Oracle: 5 ways to win at mobile-marketing

The latest installment in Oracle's series of no-nonsense marketing primers, Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Mobile Marketing breaks down the most effective ways to reach consumers through that handy device in their pockets. The following are a selection of key learnings from the ebook.

The omnipresence of smartphones should not come as news, but many still haven’t woken up to the full extent of their influence on modern life. Consumers now check their smartphones an astounding 150 times a day: that’s about once every six waking minutes.

It often seems as though the only way mobile phones could play a more integral role in modern lives would be if they were connected to a chip embedded in the brain—expect that upgrade in the next iteration cycle.

But from a marketing perspective, that is precisely what mobile—smartphones in particular—give you: a direct link to consumers at virtually any time and anywhere they go. Nearly eight out of 10 (79 per cent) of smartphone owners use their mobile devices to buy services and products, so it is little wonder Econsultancy estimates mobile marketing budgets have increased by 67 per cent this year.

Here is Oracle's Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to making sure you make that connection, before your competitor gets there first.

1. Cross-channel orchestration

Single-channel campaigns are dead. To have an impact, it is now essential to take a multichannel approach and focus on the entire customer journey. Your mobile strategy needs to blend seamlessly with the rest of your marketing mix to ensure they are all part of one continuous conversation between your brand and the consumer. Key to this is unifying mobile technologies and monitoring signals from all channels to offer solutions based on who your consumers are as individuals and how they interact with your brand at moments of need.

2. Be smart with data

Marketers today are immersed in a sea of data. Integrating marketing technology into apps on mobile and other connected devices, you can capture previously unattainable detail on everything from customers’ device type and operating system to app engagement and geographic location. This data allows you to further develop customer profiles and improve customer journeys. But it needs to be used intelligently—with a smart approach to data, marketers can sense and respond to real-time contextual information about the consumer, both on mobile devices and orchestrated across traditional channels.

3. Create a holistic view

You cannot tailor marketing materials and delivery to give a personalised experience unless you understand who your customers are, what they are buying, when they are buying and how they like to buy it. Draw all your data into a centralised location to give you a complete picture of consumers’ interactions across multiple channels—including which devices they use at various times of the day.

4. Personalise the marketing experience

Consumers today expect marketing to be tailored to their personal needs and preferences. They are bombarded daily with so much information, they are skilled at filtering out anything which isn’t directly relevant or looks like a mass-market approach.

In this context, SMS is a powerful weapon in the marketer’s armoury. SMS is not just lightning fast—taking less than seven seconds from send to receive on most mobile carriers—it can be a low-cost and efficient way to deliver interactive campaigns. The immediacy of SMS arriving on mobile phones results in far higher open rates and quicker response times than many other channels.

5. Prove the value of your mobile marketing strategy

The last hurdle is arguably the most challenging: proving ROI.

Long-term customer loyalty is notoriously difficult to link to any individual campaign, mobile or otherwise, but data and tracking technology give marketers the capacity to directly evaluate the effectiveness of their mobile campaigns. Embed short URLs into your SMS messages to enable monitoring click-through rates, conversions and click regency. Set up a mobile-specific landing page tied to a particular offer or campaign, and then use response data to monitor, track and create more relevant campaigns.

Ultimately, if you approach mobile simply for mobile’s sake, you don’t stand to gain the full advantage of what it offers. Clear goals tied to business objectives need to be set at the outset and these need to be incorporated into the mobile strategy.

But mobile is a moving target. To catch it, marketers need to fire up their engines and get moving now.

For more information, download the full ebook, Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Mobile Marketing here: blogs.oracle.com/marketingcloud/modern-marketing-essentials-guide-to-mobile-marketing-ebook

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