OPINION: 10 commandments of mobile marketing

1. Thou shalt mobilise your brand strategy

Mobile is not just a medium. It is a consumer lifestyle that is fundamentally changing how we live, work and play. Just creating a mobile-optimised landing page and/or a mobile app to ‘check the boxes’ will not cut it. As a brand guardian, you need to reexamine how your brand stays relevant to consumers as their usage patterns and lifestyles change rapidly. Invest time to evaluate how mobile can have a positive impact on the 4Ps of marketing for your company.

2. Thou shalt think beyond smartphones

Never forget that as a brand you are interested in your target consumers—and they are just as important to you whether they use a smartphone or any other mobile. Every platform has a significant user base and hence brands with a smartphone-only approach will miss out on a significant portion of their target audience. Brands need to keep an open mind and have a strategy that targets customers across platforms.

3. Thou shalt engage the senses

Mobile phones are becoming more powerful by the day, allowing us to interact by seeing (screen), hearing (audio) and touching (tap / swipe / shake). Brands must leverage these multi-sensory capabilities in their mobile marketing to generate higher engagement and brand recall.

4. Thou shalt create branded mobile content

Mobile users love downloading wallpapers, ringtones, games, apps and other items. Brands have an opportunity to leverage this natural consumption behaviour and drive engagement by allowing users to download branded mobile content. A good start is to ‘adapt’ (campaign jingle as ringtone, brand ambassador photos as wallpaper), but over time brands will need to create purpose-built, relevant, rich, engaging, interactive mobile content to stay in the minds of their target audience.

5. Thou shalt use powerful ad formats

Not all ad formats are born equal. Performance can vary wildly based on placement, size, visibility, context and rich-media capability, amongst other factors. For example, full-screen, rich-media ads shown at the launch of an app can deliver a much higher impact than regular banner ads inside the app. Hence, brands need to get the right media mix to successfully deliver their campaign objectives.

6. Thou shalt hyper target your communication

Mobile offers targeting capabilities way beyond any other mass medium. Parameters like device model, OS type, app category, location and social signals, combined with being able to identify each user uniquely, allows advertisers to hyper target their communication and offers to consumers. With such targeting capabilities, marketers can connect to mass audiences at a one-to-one level.

7. Thou shalt integrate to supercharge

Consumers today are living in a multi-screen world with television, computers, tablets and mobile devices all jostling for attention. Add to that more traditional forms of media like newspapers, magazines, outdoor billboards and the like. As a marketer, you need to translate this fragmented media landscape into an integrated experience that allows one medium to leverage the strengths of the other and make the consumer say, 'Wow'. Mobile not only offers a great independent experience but also adds interactivity, engagement, local and social capabilities to any campaign.

8. Thou shalt measure everything

Measurement is at the heart of mobile marketing, with it being the only media that offers close to 100 per cent audience measurement. Brands must obsess on tracking and measuring every parameter possible, be it ad impressions, clickthrough rates, engagement levels, post-click conversions and even post-conversion metrics like lifetime value. With such strong measurement capabilities, brands must gain valuable insights on the performance of their campaigns and strive to improve.

9. Thou shalt make it super simple

While mobile offers tremendously complex capabilities, the end user flow has to be super simple given the small screen and on-the-go usage scenarios. When creating mobile experiences, always build from the ground up, and emphasise making the experience as effortless as possible for the user. If you make the user jump through hoops—game over.

10. Thou shalt experiment to learn

While mobile is already a massive medium and continues to grow rapidly, it is still early days, and best practises are still being discovered. As mobile marketers, the only way to stay ahead of the pack is to continuously try out-of-the-box ideas and learn from those experiments. As Steve Jobs famously said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish".