Mobile Marketing as Enterprise Imperative: Strategy, Not Tactic

JULY 2, 2010
Mobile Marketing as
Enterprise Imperative:
Strategy, Not Tactic

By: Tony White
Mobile Marketing as Enterprise Imperative: Strategy, Not Tactic Current Market Trends
T  HE OPPORTUNITY Recent evolution in the mobile applications market now offers enterprises new opportunities for reaching customers in ways never before possible. In the past 18 months, a number of independent market forces have converged to enable goods-and-services providers to market to specific customers, at specific times, at specific locations. Importantly, such targeted messaging draws on a richer-than-ever set of consumer information, including not only detailed demographics from implicit (inferred) and explicit (user-provided) profiles, but also real-time, location-based data. Mobile devices, namely smart phones, now have sufficient computing power and screen real estate to effectively and conveniently replace laptops a majority of the time. Already, 1they have become the primary device for e-mail and calendaring , and as they supplant laptop-based Web clients, built-in GPS capabilities will foster opportunities for achieving competitive advantage via time-and-place aware, native mobile applications. With the right user permissions, organizations can easily use real-time, location based services to enrich the customer experience - and themselves - by a definite, if yet difficult-to-2quantify margin . Though we are still in the early stages of mobile application provisioning and mobile-based marketing, a dramatic acceleration in development of both proprietary corporate 3mobile applications and mobile versions of Websites , along with a commensurate surge in mobile-focused usage patterns by consumers, bears witness to the shift away from laptops and toward mobile devices. Savvy enterprises have already begun to execute extraordinarily powerful mobile marketing campaigns. In January 2010, 61.5% of our 4clients reported developing their mobile applications in-house , but based on recent conversations, Ars Logica believes that this number will fall as the feature-functionality of commercially-available packaged offerings ramps up considerably in Q3 and Q4 of this year. Over the next 24 months, a continuation of this pattern will result in the software vendors who deliver the most heavily benefit-laden mobile applications dominating the market in their respective categories (enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, salesforce automation, and so on).
1 Over the past six months, 65.4% of Ars Logica's clients have reported using mobile devices as the  p r  im   a  r y    m   e  a n  s    o  f   c  h  e c  k  i n  g   e  - m   a  i l  a  n  d scheduling meetings. n=26. 2 A large retail customer of one Ars Logica client is currently developing an iPod application that will allow in-store customers to take a photo of bar codes and immediately access product information, pricing, competitors' pricing; place the item into a persistence-enabled shopping cart; get notifications when the items goes on sale; purchase the item; or add the item to a wish list, which can be shared with friends and family. 3 Based on interviews of the customers of 33 Web content management vendors from January to April 2010, Ars Logica found that 38.6% of respondents had developed (or were in the process of developing) in-house, native mobile applications; and 76.5% offered Website versions optimized for mobile. n=132. 4 Based on survey data from Ars Logica's clients, September 2009 - February 2010. n=26.
1 Copyright © 2010 Ars Logica. All Rights Reserved.            Mobile Marketing as Enterprise Imperative: Strategy, Not Tactic Current Market Trends
M  arketing in a New Era - How Mobile Marketing is Different As marketers know, assembling robust data sets about prospective and actual customers remains key factor - and a key hurdle - in converting the former into the latter. Demographics remain necessary, but seldom prove sufficient. Past behavioral information, including the circumstances under which it occurred, also usually helps, but is similarly difficult to collect, analyze, and monetize. Now assume that you can add time- and location-based information to whatever data you've already gathered about a prospect through opt-in campaigns, implicit profiling, list purchases, and other multi-channel methods. ... [download for more]