Is Your Mobile Marketing a One-Trick Pony?

Yes­ter­day, I was going through my CD col­lec­tion (which I haven’t even glanced at in five years) and came across a cou­ple albums that made me shake my head. You know the ones—one hit won­der albums picked up from a bar­gain bin ten years ago as the music indus­try began its long decline.

See­ing the out­dated discs caused me to reflect on how the shift to dig­i­tal left the music indus­try in the dust just like a band with only one good song. Now a new rev­o­lu­tion is under­way as users stam­pede to mobile chan­nels; but many busi­nesses are still per­form­ing the same old trick. In fact, some com­pa­nies are doing nothing—I did a quick analy­sis of Alexa’s top 20 US web­sites and 30% don’t even have a dis­cov­er­able mobile-optimized site.

Stay­ing relevant

A sin­gle mobile chan­nel or none at all won’t be enough to stay rel­e­vant as users evolve their usage of dig­i­tal media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion to encom­pass mobile devices. Is your busi­ness lever­ag­ing a vari­ety of com­pelling mobile offer­ings appro­pri­ate to your users? If not, the chart below pro­vides an overview of mobile chan­nels you should con­sider includ­ing in your mar­ket­ing mix.

Click on the image below to down­load the file, or find it on SlideShare.

More than one trick
As you care­fully con­sider expand­ing your mobile efforts, here are some points to ponder:

–Test mul­ti­ple chan­nels and then com­pare vis­i­tor acqui­si­tion and con­ver­sion suc­cess rates to iden­tify the best mobile touch points. The “hottest” mobile chan­nels aren’t nec­es­sar­ily the right ones for your business.

–Ana­lyze usage data to deter­mine whether a given mobile out­let should be uti­lized for vis­i­tor acqui­si­tion, vis­i­tor con­ver­sion, or both and then cor­rectly posi­tion calls to action. For some busi­ness mod­els, mobile web­sites or apps may be lousy at con­vert­ing users into cus­tomers but may func­tion great for acquir­ing new prospects or retain­ing customers.

–Iden­tify gaps in your mobile mar­ket­ing mix. Com­pa­nies often pur­sue one or two mobile ini­tia­tives at the expense of more effec­tive chan­nels OR neglect either the vis­i­tor acqui­si­tion or vis­i­tor con­ver­sion por­tion of the mar­ket­ing mix.

As always, I’d love to hear about what’s work­ing for your busi­ness. What mobile chan­nels are most effec­tive? Are you using approaches not included in the chart above? Feel free to add a com­ment or send me an email.