How to Get Started Turning Your Business into a Mobile Business

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According to comScore, 176 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone as of November 2014. That’s over 50% of the entire U.S. population that carries a supercomputer in their pocket. Sales, customer service, marketing, and every other part of your business is being revolutionized by mobile. 

LinkedIn reports that 70% of clicks to sponsored updates happen on mobile and Facebook had 1.12 billion mobile monthly active users as of September 2014. Considering that there will be 5 billion smartphones by 2017, 75 billion connected products by 2020 (largely used on mobile devices), and consumers have downloaded 140 billion mobile apps globally, the mobile imperative has never been greater.

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How Senior-Level Marketers Are Redefining Success and Integrating the Customer Journey [Slideshare]

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Today’s marketing leader must be more agile, data-focused, and customer-obsessed than ever before. For The State of Marketing Leadership, a joint research report from LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we surveyed more than 900 senior-level marketers on LinkedIn to learn what’s top-of-mind in their roles—whether director, VP, or CMO. 

We sought out to learn senior-level marketers’ top marketing goals and objectives, their measurements for success, their effectiveness with marketing technologies, and where they see growth in the future.

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The 2015 State of Marketing: Marketers’ Top Priorities Across Digital Channels

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At the beginning of the year, my team released the 2015 State of Marketing. In the report we surveyed over 5,000 marketers globally and asked about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies, and metrics for 2015.

We researched the most pressing business challenges, the top areas for increased spending, the hottest trends in social, mobile, and email marketing, and more. We found that 84% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their marketing budget in 2015. Thirty-eight percent of marketers also plan to shift spending from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels in 2015.

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Learning the Art of Stillness in South Africa

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"In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent of sitting still." - Pico Iyer

After returning from one of the most amazing trips of my life, I've been taking a great deal of time to reflect and really think about that experience. Too often I become engrossed with living life through a screen. Even on vacations most of us often succumb to enjoying ourselves through a camera lens. Some of the most impactful moments on that trip, though, were when I learned the art of stillness and to enjoy "going nowhere." 

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Top Trends from 2014’s Email Client Market Share

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Every month, Litmus, an email marketing testing and analytics software, analyzes and publishes the latest data on email client market share from their system. They've been tracking email opens across a different devices and clients for over four years.

Their research has seen the entire industry changed as mobile opens grew from 8% of email opens in 2011 to 48% at the end of 2014. Desktop opens also decreased from 58% in 2011 to 22% at the end of 2014. Below is their graph on the environment growth over the past four years. 

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75 Digital Marketing Stats from Salesforce Marketing Cloud Research

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Over the past year, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has conducted a number of original research studies, benchmark reports, and marketing leadership surveys. All of this new research has given us quite a library of data and mind-blowing statistics on how both brands and consumers use technology to interact with each other.

I've compiled many of these statistics into a single list of 75 digital marketing stats from 2014 research. 

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The Multi-App Ecosystem and Scaling a Business

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The mobile app world is maturing and starting to unbundle itself. We've seen this recently with the Foursquare's introduction of Swarm, Facebook's unbundling of Messenger, and many more. Major tech companies are starting to build their own ecosystem of apps. Just look at the apps companies like Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Salesforce are building—these companies are building entire ecosystems of specialized apps.

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Making Mobile Moments Matter in Your Customer Journeys

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The customer journey is comprised of a thousand moments.

Jeff Rohrs, Vice President of Marketing Insights at the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, presented on this idea of making the most out of mobile moments along the customer journey in one of Connections 2014's breakout sessions. 

Moments matter, and it's imperative for you to optimize and uncover these pivotal moments in your customer journeys. Jeff identified three main ways to build on these moments and make these moments matter for your customers. 

Optimize Known Moments

There are four key moment makers in our businesses today:

  • Mobile: eMarketer expects 4.55 billion people worldwide will use a mobile phone in 2014—that's 64% of the population.
  • Social: 73% of online adults use social networking sites. (source)
  • Connectivity: According to ABI Research (2013), more than 30 billion devices will connect wirelessly to the internet by 2020.
  • Data: According to IDC, 34% of the Digital Data universe if "useful" in some fashion, only 7% is tagged in a meaningful fashion, and only 1% if actually analyzed. 

As Jeff pointed out, these metrics show us that "ultimately, all marketing is now direct marketing because of mobile devices in our hands."

When you think about it from this perspective, there are many known moments you are already taking advantage of that can just be optimized to make them truly matter to your customers. 

Jeff talked about commercials and traditional advertising—why aren't commercials asking you to do anything? Why aren't we asking our audiences to engage when we are spending thousands to advertise to them?

You can also look at the point of sale: there are wins for you in addition to the sale. As marketers, you should also be thinking about building your audience and increasing brand loyalty in addition to making the sale.

Jeff gave these couple examples and numerous more of existing moments that brands are optimizing to make them matter for their customers. A couple examples are the Share a Coke campaign and Esurance's post-Super Bowl commercial.

Uncover Hidden Moments

There are also key moments already in your marketing programs, but you just don't necessarily see them. 

Jeff gave the example of Seth Casteel's Underwater Dogs and Papa John's Super Bowl Coin Toss Pizza Giveaway—both of these moments were easy moments to uncover and make matter, but it took Seth Casteel and Papa John's to uncover these moments to make them matter to their audiences.

Creating New Moments

The third way to make the mobile moments matter in your customers' journeys is to create new moments that didn't exist before.

Jeff talked about American Express and when they first started Small Business Saturday, which resulted in a $5.7B economic impact. American Express was able to completely invent this event and make a big impact not only on the communities where Small Business Saturday was adopted, but also for their own customers, the small businesses. This was definitely a moment maker for these customers and potential American Express customers.

Jeff's key takeaway from Small Business Saturday is that "mobile moments don't have to be small. They can be big ideas." Don't limit yourself when you're creating these new moments.

The moments matter in your customer journeys. The key question to ask yourself is, "How do I find, optimize, and personalize around the moments that matter to my customers?"

A Digital Marketer’s Recap of Google I/O 2014

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Last week’s Google I/O 2014 developer conference left many developers swooning. With typical tech keynote fashion, product announcements, feature enhancements, a new operating system, new developer programs, and much more were all packed into a two-and-a-half-hour keynote—the full recording can be found at the bottom of this post for any Google enthusiasts out there with a free three hours.

There have been many recaps and articles on the news from the conference, but I wanted to call out some of the big news specifically for marketers and the impact Google's announcements will have on your future marketing plans. Below, is my recap of the keynote and conference along with the major takeaways for marketers.

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Major Brands Break Into Messaging App Marketing

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Last week IPG Media Lab released a new report on messaging apps and how brands are experimenting with marketing campaigns on these new platforms.

Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion brought significant coverage for the mobile messaging app industry as a whole. Ever since, brands and marketers have been asking what value these new apps and platforms could have for marketing purposes.

IPG's whitepaper explores their predictions for the future of app messaging and gives some case study examples and best practices for brands to understand how to utilize these new platforms.

Below are a few of the major messaging platforms and how brands have already begun to use each platform:

Kik
The IPG Media Lab launched their own campaign on Kik with One Direction to build an exclusive user community for One Direction fans using Kik cards. They created an exclusive community where fans could chat and connect while encouraging purchases with exclusive rewards.

Line
The Japanese messaging app giant, Line, offers a vast array of voice, messaging, and gaming services for its users. Paul McCartney has started to experiment with Line's popular "stickers," releasing eight exclusive stickers for sale on the platform through his Line account.

Snapchat
Snapchat has gained quite a bit more popularity and press here in the United States with its limited-time "Snaps." A few brands have already started to experiment with Snapchat. The Philadelphia Eagles used Snapchat to send behind-the-scenes photos and videos and release announcements and news to fans.

WeChat
WeChat, which is largely used in China, is being used in numerous ways by major brands. After partnering with mobile payments provider Tenpay to allow users to make purchases within the app, McDonald's used this partnership to offer discounts on items purchased upfront through the app.

McDonald's also has launched campaigns using WeChat's voice capabilities. They launched a contest asking users to record and submit a "Big Mac Rap" in the style of a Chinese TV personality.

PepsiCo has also used WeChat's voice capabilities to launch similar campaigns.

One of the key differences for marketers beginning to use messaging apps in their marketing programs will be the private nature of these apps. The essence of these apps is built around private messaging. Brands must keep in mind this conversational and personal nature of these apps.

These mobile messaging apps began as a way to avoid texting charges by distributing messages over IP, but these apps have become much more than simply an alternative to SMS. Many analysts in the industry believe a much larger trend is arising as these messaging apps are becoming major platforms in and of themselves. In-line messaging will soon be an integral part of brands' mobile marketing campaigns. 

The Future of Mobile Advertising Isn't Number of Clicks

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I recently found this quote from Brian Wong, Founder and CEO of Kiip:

The future of companies in the advertising space shouldn’t be about the number of clicks—it’s about changing how the brand is involved in the consumer’s life. There’s an obsession with the old metrics used to define success, like reach and frequency. In the old model, the number of times a users sees something is when the brand wins.

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