Mobile Solutions
By Chris Sledzik, account executive
No matter what industry you work (or play) in, the idea of being “mobile ready” has been a hot topic for at least a year or more. As mobile – and particularly – smartphone usage is embraced by a wider audience than just early-adopting millennials, marketing communications professionals are practically drooling at ways to use this new untainted channel.
Text message campaigns, website optimization and app creation are just a few of the tactics that marketers have implemented to carry their brands’ messages to the mobile masses. And as the population of smartphone and tablet users continues to grow (currently 50 percent of the U.S. population uses smartphones and experts predict we’ll hit 95 percent by 2015), so will the mobile piece of the marketing pie.
So just how big is that piece? And who’s managing it?
As with any new form of communication, effectively incorporating mobile marketing into your mix is contingent on approaching it strategically and measurably. Doing so in a world that changes on a daily basis can be daunting, which is why many in our field are constantly seen with ears to the ground to find out what’s coming next.
As a relatively new addition to the Marcus Thomas team, I was pumped to have a handful of my colleagues (and a few clients, shoutout Diebold and ACH!) on hand at the 2012 YouToo Social Media conference focusing on mobile and measurement earlier this month. As a member of PRSA Akron and a PR grad student at Kent State (both hosts for the event), I was admittedly more excited about this than others. But I also wasn’t let down after attending.
Kicked off by MT’s own Scott Chapin, and sprinkled with academic and professional experts in the marketing, public relations, mobile, web design and information architecture fields, #YouToo2012 did not disappoint. I’m not going to try to capture everything from the day in a single blog post (there are ample online resources for that), but I wanted to share what I thought were the biggest takeaways:
Social media and mobile marketing change rapidly and it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the nuances. No matter what your business card says – marketer, advertiser, PR pro or otherwise – as professional communicators and brand advocates we need to understand the fundamentals. Because we’re dealing with new platforms and devices, this means looking beyond our usual planning. In addition to considering business objectives and audience demographics, mobile marketers must also consider usability.
A differentiator for any interactive marketing, but especially for mobile marketing, is that our audience is approaching these channels with the intent to compete a task. Even if the task centers on finding a piece of information, the steps they take to complete the task have become just as important as the task itself. In other words, if a mobile user can’t navigate your site, download your app or understand your SMS, the strategy, messaging and call-to-action of your marketing campaign are lost.
Usability is King. (Though YouToo’s keynote speaker may disagree.)
As marketers consider mobile solutions, we must consider the user-case first and foremost. Having a mobile approach that is user-friendly is more important than having a perfectly crafted message. And ensuring that we have measureable results is the only way to justify this investment and improve on the approaches moving forward.
Distilling a day of intense learning into a few paragraphs hardly does the conference justice, but I encourage you to check out the presentations online, if only for those oh-so-essential mobile data points for your slide deck. And of course, look into joining us next year at YouToo 2013.






