The marketing strategy for interacting with the untethered consumer should align with the goals of the business, and should take advantage of the new opportunities presented by mobile capabilities. The first step in this process is to evaluate the current and future mobile use of current and future customers.
Different demographic groups can be associated with specific mobile phones or platforms, so the first step is to determine what your customers use, that is, the phones they own and the mobile platforms they use, such as Apple, Android, or BlackBerry. One way to determine customer use patterns is to conduct a survey that simply asks customers what kinds of phones they use and whether they have smartphones. Another approach is to launch a mobile website and track the difference in traffic compared with the regular website. It is likely that a percentage of any given audience will have smartphones; the question is whether that percentage represents a small or large slice of your particular customer group. It is also possible that the best customers of your business use one dominant category of phone, such as a smartphone. You should then research what your customers are actually doing with their mobile phones. Are they texting, e-mailing, comparison shopping, buying, or watching video? The types of actions they perform can provide an indication of the manner in which they might be most comfortable interacting.
As we speak with businesses regarding their mobile approach, a common thread is the company’s initial instinct to create a mobile app. While this may ultimately be a logical approach, it is not always the best place to start, at least in the short term. Creating an app limits use to smartphones, and while a significant number of people own them, millions of others have non-smartphones.
This leads back to the initial question: Which type of phone do most of your customers use? For some businesses, especially well- known brands, it is expected that at a minimum they will have a great and useful smartphone app, and many do.
Over time, the majority of the market will migrate to smartphones, depending on price consideration and various other factors.
And it is the smartphone that is driving the mobile revolution. This is because of the value proposition of smartphones: the computing power and sophistication of smartphone technology can provide consumers with unique abilities to gather tailored information on location, helping make their lives better and easier. This improvement can relate to saving time and money, automating processes, or even helping to stay connected with loved ones through real-time video communications.
Follow Your Customers
Mobile phone use is evolving, as more features are introduced and more people learn about them.
In fact, one of the challenges of the mobile industry is that businesses are still learning about the capabilities offered by various mobile companies. With so many established and start-up companies in the nascent mobile industry, it can be difficult for a business to get a handle on the current capabilities of mobile phones and on future possibilities.
Because individuals naturally are most familiar with the features and capabilities of their own personal cell phones, they can be tempted to view the market through that prism. Without appropriate research on the spectrum of mobile features available and on what their particular customers use, business leaders risk missing potential market opportunities.
Many businesses have found exactly what their customers do with their phones, and they track in great detail specific customer–company mobile interactions. This is one of those times in history that customers are ahead of businesses. Because there are hundreds of thousands of different mobile applications and billions of people using cell phones, consumers are discovering and utilising phone features and applications faster than businesses can keep up with them. As consumer behaviors evolve in tandem with emerging mobile capabilities, businesses that don’t monitor and track these behaviors risk being left behind.
It is essential that businesses follow their customers’ mobile use patterns and preferences. Otherwise, a business could end up creating a mobile product or service that doesn’t match the behavioral characteristics of its own untethered customers.
By Chuck Martin, author of The Third Screen: The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing (revised edition).
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