Digital technology is in overdrive right now as we approach the Christmas season. There’s a kaleidoscope of new devices being promoted to consumers that could be the next ‘brightest and shiniest’ thing.

In such a fast-paced digital technology landscape, it’s easy to lose sight of business objectives. How can my company innovate? Stand out? Fulfil the desires of our customers while remaining on-brand and maximising ROI for marketing and R&D budgets?

So, how do you cut through the white noise of hot tech? Go back to basics and create a strategy that focuses on how any smart device like a phone, tablet or e-reader is rarely, if ever, out of reach. But there is an important nuance to how you apply this strategy because the much touted strategy of ‘mobile first’ actually means putting your customer first and mobile devices a close second.

Achieving this goal can be a rocky road with even the biggest digital brands getting caught out by how challenging it is to successfully align digital technology choices with customer-centric marketing requirements.

What can we learn from customer first mobile strategies?

Firstly, never stop experimenting.

As prime example of this, Starbucks continually innovates through technology trials to find better ways to connect with their customers. Starbucks’ active mobile users has just tipped over 12 million (US and Canada) and 15% of all revenue is now going through mobile devices. Without resting on their laurels, Starbucks is now testing how mobile customers can order items ahead of time on their smartphones. This ‘pay ahead’ system has been going through a trial period in Portland, Oregon and Starbucks recently announced it plans to roll this out nationally in the US next year.

The second big lesson to be applied is – never be afraid to change your strategy to improve engagement with customers and get the most out of your marketing budget. Sometimes the most dramatic pivot in digital marketing strategy is absolutely necessary even when it feels so dramatic or even painful.

Facebook offers a great example of this lesson. The company invested in HTML 5 to revamp its online experience for customers. It was an unmitigated disaster so rather than muddle through it switched to better technology to achieve its customer centric goals. Speaking about this, Mark Zuckerberg said going native was only way to get the highest quality experience and the iOS app has now doubled the amount of news feeds people consume.

Preparing to pivot will be driven by how well attuned you are to your customers and how far their expectations are changing. There are several areas on which to concentrate your attention in thinking about how your apps-driven strategy needs to evolve. Future trends like the below, will mean a mobile first strategy will become all the more important:

  • Making life easier for customers – use of context in the widest sense i.e. not just geographic location but where the customer is in their customer journey with you, as a brand
  • Making purchasing easier – for example, the sending or scheduling of a present to your friends on Facebook
  • Cross-promotion of services, optimising any customer contact opportunities, either in person or through friends. It’s easy to see how, in the near future, we’ll be able to send a gift to a friend who receives it on their mobile and as they wander past the store, an iBeacon alert entices them into a store to pick up the gift.

As a marketer, it’s about embracing change and the new digital economy. You need to look at innovative ways to address the needs of a new generation of mobile device users. Companies are reaching out to consumers all the time through mobile technology and apps so if you’re not, you can bet you’re behind your competition. This leads to the third and final lesson. When driven by the need to be digitally-focused, there’s a risk that digital marketers fail to learn the lesson of past, big technology investments. Creating technology in isolation or not enough connection to other systems or without capacity to grow are all avoidable failings of a rush to innovation.

New, more efficient ways of accelerating the development of customer-centric technologies need to be brought to market seamlessly integrated, built to highest commercial grades of performance and stability; and rigorously streamlined and automated to save costs and widen operational margins.

“Experience engineering” can help here. This approach knits together in-depth, end-to-end software engineering skills with creativity, business acumen and long term relationships with partner experts. It maps the technology to the customer journey that the organisation wants to support, drive and monetise. This enables enterprises and marketers to create innovative new products and services, enter into new markets, win new customers, and streamline operations to radically reduce costs.

 

By Jane Linton, Business Director at Imano, a division of Ness SES. 

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