Mobile Marketing Fragmentation: What marketers need to know

Fragmentation. Sounds painful, and for those planning and implementing mobile campaigns and services, it presents a real and present challenge. It’s the technical term for the fact that we all have different phones, and that these phones tend to work differently. Take a look around a meeting room or a pub table: iPhones, Blackberrys, Nokias, each with their own operating system, applications and ways of displaying the web. For now and the medium term, there is no common format, apart from voice and text messaging that will work, 100%, across all your customers’ phones.

Getting round this problem requires a good deal of insight and strategy, based on a clear understanding of what your ‘mobile consumers’ look like, in terms of both the devices they own, and the ways in which they choose to use them.

Step One – Know your customer

To decide on a mobile strategy, you first need to know what mobiles your customers are using and how they use them. There are only three ways to do this, to my knowledge.

The first is to survey your customers directly, which is a fairly large undertaking, and would probably require re-running at regular intervals to keep up with changing trends.

The second is to look at mobile traffic on your website, which can show you what type of mobile devices are already trying to access your existing (probably PC facing) properties. However, this method only shows you a partial picture.

The third and most effective method is to pay for research data. At We Love Mobile we recently invested in the mobile usage survey, provided by Comscore , and we haven’t looked back. There is nothing else that can tell you what your particular customer base is likely to be doing on mobile to such a degree, and it has taken much of the guesswork out of approximating likely mobile ownership and usage across our client base. If your existing mobile agency isn’t using this product, then you should ask how they are making decisions around mobile technical strategy for you. And no, I am not on commission, but robust consumer mobile usage data is a must-have for anyone looking to make informed decisions in this space.

Whatever way you get the data, knowing your mobile customer means, at the very least, establishing some basics, including: what devices they own (Apple, Android, Blackberry etc) and how they use them (mobile internet, e-mail, games etc). You should also have an eye on general trends, which will either feed into your medium term planning or roadmap.

Step Two – Define and refine your objectives

Identifying the ultimate goal for the business is normally going to be the main driver in helping you decide on the most appropriate mobile route. Key areas to identify are: do you need to reach the maximum number of customers, or are you happy to target a defined segment? What type of engagement and interaction are you after? How important is it to preserve brand identity?

While we can all get excited by the technical possibilities presented by smartphones and apps, sometimes business objectives can be achieved using much simpler and ubiquitous technologies. Clients asking straight from the get-go for a specific technology solution is often a sign that the horse is being put before the cart, and something that a good mobile agency looking for long term client satisfaction should challenge.

Step Three – Choose your weapons Clarify your objectives, and the mobile technical strategy, informed by your consumer’s mobile usage profile, will often become quite clear quite quickly. Any decision is probably going to be heavily dictated by budgetary restrictions.

For example, while a mobile experience might be better implemented as an application, if your customer base is spread across a range of operating systems (OS) and reach is key, then a less functional mobile internet experience might provide for better ROI. Sometimes development priorities aren’t so clear-cut. An iPhone application, for instance, is often a logical first step, as it demonstrates the potential for the channel and appeals, amongst other things, to brand guardians, PR departments, board director egos, and to relatively wealthy, influential and growing consumer segments.

Step Four – Think Roadmap

A mobile roadmap is important for three key reasons. Firstly, because you are unlikely to have managed to reach all of your potential consumers in phase one, you will probably need to consider who is next and how to target them.

If you’ve started with an iPhone app, for instance, you might consider whether an Android or Blackberry version should be next.

Secondly, a roadmap is important because mobile technology and usage changes fast, so an eye for the future will help you keep up with the market. Android is a good example here, as it is growing much faster than Apple OS. A mobile retail solution that is taking six months to implement should consider, perhaps, that the OS landscape is in flux, so any major investment in mobile technology needs to reflect what the consumer will be using in the future, not right now.

Thirdly, if you’re going to run a mobile campaign, especially if you are new to the area, think beyond your first foray and consider, for example, what you are going to do with the data you are bound to collect, how you are going to continue to engage with consumers and how your mobile service or dialogues can evolve over time.

The future

Whilst fragmentation is not going away right now, with the gradual spread of Mobile Flash and Mobile HTML 5 we can envisage a mobile world where the mobile browsing experience becomes much more interactive and standardised across all OS, thus paving the way for increasingly ‘one size fits all’ implementations. In the meantime, a cost-effective mobile strategy will need to carefully weigh up a number of key factors before you can safely decide on the right mobile technology for the job at hand.

Simon Liss – Managing Director – We Love Mobile

This article was originally published in UTalk Marketing.