Shifting Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

How do you assemble your mobile strategy?

What do you need to do to use mobile to its greatest advantage?  Before you start developing your mobile solution you might find it helpful to consider how marketing is evolving.  You might consider several elements of your marketing strategy as you begin developing your mobile experience for your best clients and customers. Mobile may be a unique platform but it requires leveraging the changing demands of your clients.

The first major shift is away from decisions and toward customers’ experience.  This shift means that you must try to understand what your customers want in dealing with your organization.  Every organization is different but customers today want to feel part of what you’re doing and being. For this reason, you need to think more share than sell with many of your mobile applications.

The second major shift is from product to values. This shift means that if you’re a commodity, your business is in trouble. Many of today’s consumers are looking to buy from companies who share their values. The good news about this is that most organizations have a good handle on what they value, from being cool to being green. Shared values create an opportunity for ongoing dialog with your best customers.  When you are sharing you can communicate more often. If your mobile technology is not creating shared values and experiences, people opt out.

The third shift is from waiting to wanting it all and wanting it now. This provides an opportunity for faster adoption or failure for your new products. When you look at many mobile applications, you see a very short adoption curve for new products and services. The market gives you an instant answer to if your product is going to take off or die on the vine. There is a tremendous prospect to build strong relationships with new customers because mobile offers an incredible opportunity to leverage community and connection.  Hot ideas move quickly across mobile platforms, bad ideas die quickly. Adopting a “ready, fire, aim” approach may serve you well in this new mobile era.  The amount of time for your learning curve is decreased exponentially.  If you’re not careful, all the insight you receive from the market can overwhelm your market research teams.  You must find new ways to manage your product development processes.  Experimentation is required to understand how to best maximize these new systems.

The fourth shift is trust matters more in this mobile era. Customers buy faster but also expect you to be more on the edge with what you offer. When you look at many of the mobile applications, you see they have bugs and problems. Today’s mobile consumers expect you to solve the problems.  When you look at an application you get to see all of its development issues in real time. If there’s a bug, and there will be bugs, your detractors will be out sharing it on every social outpost including right under your product description in the app store. So consider how you support your product. If you build a great solution, your application can go viral in minutes.  Building real time systems to support this new world can challenge even the most innovative organization.

Why this is critical is that most applications cost less than $10. The customer does not expect a $10 experience.  This economic model challenges the way you roll out your new products because you must exceed your customers’ expectations.  All of your customers!! The disgruntled customer is given an unheard amount of power to decide your fate. You must decide how to connect and how to provide fixes to your clients. Your response is your destiny.

When you look at these four shifts, your mobile strategy is as much a mind shift in marketing as it is a technical shift.  Yes, you can put your product catalogue in an app and call it a day, but you’re not going to get rabid customers with that strategy.  All you’ve done is make your products even more of a commodity.  By shifting your marketing view point, you can create a customer experience with your mobile solution.  This customer experience creates a strong, repeatable client base, which in turn, increases the value of your business in the eyes of potential buyers.

Next Monday, we will share a new strategy framework to help support these challenges.  Over the next several years mobile is not only going to change the way you do business, but the value of your business forever.