Video
In a society where people report using their smartphones more than 200 times in the course of a day, mobile marketing is a vital tool for reaching consumers. Laura Beaudin, a partner with Bain's Customer Strategy practice, shares three ways marketers can effectively target consumers—and increase traffic—through mobile campaigns.
Read the Bain Brief: Mobile Marketing—Don't Miss the Moment
Read the transcript below.
LAURA BEAUDIN: Mobile has become an incredibly important tool in any marketer's toolkit. What's interesting to us is that we found that marketers really aren't using that tool as often as they really should. If you think about the customers that marketers are trying to reach, they're telling us that they're using their mobile devices a lot. You know, they check their phones 13 times an hour, on average. And that means up to 200 times in the course of a day. And I think from our own behavior, we understand how immersive that experience can be.
But we've seen marketers hesitate in terms of their adoption of mobile as a marketing platform. And there are many reasons for that. Mobile doesn't have the same ad formats, and it is actually harder to track the impact of mobile right now. But we've also seen that marketing leaders have gotten out ahead on new platforms and have begun to experiment with those new platforms early on.
Four years ago, when we researched what marketing leaders were doing, we found that they had been the ones who were the early adopters of Facebook. And that was before there were great metrics to know whether or not that Facebook was really delivering a conversion to them.
And now we're seeing the same thing with mobile. Marketing leaders have gotten out ahead in terms of the amount of marketing dollars and campaigns that they're delivering on mobile devices. And they may not be perfect, and it may not be possible to calculate the precise ROI for each of those campaigns, but those mobile marketers know that mobile is a way to be able to connect with their customers. And it doesn't take a lot to be able to get started.
One of our clients found that just by identifying good moments in time that they could reach customers on mobile devices when they were out and about and ready to—or might be thinking about making a purchase. So to get started on mobile, we see that it's really about three steps. One is thinking about who you might like to reach, and what are the mobile platforms that those customers are using? Two is about being creative and thinking about ways that you can capture attention in an increasingly fragmented world.
And finally, the third piece is about experimentation. Mobile is an excellent platform to be able to do ongoing test and learn, ongoing experimentation, and finding new times, new ways, new platforms, new messages that might resonate with your customers.
Overall, we think mobile has a lot to offer, and it will only continue to increase. But in order to be a marketing leader, you don't want to miss the moment.
Read the Bain Brief: Mobile Marketing—Don't Miss the Moment
First published in juin 2017