How To Tap Into Mobile Marketing

Although ‘mobile marketing’ is very much in its infancy, and may seem way beyond the reach of most SMEs, it can be one of the most cost effective ways to engage with your customer-base and can even provide new revenue opportunities.

‘Mobile marketing’, as the name suggests, is simply using the outlet of the 50 million mobile phones in the UK to market your products or services.

The primary drivers behind mobile marketing are typically to build up a better profile of your customer base and establish tools to encourage regular communication on an ongoing base.

The first stage is always building up a database of contact details, and in this case means getting clients to give you their mobile phone numbers. Although people are famously protective about giving out contact information, they are much more likely to participate if they have a chance to win a prize, and people’s propensity to send text messages makes this the ideal medium.

Such promotions, typically referred to as ‘Text 2 Win’, are well within the marketing of most consumer-facing SMEs. Details of the competition are distributed together with usual print materials or packaging, and customers are requested to text in to win a prize.

The prize can be a product discount, tickets to a sports event, or free ringtones or wallpapers for their phones.

The key asset that you need to be able to bring to the party is regular communication with your customers through print media. If your primary business is through the web, then mobile marketing is not effective, as web-savvy customers tend not to sign up for mobile services.

Larger firms will normally engage a specialist agency to run their mobile marketing campaign, but for many SMEs, it’s likely to be more effective to run the competition in-house.

Companies can provide very low cost SMS services that can be operated over a website with little mobile expertise, and for a few hundred pounds will set-up a ‘shortcode’ and provide you with a simple web interface to process the messages.

Of course, if you are expecting millions of different entries, you may want to consider a slightly more automated system, but millions of entries would be a very good problem for most SMEs to have.

The usual format of the competition is for people to text in the answer to a multiple-choice question together with their name, house number, and postcode. In choosing a winner, you only need to pick someone who has the right answer, and you can process the SMSs to build a customer database that can be used for direct marketing.

The usual data protection issues apply with regard to opt-out for direct mailing, but you may want to be more careful with regard to sending unsolicited text messages.

ICSTIS, the UK regulator (www.icstis.org.uk) provides comprehensive advice for anyone looking to launch SMS services and you should be careful as unsolicited messages are treated as ‘spam’ by your customers and network operators.

In addition to building customer databases, mobile lends itself very well to viral marketing, and this can even present a revenue opportunity to many SMEs. If your business has strong appeal to young people, humorous ringtones, wallpapers, or text messages can fly around very quickly, and if sufficiently compelling, people will be willing to pay for them.

When effective, this type of campaign can contribute to significant brand awareness and loyalty to a young demographic and for many consumer-facing SMEs this could provide a significant amount of revenue for very little work, much in same way as white-label credit cards did in the 1990s.

For the more ambitious, a specialist ringtone or wallpaper associated with your firm’s brand can spread awareness as well as providing additional revenue. If it’s going to be effective it needs to either be funny or ‘cool’ to the youth audience and your ability to generate compelling creative will be critical to your success.

How To Harness The Power Of Brand Management

Although it is possible to dress it up in different subtle words such as the ‘drive for shareholder value’, at this moment in time, many businesses of all sizes are simply struggling to make money. Many are cutting back on costs, some are reviewing product investment, and most are slugging it out to win the very few sales that are around.

In some parts of industry, however, business leaders are also taking a closer look at a well-proven method of creating value: brand management.It is surprising that brand management is not more generally recognised to be the powerful tool that it is. It certainly has more impact than many things attempted over the past 20 years by different management teams.

During that time companies have not hesitated in reaching for passing management fashions such as ‘total quality management’, ‘process re-engineering’ or dot.coms as a means to create profit. These fads, sponsored by pundits, gurus, or the City, have come and gone, with dubious impact on organisations and their profits. But by contrast, a number of companies have managed brands, with their associated price premium, in different markets over many decades. They have shown that it is possible to create an entity which appeals to a group of customers and, over time, becomes a very valuable asset.

This flies in the face of much recent management thinking (that everything is changing fast and that price is constantly under pressure) but it is, nonetheless, true. It is astonishing that more companies have not invested extra resources and attention into what is a proven technique. Unfortunately, brand work tends to involve a wide spectrum of activities. At one end, creative companies help to design new images such as the international tail fins for British Airways or new names such as Consignia. These projects attract public attention and sometimes criticism or even ridicule.

At the other end, journalists have challenged the ethics and integrity behind brand building, suggesting that brands exploit consumers, causing them to pay more than they should for the goods on offer.

The range of experts operating in the field of brand management proliferates by the day. In addition to professional brand managers in large corporations, there are strategists, design consultants and valuation specialists. Yet it is still hard to define exactly what a brand is and as a result, many companies have ignored, to their detriment, the precious role that brands can play in the life of both companies and customers. It is therefore possible that industry might miss a very powerful, proven source of profit.

Despite the disparity of work, it is beyond dispute that a carefully designed image rests in the memory of customers and helps them to buy. We also know that numerous firms have proved that, by managing that image carefully, a product or a service will appeal time and time again to a group of interested customers. It becomes a familiar part of their life, giving them consistent benefits in their day-to-day life. As a result, they will pay a premium for this offer and develop a loyalty towards it. But this does not mean that this incremental cost is not valuable to them. Quite the opposite. Over time, they become fond of these entities and, if they think about it, regard them as part of the landscape of their life.

What starts as simple reassurance about quality or consistency becomes, on a deeper but harder to measure level, an emotional bond in a hectic modern lifestyle of constant pressure and change.

As a result there are people who feel warmth towards a tin of paint, a sugar-filled drink or sports shoes. In fact these items mean so much to them that they can be as upset and unforgiving if they think a favourite brand has been damaged, as when a favourite soap character is killed off.So why hasn’t this marvellous technique been more fully adopted by all businesses? The answer lies in the fact that truly adopting brand management often involves major changes to an organisation. The company must become market, rather than supply-driven. Customer segments need to be clearly defined and their needs understood in detail.

Branded propositions then need to be created, giving direction to sales, service and operating functions. Large firms do not typically have the political commitment to radically alter the balance of power in their internal operations in order to achieve this longer term benefit. They have to be driven there by relentless market forces, often going through traumatic management change en route. Smaller companies, on the other hand, can be daunted by the world-class power of better known brands like Coca-Cola or Nike. They forget that many successful brands, such as Uniliver, Virgin or Body Shop, were built from scratch by business leaders with very modest initial resources.

However, whether brand success has resulted from vision as with Mars or luck in terms of Virgin or the ravages of the market as has happened with the motor industry, the steps needed to succeed are well-known.

It is possible for any sized firm to create a brand which customers prefer and pay a premium for over many years. But first they must first understand the key customer groups; second, understand their rational and emotional needs; third, design a clear, unique proposition; and fourth, deliver consistent, reliable benefits over time.In order to thrive, companies of all sizes need to take a hard-headed look at brand management. This has been shown in different sectors of the world to produce real value over time and guard against the ravages of the market.