Mobile Marketing: Why We Need To Integrate, Not Disrupt

The world of digital marketing is ever evolving. Yet a common frustration is that there’s always some new groundbreaking product that promises to shake up the industry like never before – something that will “replace” or “displace” what you’ve just seemed to implement.

With an increasing percentage of marketing spend going into the digital bucket, one single refrain comes to mind: “Perhaps this is the next big thing, the holy grail, the disruptive tech that we’ve been waiting for.” It certainly has been said of mobile and many of the offerings such as real time, geo location, mobile payments and so on. The truth of the matter is, mobile is as prescient and as important as it is today not because of how it disrupts. Mobile is essential to any digital marketing effort because of how it integrates everything.

Mobile is unlike any other channel that has come before it. Despite how the Internet broke the traditional media mind-set, mobile does not challenge or usurp existing channels. It actually plays well with other media channels, serving as an amplification agent. Let’s look at the following examples:

Social media and mobile. Social has become the must-have channel because of the anywhere and everywhere nature of it. Consider Omobono’s latest B2B digital marketing survey assessing the rising stars of mobile: 84 percent regard mobile as crucial, and 79 percent see social media as the most effective channel to utilize.

Targeting and mobile. The ability to know where your audience is and what they are looking for has elevated accuracy and an enhanced value that can be passed on to your customer. A lot of criticism is leveled at how mobile requires more effort on the users’ part, when it comes to consuming mobile messaging. This thinking is more than balanced out by the value that is given by the customized mobile experience. Visa, for example, is seeing a huge amount of success in personalizing mobile messaging in Asia as they digitize their points system and mobilize the experience. It just introduced a new rewards credit card targeting on-the-go moms. The card integrates with AmEx’s mobile app and enables moms to track and redeem rewards from their phone and can be shared on social networks.

Traditional and mobile. Audio marking, QR codes and beacons all work based on mobile interacting seamlessly with print, TV, radio and in-store advertising. The value is that it creates a customized experience for the individual off a mass-produced message. This is what makes mobile so invaluable: It battles fragmentation by integrating across channels, which is simply priceless in this day and age. In the report “Fragmented Path-to-Purchase Demands Everywhere Marketing,” Forrester found that “40 percent of online consumers are more likely to purchase from a company whose offerings are available through multiple purchasing channels.” An example is Macy’s deploying a record number of beacons across its retail locations and Heinz hitting 1 million scans on the QR codes it put on ketchup bottles across the country.

Everywhere you turn in the digital ecosystem, you see mobile seated comfortably across channels and boosting the relevance, reach and results of each. It has accomplished all these goals by narrowing the audience down to the individual.

By giving your customer a contextually relevant message that meets the real-time need in a geographically accessible location, you are achieving true mobile integration, which is the goal. Let someone else drone on about disruption.

Mobile Marketing: Why We Need To Integrate, Not Disrupt