one tough question: mobile marketing means business

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ONE TOUGH QUESTION:

Mobile Marketing Means BusinessIntegrating mobile into your overall campaign is vital. What are the best ways to overcome obstacles that may jeopardize your program?

ONE TOUGH QUESTION | MOBILE MARKETING 2016

With customers increasingly turning to their mobile device as their first screen, brands are taking note: A recent AdRoll report on more than 1,000 marketing and advertising executives revealed 82% are retargeting in mobile, up from 54%.

Data gathered by The CMO Council is telling:■ In 2015, eMarketer projected mobile

to overtake desktop for U.S. search ad dollars, rising from $8.72 billion to $12.85 billion — slightly above desktop’s $12.82 billion.

■ As of February 2015, 78% of Facebook users are mobile-only.

■ 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices.

However, while marketers understand implementing mobile into their brands’ overall campaign is imperative, the nuts and bolts of how to make it happen still prove elusive. We asked 11 industry insiders to discuss the one obstacle marketers need to overcome to innovate their mobile marketing. Hint: The small screen is the least of it.

ONE TOUGH QUESTION | MOBILE MARKETING 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Kurt Hawks, head of mobile, Conversant

7 Aaron Rudger, senior director, customer marketing, Dynatrace

8 Josh Todd, CMO Localytics

5 Yasmeen Coning, VP of marketing, Genesis Media

9 Josh Rochlin, senior disruption officer, IBM Commerce

11 Jason Long, senior solutions engineer, the Pedowitz Group

12 Hilmi Ozguc CEO, Swirl

6 Stephan Bajaio, VP, professional services and co-founder, Conductor

5 Patrick Reinhart, director of digital strategies, Conductor

6 Meghann York, director, product marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

10 Karen Kokiko, senior product marketing manager, data management platform, Oracle Marketing Cloud

ONE TOUGH QUESTION | MOBILE MARKETING 2016 4

KURT HAWKShead of mobile, Conversant @conversant

What’s the one obstacle marketers need to overcome in mobile marketing? Fragmen-tation. Despite the constant conversations about the importance of breaking down data and technology silos, most mobile campaigns are still executed and measured in one. This is a major problem because consumers don’t operate in silos.

While the majority of digital interaction time is spent on mobile devices, it’s clear that mobile-only data is not sufficient to truly understand and target the right consumers. In addition to mobile’s own challenges — from tying disparate cook-ies together to the iOS Safari browser’s default blocking of third-party cookies — consumers constantly jump back and forth between apps, the mobile Web, and desktop computers. They have come to expect a seamless and personalized digital experience, from the content they con-sume to the messaging that brands deliver to them. When consumers are presented with inconsistent brand experiences as they jump across devices to complete activities, brand equity can be compro-mised and potential conversions aban-doned. Additionally, key insights tend to get lost when campaign success is evaluat-ed in a mobile silo.

The fragmentation of time spent across multiple devices has left marketers scram-bling to attempt to tie various cookies and device IDs together. It seems the race to tie devices together has overshadowed the importance of understanding the consum-ers behind those devices. Devices don’t buy things. Consumers do. Even if two or more devices are tied together, how do you know enough about the consumer behind those devices to determine the best message to serve?

To unlock mobile’s potential, we need to take a consumer-first approach. This means building our marketing strategies around individual consumers, with mobile operating fluidly within that framework. All consumer learning (purchase, brows-ing, and location, to start) must be unified in a single consumer profile to be sure that the right individual is presented with the most relevant messaging across all chan-nels. Measuring cross-channel messaging’s impact must be centralized and include offline transactions, which still represent more than 90% of all retail purchases.

Essentially, we all need to take a step back in how we view mobile amid the larger digital landscape before we can take a step forward.


YASMEEN CONINGVP of marketing, Genesis Media @GenesisMediaNY

PATRICK REINHARTdirector of digital strategies, Conductor@askreinhart; @Conductor

Many marketers are their own obstacle. Why? Because old habits die hard.

Up until last year, desktop was king. Marketers were used to creating media and assets focused on the desktop audience. But the experience that an online user has with your site and brand is vastly different on a mobile device than it is on a desktop. With the majority of users now on mobile, marketers need to think differently: They need to think smaller and think quicker.

What many people have a hard time getting past are the campaigns, exercises, and deliverables they’re used to. Marketers who have been doing the same thing for years and years have a hard time moving on from those tried-and-true methods. They’re nervous to try new things in fear that they might not get the same ROI.

Using desktop methods on mobile isn’t going to work. Those who don’t move on and make themselves uncomfortable are going to lose pace with the industry.

Mobile marketing is an essential part of any strategy, but too many marketers silo mobile as its own plan. Separating mobile and desk-top is an archaic approach and creates more obstacles for marketers than benefits.

So much point of purchase occurs on mobile devices on a daily basis that it’s point-less not to include mobile marketing as part of any cohesive digital marketing strategy. In fact, tablets represent the highest add-to-cart rates for e-commerce websites, with 8.58%.

Beyond just device use, a recent survey found that approximately 40% of millennials use mobile devices to make purchases. As millennials begin to outpace baby boomers on purchasing power, we’ll see a more accelerated shift to mobile purchasing from desktop. In an increasingly digital world with cross-platform marketing as the new norm, digital marketing plans need to become platform agnostic to align with consumer behavior.


STEPHAN BAJAIOVP, professional services and cofounder, Conductor@stephanbajaio; @Conductor

MEGHANN YORKdirector, product marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud @meghann_york; @salesforce

Mobile, local, social, global, flexible. All marketers need to understand the method, medium, time, and place that evoke action from their audience.

As marketers, we need to adapt, but I challenge you to adapt to more than just mobile. The speed at which we’re forced to keep up with technological advances is vigorous. For mobile it began with mobile sites and then went to responsive design, then to adaptive design, and most recently to Google AMP. But the common tie that binds all of these changes is content.

All too often in digital marketing, we only see the pieces of the whole — not the whole in its entirety. Start thinking of your content as parts that contrib-ute to something bigger. Images, text, videos — each serves a purpose in providing the best experience to our audience. The key is to be sure we build those elements with more than just mobile in mind. Instead, create content that’s flexible enough to meet today’s screens and the screens of tomorrow. There will always be a new screen.

The biggest obstacle for marketers to overcome is thinking about mobile in a silo. For instance, some organizations may have mobile teams, when the truth is that everything is mobile. With the prolif-eration of smartphones, channels like email, social, advertising, and the Web are all mobile.

For years email has proved to be a significant revenue driver that consistently delivers the numbers marketers need, while mobile is ideal for taking advantage of time-sensitive moments. By pairing these two channels, marketers can leverage the time-liness of mobile and the reliability of email to drive

customer engagement across customer touchpoints. As an instance of this, marketers can create a text-in campaign that solicits customers to forward their email address to be entered into a sponsored contest or receive a white paper or eBook, thereby boosting a brand’s subscriber list.

By integrating a tried-and-true method such as email marketing with a fresh and convenient channel like mobile, marketers are not only overcoming their hesitancy to try something new, but also creating consistent brand voice across channels to smooth the way and ensure a holistic customer journey.


AARON RUDGERsenior director, customer marketing, Dynatrace@arudger; @Dynatrace

According to the 2016 Digital Trends Report from Adobe, cus-tomer experience is considered the top priority for marketers — for good reason. In just two short years, CX has morphed from being a top priority to a trend that’s defining all other marketing priorities. The thing is, without the proper actionable analytics, it’s impossible to improve on the experience.

In order to provide consumers with exceptional experiences, it’s important to understand what peo-ple see when they visit your website. For example, when a landing page is providing a poor experience, people are likelier to abandon the site all together that continue exploring. In fact, 50% of shoppers will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Consumers on desktops get better customer experience than those on mobile, which is where the over-whelming majority of online sales are made. But mobile is still a critical component when it comes to shop-ping. People eat, sleep, and breathe with their mobile device and expect the same high-quality experience from it that they have on desktop.

Rather than being reactive, com-panies should look into what they can do now to improve mobile and Web performance for their cus-tomers, which will allow them to iron out any wrinkles ahead of time. To do this, companies should be testing their mobile websites and apps before they launch in order to be sure that they’re delivering worthwhile user experiences to potential customers.


JOSH TODDCMO Localytics @JoshToddMKT; @Localytics

To improve mobile marketing, the most important obstacle that marketers need to overcome is a limited view of what they deem “successful.” It sounds counter intuitive that the danger lies in success, but that is exactly what is happening. If companies isolate their analyses to a simplified view of results like click-through rates or campaign conversions, they may be missing the negative consequences of mobile marketing campaigns.

To start, I believe that we are in the middle of a mobile engagement crisis. Our own data shows that 25% of apps are used only once. That’s why it’s critical for marketers to re-evaluate their mar-keting efforts in order to prevent further alienation of their customers.

Unfortunately, many marketers are measuring mobile success on the wrong metrics, often negating any gains that their engagement efforts produce. Many marketers fail to connect downstream user metrics (like lifetime value) to campaign metrics (the volume of new downloads, installs, users acquired). Connecting the two is vital to any cam-paign both to give marketers a fuller

picture of the overall business impact of their efforts and to prevent user disen-gagement and churn.

Consumer behaviors and preferences have changed, and marketers need to innovate in order to adapt to those changes — or they risk the unintended consequence of losing their users’ atten-tion. Consumers expect personalized and timely experiences when it comes to mobile. Failure to enable those expe-riences is detrimental for any brand.

Take push notifications. Push con-tent is deemed valuable when it elicits a successful open rate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every individual user finds those messages to be useful. In fact, more than half (52%) of consumers view push messaging as an annoying distraction. This is the negative effect of a smart marketing strategy without the data and insight to back it up.

While mobile engagement levels are teetering, there is still time for marketers to change course. But they must act now. The keys are using data to personalize and integrating marketing efforts as part of a user’s mobile experience in order to focus on the right definition of success.


JOSH ROCHLIN senior disruption officer, IBM Commerce @ibmcommerce

The biggest obstacle to integrating mobile into a successful marketing campaign? “Location, location, loca-tion!” Actually, no, that was 2015.

When it comes to mobile marketing, it’s no longer enough to be “mobile first,” that’s a given. “Location aware?” That’s also a given.

What is necessary is to be “relevant first” on the mobile device.

Your target consumer is likely head- down on his or her phone while cross-ing a street or walking a crowded mall. With attention being drawn in so many directions (owing to WhatsApp, Snap-chat, push notifications, Messenger, nagging toddlers) and limited real es-tate on mobile screens, marketers must be sure that what their customer sees first is relevant to the context at hand.

Assume that your target customer is looking for something specific when he or she is experiencing your brand on a mobile device:

■ When they go to United.com in an airport, be sure you are showing them flights from that city.

■ When they showroom- browse on HomeDepot.com in a Lowe’s, be sure you are telling them that you will beat the competition’s prices.

■ When visiting NYKnicks.com at Madison Square Garden, assume that they know the score already and offer them something else: highlight videos or ticket discounts, even directions to the closest rest-room or the concession stand that has the shortest line.

To get this all done right, marketers must invest in a platform that enables multiple channels of communication email, SMS, push, Web personaliza-tion, for starters), provides engage-ment efficacy analytics, and allows the marketing staff to know their custom-ers and the context in which they are experiencing the brand (and sure, that includes “location”).

In truth, there are no obstacles to successful mobile marketing, just missed opportunities. Invest well, think creatively, and get it right.


KAREN KOKIKOsenior product marketing manager, data management platform, Oracle Marketing Cloud@OracleMktgCloud

Brands that do not leverage the most sophisticated mobile market-ing solutions will fall behind in the race to capture consumers’ increas-ingly divided attention. True mobile marketing promises to allow brands direct access to their consumers by targeting the individual across any device, from smartphones to PCs, tablets, IP-enabled devices, game consoles, and beyond.

Mobile marketing now comes with a host of challenges — namely, collecting and deriving insights from the massive amounts of consumer data generated each day on various forms of mobile devices. Marketers need a sophisticated data-marketing platform able to identify and analyze consumers by device, geolocation,

purchase, and intent data from mil-lions of consumers while combining findings with data from digital and offline advertising to improve the impact of cross-channel campaigns.

With the right DMP, mobile mar-keting becomes the cornerstone of a brand’s overall modern marketing program, reaching more in-market and intent-driven consumers with the right messages on the right device at the ex-act right time in the purchase process.

Without an advanced DMP that has the ability to recognize consumers across devices, brands run the risk of doing mobile marketing in a vacuum — missing out on the cross-channel cross-device synergies that will help the nimblest brands capture more market share in the years to come.


JASON LONGsenior solutions engineer, the Pedowitz Group @revenuemarketer

The main obstacle that I see market-ers needing to overcome with mobile mar ket ing is the idea that mobile is just another screen size. Websites that use responsive layouts and mobile- friendly emails are a great step in the right direction, but the context and environment in which prospects and customers use a mobile device versus a desktop are very different.

Litmus reports that more than 55% (and growing) of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, but we still encounter marketers who design and lay out their campaign assets in desk-top contexts first and then adapt them to the mobile experience. It should be the other way around.

Instead of serving the same content to all users and ensuring it is presented correctly, start first with the user’s con-text. This may mean that marketers will need to simplify calls to action, reduce email and landing page copy, shorten and standardize their forms, and pro-duce assets that are easy and quick to consume on mobile devices.

An example of this comes from one of my favorite marketing speakers and entrepreneurs, Gary Vaynerchuk. He is famous for his presentations and key-notes, which are easy to binge-watch on YouTube. He produces snippets (60 seconds or less) of these videos with visual calls to action and subtitles built right in to the content because most mobile users are scrolling through their social feeds with audio turned off. B2B marketers should understand that users who are consuming content on mobile devices are either looking for bite-size content for immediate use or they want to save or bookmark deeper content for viewing later.

This approach can be summed up in one word: empathy. Understand- ing the environment and mind-set of your prospects and providing them with a tailored experience is a chal-lenge, but those who spend the time to thoughtfully plan the user experi-ence and interactions to complement their marketing objectives will be the ones who win.


HILMI OZGUCCEO, Swirl @HilmiOzguc; @Swirl

Personalization is the key to effective mobile marketing. This is especially true when it concerns the retail customer experience, where a lack of personal-ization can actually be detrimental to estab lishing connections with consum-ers. One-size-fits-all messaging just doesn’t cut it when you’re communi-cating via a smartphone, an inherently personal device. To effectively craft per-sonalized messaging, marketers need to amass data on their shoppers to better understand their preferences, browsing, and shopping history. One glance at Amazon’s exponential rise to market share domination shows the power of data coupled with personalization.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are begin-ning to build online and mobile profiles of their shoppers, but the majority remain in the dark in terms of gathering and leveraging data in their physical stores, where 90% of retail sales still occur. With the advent of mobile pres-ence technologies, such as GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth beacons, brick-and-mortar retailers finally have a chance to utilize in-store behavioral data to guide future personalized marketing messag-ing. The beauty of this in-store data is that it is unique to and wholly con-

trolled by the brick-and-mortar retailer. Importantly, the data offers a distinct competitive advantage over online-only retailers and cannot be leveraged by competitors for conquesting purposes.

While online, mobile, and in-store behavioral data are each powerful in its own right, the real magic happens when marketers can link these data points across channels for comprehensive viewing by each individual shopper. By better understanding shopper journeys, marketers can be sure that their mo-bile communications are targeted and welcome while enhancing shoppers’ experiences with their brand.

Let’s make this idea of cross-channel data-driven personalization more con-crete with some real-world examples. A fashion retailer could alert an in- store shopper to a sale on a dress that she had previously browsed online. A coffee chain could send a push notifi-cation at the store entrance, inquiring if the brand loyalist would like “the usual” and inviting him to bypass the line with a mobile payment. A hotelier could deliver targeted micro-rewards to surprise and delight returning cli- entele. Now that sounds like mobile marketing done right.

one tough question: mobile marketing means business

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