5 Strategies for Mobilizing Your Brand
Chief marketing officers and brand managers are increasingly aware of mobile’s importance for connecting with consumers. They're talking about mobile and diving into launch sites and apps as fast as they can. However, only a few brands are really cracking the code. The brands that are getting it right started with some basic tenets and knowledge bases: know your consumers, yourself, your strategy, your brand, your competition, your goals and objectives, and your mobile best practices.
1. Integrate your strategy. Mobile is a state of being, embedded in the lives of busy consumers. It's not a stand-alone channel or singular marketing tactic. Instead, mobile must work to ensure a brand is creating O.P.E.N. (on-demand, personal, engaging, networked) experiences with and for consumers. Don’t rush off on a tactical mission to launch a mobile site or app without first looking at how it plays in your customers’ lives, with your other channels, and how it mirrors the measure of your brand. That means having a strategy that brings mobile into the fold of your other channels (e.g., destination site, in-store, social, etc.) rather than treating it as a stand-alone or orbiting channel.
2. Create always-on experiences. Mobile elevates itself to a new level of importance for consumers and brands because the expectation and experience is 24/7. Now that consumers can find everything from a clean restroom (via the Charmin-sponsored Sit or Squat app) to a great place to eat nearby (e.g., Urban Spoon's app), their demands and expectations reach beyond the destination site or brick-and-mortar store.
Mobile creates opportunities not just to be always-on, but always reactive, responsive and available for consultation. Make the most of this ever-present channel by engaging consumers with 24/7 brand experiences that fit into their fast-moving lives. Catch up with them at the checkout stand with brief, on-brand games and polls (e.g., Gain’s Get a Sniff of Me Quiz). Excite consumers with the immediacy and evanescence of mobile flash sales, or meet them at the airport gate with geo-targeted features on stores and sales in the city where they’ve just landed.
