but is also throwing up once again, a big challenge to business on working out how they can properly measure metrics, decipher analytics, understand new audience types and engagement methods.

The confusion lies in the fact in that to use mobile marketing for delivering basic text message alerts or customised, interactive content is to use mobile as an individual distribution channel, which can produce a variety of customer response patterns, positive or otherwise.

The key attraction for eCommerce business is that mobile devices are almost certainly now a constant ‘life’ companion with which we rely upon to carry out an ever increasing number of minute by minute ‘work, social and personal’ activities. This fact alone is unique to mobile and should shape the messages. To be effective they need to be seen as highly relevant or highly important that best serves both parties, rather than annoying and intrusive.

Businesses endeavouring to position their brand identity should always know who they are communicating to and, thus, feel reasonably confident that each recipient is amenable to mobile communication, either based on a direct request to be contacted via mobile or other customer data collected.

Once a campaign has begun, the next step is to gather information on performance, e.g. How did each and every customer respond, to know how to better engage next time? Sending a compelling text message or directing a potential customer to a website needs an understanding of how to follow up, e.g. email, another text message, direct mail, etc

Businesses must make faster decisions on whether to implement new site infrastructure, keep pace with rapid change, and bridge the gap between traditional and emerging channels, otherwise risk losing contact with their audience as their communication preferences multiply.