Seven rules for building a mobile campaign

So you’ve decided to build a mobile campaign. It makes sense. Everybody has a mobile phone right? And you know a few marketing basics from that course you did once a few years ago. It should be easy right? Even though we’re all marketers now, it’s a little more complicated than that.

Here are eight things gleaned from three people deeply ingrained in the emerging markets mobile space. The three — Brett St Clair, head of Mobile for Google South Africa, Nic Haralambous, CEO and co-founder of Motribe, a platform that allows people to create virtual mobile communities and Jason Xenepolous, CEO of “full integrated” digital agency Native — shared their thoughts at Tech4Africa, a prominent conference in Johannesburg.

Mobile must be part of a full media campaign
Whether you’ve built an app, a mobi site or are even just sending out plain old SMSes, your mobile campaign will become irrelevant if it doesn’t interact with all your physical “real world” media campaigns.

“You need a marketing message, an identity and a great campaign from end to end,” says Haralambous.

St Clair explains exactly how potential reach there is for mobile to be integrated with other forms of media. He makes particular reference to Google’s research on a large bank’s radio spots.

“We see search request spike to the second when these ads are aired,” he said.

This, remember, is a campaign with no planned mobile integration. Those search spikes could be even bigger if the bank figured out how to use them to its advantage.

Integrate properly
Okay, you might say, “I totally get this whole integrated campaign thing. I just have to advertise my mobile presence on all my other adverts right?”

Not quite…

The worst thing you can do is stick a QR at the end of TV spot or a read out a mobile web link during a radio ad.

Put some effort in
“The standard mobile campaign is kind of crap,” says Haralambous. The community you’re targeting isn’t going to respond to a shoddily put together campaign just because it appears on their mobile phones.

Companies have adapted their whole business model for the mobile sphere, says St Clair. In particular, he refers to the example of international supermarket chain Tesco and how it changed up its business model in Korea. The company placed QR codes in train stations which gave commuters access to a virtual store enabling them to do their groceries on the go.

Focus on the consumer
The people reading your adverts don’t care about the same things you do.

“Mobile can be a powerful marketing tool if you look at it from the perspective of the user,” Xenepolous says.

This focus can be as simple as making sure your mobile site isn’t data heavy if you’re targeting a region with high mobile broadband costs. If your site has too much data, someone will log on once, log off and “you’ll lose them forever,” says Haralambous.

Let communities grow
This people-centric approach to advertising can be applied as much to communities as to individuals.

Very few brands are a community. You have to build the brand and the community will build itself around it, says Haralambous.

People have to find a common theme that unites them around a product, he adds and suggests that you bear in mind communities tend to grow organically and that you can’t force them to grow.

Search matters
We all know how important it is for people to be able to find your business on the web. The SEO industry wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t.

Mobile search, particularly from smartphone users, is becoming just as important and has the potential to be even more so.

“We’re beasts of immediacy”, says St Clair: 85% of hotel bookings are made immediately using after searching on a mobile search. In comparison only 43% are made immediately after a desktop search.

Even in an emerging market like South Africa two-thirds mobile searches are local and related to the immediate environment. In South Africa 55% of people who searched for a business called them, 48% then visited that business.

You have to be aware, however, that search also puts the power into the hands of people wanting to find out about your product.

Entertain
We flock to mobile because it entertains us. We love Angry Birds. Hell, phone manufacturers are even betting that Angry Birds will make their products sell better. The largest video watching platform on Earth is YouTube “The second largest, — YouTube mobile,” says St. Clair.

Some of the most successful mobile advertising campaigns have had an interactive element to them, built around things people are passionate about.

One of the best examples of this is Heineken Star Player, which rewarded people for guessing when a soccer player on a live televised match was about to score a goal.

This doesn’t mean you should be overly familiar with the people you’re targeting. As Xenepolous says, all that does is make your campaign more intrusive. Familiarity, after all, breeds contempt.