How to integrate mobile into your marketing strategy
Mobile advertising is growing rapidly with many new opportunities for marketers. Simon Francis (left), CEO of integrated marketing consultancy Flock Associates, outlines some of the ways clients can organise themselves to make the most of the new mobile phenomenon.
Recent predictions show that mobile advertising will shortly be 25 per cent of digital adspend, and up to five per cent of the total advertising market.
For marketers and their agencies to capitalise on the benefits of mobile advertising there are some interesting challenges to solve. These include:
Roles
Which department or departments are involved, or take the lead? Setting a clear RASCI (Responsible, Approver, Supporter, Consulted, and Informed) at the client organisation is critical to success. Setting clear boundaries where agencies are to work together and discretely, is an important foundation to all and any mobile program.
Budget
How do you mobilise (excuse the pun) budgets? Budgets for mobile are likely to sit across different departments and agencies, they need to be made agile so that they can move to fund the work that is required, when it is needed. Careful planning is critical to work back to budgets, and a sensible and sensitive collaborative approach is required to “liberate” budgets that are probably allocated to existing programs.
Standards
What does good look like? How will you define quality benchmarks and KPIs for you activity? To learn, to improve, and to justify appropriate measures of success are required. Using internal measures, category and competitive information, plus best in class case histories are an important part of a successful mobile plan.
People
Are they good enough? Have you enough expertise in-house, and/or at the agencies? What is your training and development plan? Without a training plan ‘learning on the job’ is the only real alternative which could be slow and expensive.
Resources
What marketing technology is required? How do the systems integrate? Do you need to change your content management systems for a mobile environment? How are you evaluating success? What common measurement and evaluation currencies are you using across media, to allow for comparison and benchmarking? We see many clients “wanting to do mobile” but not considering the infrastructure required to build a robust program.
Organisation
What changes or additions to workflow process are required to ensure mobile requirements are made? Do you need to change organisational structure? Is mobile a department, a part of a department, or a function in every existing department? A clear plan for development that changes as little as possible of the existing structure is always a good starting point. Think back to digital – most people built a separate department, or company, and then spent a lot of time trying to re-integrate everything.
These can be daunting challenges for clients, who are already at breaking point in a fragmenting communications landscape. But they still require addressing if mobile is to reach its full potential.