June 23rd, 2008

Mobile Marketing: Tremendous Potential For Growth

By Guy Talmi - Senior Marketing Director

The Washington Post has featured a report, Mobile Marketing Crowd Says Improvements Must Be Made For Growth To Happen showing how much the industry wants to embrace mobile marketing:

A survey conducted at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum this week in New York quizzed advertising agencies, content providers, aggregators, carriers and others about the space to understand from an insider’s view of what is going on in the industry.

Here are results that are relevant for wireless operators:

– 31 percent of wireless operators reported that they are looking for more information from the mobile ecosystem on the strategies used for executing mobile marketing campaigns.

– 23 percent of wireless operators said they felt that content customization and personalization are the key to increasing mobile marketing.

These results and others clearly puts Personalization in the center of attention for marketing activities.

Another example where we see similar results is in a new survey commissioned by Pontis - 34% of all respondents consider personalisation to be the most important aspect of developing a successful marketing offer or promotion.

Yet our survey also covers what operators perceive to be the barriers to achieving a high standard of personalization:

- 47% of respondents judged technological challenges in accessing data held on different and non-interoperable platforms to be the biggest barrier to delivering personalised communications

- 29% blame organisational structure and processes

- 9% of respondents highlighted lack of resources as the issue

Our survey also reveals the difficulty marketing staff are facing in creating such personalised communications. The problems begin with attempting to access subscriber’s usage history, real time behaviour and response to previous offers - just 18% consider this to be easy whilst 82% find it problematic. This poses a particular difficulty in marketing bundled services like triple and quadruple play offerings where 44% of respondents consider it extremely difficult to get access to the relevant customer data.

The results graphically highlight what our customers have been telling us all along about the difficulties they encounter in accessing customer data and usage history to help them deliver well targeted marketing offers. It’s hardly surprising that marketers have struggled to market new mobile services effectively in the absence of such vital data.

The good news of course is that there are now solutions available like our own, which automate this process and help marketers to determine the optimal proposition, price, communication’s channel and timing to give the maximum chance of success and help to overcome the technological and organisational barriers that have traditionally hampered the marketing of mobile services.

So it doesn’t really matter if as a marketer you are up to promoting your organization’s content and services or looking to open your channels to mobile advertising. Making it personal is the key to success!