How to Make Money with Mobile Media

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH MOBILE MEDIA

Jamie Turner


If you’re like a lot of people, you may be asking yourself if mobile media is right for your business. That’s a good question. And one that everyone should ask before they launch a mobile media campaign.

Here’s a checklist that should help you decide for yourself. Mobile media is right for you if you want to…

► Attract new customers to your business

► Drive existing customers to come back more frequently

► Distribute coupons in an inexpensive way

► Get customer feedback about a new product or service

► Cross-promote one part of your business with another part of your business

► Increase your brand loyalty

► Differentiate your brand from your competitor’s brand

See where I’m going with this?

Who wouldn’t want all of the above? New customers? Check. Repeat visits? Check. Inexpensive marketing tools? Check, check, check.


That’s what makes mobile media so exciting. It’s a terrific new way to connect with customers, and it’s getting better all the time. In fact, before long, a business without a mobile media marketing campaign will be as rare as a business without a website.

What’s more, the ability to track data and information about mobile users allows businesses to provide increasingly relevant experiences for their prospects and customers. For example, wouldn’t it be cool to receive a mobile coupon for a visit to a spa a month before your wedding anniversary? Or perhaps you’d like to get a reminder that it’s time for an oil change, plus $5 off if you visit the same location you did last time. You might even set your phone on vibrate to let you know when there’s a Starbucks around the next corner.

The possibilities are endless, and they’re going to keep evolving. This is why it’s so good you’re getting a head start on this before your competitors do.

Six Ways Businesses Are Using Mobile Media to Connect with Customers

With today’s smartphones, your prospects and customers are essentially carrying around a little computer in their pockets. And that little computer can be used to do some incredible things.


Mobile Media Facts

According to a recent report by Burson-Marsteller:

► The average iPhone user only spends 45% of his or her time making voice calls. The rest is spent browsing the Web or using applications.

► By 2011, 99% of mobile phones will be data-capable.

► In 2012, shipments of smartphones will exceed shipments of PCs.

► 42% of mobile browser use is for social networking. 48% is for conducting searches.

► The growth rate of the iPhone is 10 times faster than the grow rate of AOL.


In fact, here are six different ways consumers are connecting with businesses via mobile media:

Short Message Service (SMS) As anyone with a teenager can tell you, SMS is usually referred to as texting. It’s the most common phone-based activity among U.S. cell phone users of all ages.

American Idol supercharged the use of SMS when they encouraged viewers to vote for their favorite Idols by texting in their votes. The American Red Cross used texting very effectively during several global disasters when they asked people to use SMS to make donations to support the victims.

SMS is big. Someday, SMS will be overwhelmed by smartphone apps and mobile websites, but for now it’s still a viable marketing tool for businesses.

Mobile Websites If your business has a traditional website, you should also have a mobile website that’s specifically designed for a smaller screen. That’s what organizations like ESPN do. When you type www.ESPN.com into your mobile phone, you’re actually re-directed

www.ESPN.com


to www.m.ESPN.com, which is a website designed for mobile devices.

The key consideration when designing a mobile website is to design it specifically for a smartphone. In other words, you’ll want to design it to load quickly and to be navigable by someone standing on a street corner or sitting in a coffee shop.

Mobile Ads Current research indicates that mobile ads perform about five times better than Internet ads. You might have noticed mobile ads at the top or bottom of the mobile websites you’re visiting. The most effective ads match the content of the site. So, for example, an ad on the MarthaStewart.com mobile website that offered discounts on All-Clad copper pots would probably do better than an ad on the same site for discount hammers at Ace Hardware.

Banner and display ads on mobile sites are sold based on a cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), and cost per thousand (CPM). With CPC, you’re charged only when someone clicks on your ad. It’s the same model you’ve come across for paid search campaigns on Google, Bing, or Yahoo!.

With CPA, you get charged each time you acquire a lead from your mobile media ad. CPA programs are great if you know how much a

www.m.ESPN.com


customer is worth to your company and what percentage of leads you can convert to a sale.

With CPM, you’re charged based on the number of times your ad is seen by consumers. Typical rates for a CPM program are about $6 to $20 per thousand times your ad is delivered to a mobile device.

If you’re just getting into mobile media banner ads, stick with CPC ads since you only get charged when someone clicks through. CPA and CPC campaigns are a little more specialized and require more experience to make them work.

Bluetooth Marketing This is the really fun stuff. Imagine if every time customers visited your location they could wave their cell phone over a Bluetooth reader to register their visit. After 5 visits, the customer would get a discount on your products or services. Better still, their data would be stored in your system so that whenever they were within 100 yards of your business, you could offer them incentive to stop by.

Or, imagine you’re at a conference and you want to exchange business information with someone else at the conference. There’s no need to distribute business cards if you have LinkedIn or Bump installed on your smartphone. Just “bump” the phone up to your business contact (who also has LinkedIn or Bump installed on his or her phone), and the information is exchanged immediately.


How cool is that? (The answer, by the way, is “That’s way cool!”)

Smartphone Apps Nearly half of all the handsets sold in the U.S. are smartphones. The platforms include iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows, and BlackBerry.

If you’re going to design a smartphone app for your mobile marketing campaign, you’ll want to create something that’s functional (such as a calculator), that’s entertaining (such as a game), or that provides some sort of social connectivity (such as an app for your local community). Many applications are fee-based, but more and more companies are giving away smartphone apps as a way to stay connected with customers and prospects.

QR Codes These are the two-dimensional barcodes that you’ll find in print ads, on in-store posters, and on business cards. They were initially used to track parts for vehicle manufacturers, but then someone had the bright idea to use them for marketing, too. If you add them to your magazine ads, newspaper ads, posters, or even T-shirts, the person who “snaps” it on their smartphone can be sent to a web page, download an MP3 file, dial a telephone, or even send an email message.


Those are the six primary ways companies are using mobile media for business. Now, let’s talk about how consumers use mobile media.

How Consumers Use Mobile Media

Before we dive further into how you’re going to use mobile media to connect with your consumers, it’s important to understand how consumers are using mobile media to connect with businesses.

For example, Yelp allows customers to get restaurant reviews from their mobile devices. This is perfect for the consumer who is visiting an unfamiliar city and wants to check out the reviews of a restaurant prior to walking through the door.

As if that weren’t engaging enough, Yelp also has an augmented reality application that allows users to point their smartphone viewer

The Impact of Mobile Media

To give you a sense of just how widespread mobile media is, consider this—out of 6.6 billion people on earth, 5.1 billion of them own a toothbrush. 5.0 billion of them own a cell phone.


down a street and have tags pop up over the restaurants on that street. That gives potential diners the ability to look through the viewfinder of their smartphones at a live image of the street and to see ratings and reviews of the restaurants on that street.

Consumers are also getting more comfortable with QR codes. The Smithsonian Institution used QR codes to enhance the experience smartphone users were having in their Natural History Museum. In the museum’s exhibit on early human Neanderthals, they encouraged visitors to snap a QR code that would link their smartphone to an application called MEanderthal.

The MEanderthal application superimposes an image over a photograph of the users to make them look like cavemen from 30,000 years ago. In other words, people visiting the exhibit could snap the QR code, superimpose a Neanderthal’s facial features over their own, and then share it with friends at the museum or even email it to others.

If you’re a Harley-Davidson rider in central Texas, you might be interested in hearing about where other Harley-Davidson riders are meeting up for Bike Nights. That’s what the Fort Thunder Harley-Davidson and Central Texas Harley-Davidson dealers realized. So they encouraged Harley riders near their locations to opt-in to receive notifications whenever there was a Bike Night event happening.


Better still, the bike riders were also notified when the dealerships were offering special discounts on Harley-Davidsons. Interestingly, the Harley-Davidson corporate headquarters has strict guidelines on using print ads and other traditional media to advertise discounts on their motorcycles. But at the time, they hadn’t set up any guidelines for discounts communicated via mobile media. So one of the dealerships was able to send out an SMS message about a sale they were having on Harleys. The result? They had their best one-day sales in more than nine months.

Chili’s found an interesting way to use mobile media to attract customers. The popular location-based smartphone application called Foursquare was used to provide coupons for free cheese dip for people who checked in at a Chili’s location. That’s pretty cool, but what made this even cooler was that Chili’s sent the same coupon to people who checked into other Foursquare locations nearby. In other words, they sent coupons for free cheese dip when people checked in to any store within 200 yards of their Chili’s locations.

Spanair, the Spanish airline, lets users check in from their smartphone. But if you’re checking in from your smartphone, you don’t have access to a printer. Spanair solved that problem by providing the QR code on the smartphone screen. Once travelers have checked in using the Spanair.mobi website, they receive a QR code that can be scanned at the gate as they board the plane.


As mentioned previously, LinkedIn allows people to exchange contact information by simply “bumping” their phones together. By using Near Field Communication technology, LinkedIn enables smartphones to exchange data between devices over a 10-centimeter (around 4 inch) distance. Bump accomplishes the same thing, only it allows consumers to exchange contact information, photos, social networks, and calendar events, too.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of terrific ways consumers are using mobile media to connect with the brands they love. This leads us to our next question: How are you going to use mobile media to connect with your consumers?

A Step-by-Step Action Plan to Help You Set Up, Launch, and Run a Mobile Media Campaign

Okay, so you’ve embraced the concept of mobile media, and you understand how consumers are using it to connect with businesses. What’s next? Where do we go from here?

Glad you asked. While each and every business is going to have different needs, you’ll need to take several steps along the way to mobile media success.


The Most Common Mobile Media Mistakes

Here are the top mistakes most businesses make regarding mobile media:

► Thinking mobile media is a flash in the pan. The truth is that mobile media is here to stay, just like social media.

► Treating mobile media like traditional media. Mobile media is an entirely different animal. If you ignore that fact, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

► Ignoring the needs and desires of the consumer. Consumers want to engage with you via mobile media. Give them that opportunity.

► Sitting on the sidelines. Don’t wait for your competitors to go deep on mobile media. Dive in today.


Step #1: Mobilize Your Website If you’re going to encourage prospects and customers to visit your mobile website, it needs to be designed for that. As mentioned previously, the key is to design it to load quickly and to recognize that the visitor is mobile.

When you talk to your Web designer about setting up your mobile site, just reinforce the fact that mobile websites are scaled-down, simplified versions of a full-blown website. If they’re any good, they’ll embrace the concept and design the site for the mobile user.

That means no Flash programming. (Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages.) Flash is terrific for regular websites but is too much of a memory hog to work on mobile devices.

That also means scaling down the number of pages on the site. Most people who are accessing your site from a mobile device don’t need to take a deep dive into your website. As such, you should design it with just a handful of pages.

If it’s possible, you should reward people for visiting your site using their mobile devices. So, for example, set up the site so that one of the pages includes a discount coupon for people visiting the site via smartphone. Ideally, your visitors should be able to show the coupon to the cashier, clerk, or waitstaff to redeem the coupon.


Step #2: Watch How Your Competitors Are Using Mobile Media It may seem as though you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile, but one of your competitors is probably a step ahead of you. So I encourage you to snoop around and find out what they’re doing. The odds are pretty good that they’ve already made some mistakes, which means you can learn from their errors.

And remember, you can study businesses outside of your immediate competitive set, too. Why not borrow some of their ideas?

Step #3: Start Using Mobile Media It’s easier to understand mobile media once you’ve used it yourself. So don’t sit on the sidelines. Start by using your mobile browser to visit 5 to 10 of your favorite websites and explore their sites. Then, join one of the location-based services like Foursquare, Facebook Places, or Gowalla to understand that experience. Also, log into LinkedIn, Bump, or Facebook on your smartphone so you can get a sense of that experience. You’ll even want to click through on a pay-per-click ad from your smartphone.

There’s a lot to do. Get going!


Step #4: Read Everything You Can About Mobile Media This FT Press Delivers Short is a great place to start. But you might also want to read Marketing in the Moment by Michael Tasner or Wireless Future by Scott Snyder. You could even visit websites like www.60SecondMarketer.com and do a search for articles on mobile media.

You’ll also want to set up your RSS reader so it drops articles about mobile media onto your browser. The easiest way to do that is to go to iGoogle.com and follow their step-by-step process. Then, next time you’re on a blog, website, or news outlet, just click the orange RSS button. From that point on, every time that page is updated, you’ll be notified on your iGoogle page.

Step #5: Claim Your Business on Location-Based Applications No matter what business you’re in, you’ll want to claim your business on Foursquare, Places, and/or Gowalla. By claiming your business, you’re saying, “I’m the official representative of this business, and, as such, I’m authorized to update this application as it relates to my business.” Do that soon, before an unknown employee does. Or, worse still, before a disgruntled employee does.

www.60SecondMarketer.com


Step #6: Run a Mobile Ad Campaign This process will take from about one to four hours to complete, but it may be worth the time. At a bare minimum, you’ll learn a thing or two about mobile marketing. But you’ll also probably drive some revenue to your business.

Mobile ad campaigns work just like regular paid search campaigns. Apple has a mobile ad platform called iAd. Google does too, as part of its AdWords platform. There are several other companies you can use, too—Air2Web, OptIt Mobile, Moblin, and ExactTarget are all companies that can help you launch a mobile ad campaign.

Step #7: Create a QR or 2D Code Promotion What are some places you can include QR or 2D codes? How about on your product packaging, so people can be driven to an online video with instructions on how to install your product? Or how about on a restaurant menu, where people can get more information on the ingredients in your food? Or perhaps you’d want to include one on a “Home for Sale” sign so people can take a video tour of the inside of the house. The uses are endless.

Better still, they’re surprisingly easy to generate. Just Google “QR Code Generator” or “2D Code Generator” and you’ll be asked for the Web page you want the user to be driven to. Type in the URL


and, boom, the code generator sends you a jpg that you can add to brochures, websites, posters, whatever.

Step #8: Design an iPhone or Smartphone App Designing an iPhone or smartphone app is a little more complicated than some of the other items on this list. Typically, you’re going to have to hire an outside design firm to create one for you. But you can save some money by coming up with the concept yourself first.

The key aspect to keep in mind is that nobody wants to download your iPhone or smartphone app just because you have one. It has to have some sort of reason for being. So, for example, you might want to create a calorie counter that gives people a reason to continuously use it. Or, you might want to create one for people who are part of your church, athletic club, or apartment complex. You might even come up with something funny that makes people want to come back time and time again.

The main point is that you want to have a very good reason for doing an iPhone or smartphone app before you invest the time and money into creating one.


Step #9: Encourage Interactivity No matter what kind of mobile marketing you do, be sure that the user is encouraged to engage with you in some way, shape, or form. Virgin Air encourages travelers to upload places they’ve visited. CNN encourages video journalism. And location-based services like Gowalla, Facebook Places, and Foursquare encourage users to check in whenever they visit a new store.

There are two important considerations on this front. First, you want to provide users with a reward or reason to connect with you. And second, you want to give them a reason to keep coming back. If you can accomplish those two goals, you’ll have a good, solid mobile campaign on your hands.

Step #10: Integrate the Program into Your Overall Marketing Program Your mobile media program shouldn’t stand alone in a silo. It should be integrated into your other marketing programs. As you develop your program, explore ways to cross-promote your mobile campaign with your traditional marketing campaigns. And, most of all, be sure your mobile media campaign reflects the brand image you’ve worked so hard to promote in your traditional media campaigns.


Step #11: Track Your Results The wonderful thing about mobile media (and social media) is that everything is digital. That means you can track the results of your campaigns down to a very specific level. You can keep track of your downloads, your click-throughs, your conversions, your uploads—just about anything can be tracked. And that means you can keep tabs on the return-on-investment, which is what it’s all about.

Step #12: Test, Test, Test Because you’re already tracking your results (see Step #11), you’ll be able to test campaigns against one another. Does a “free” promotion work better than a “save 5%” promotion? The only way to find out is to do an A/B split test. Once you have a winner (also known as a control), then you can test other promotions against the winning campaign.

Your goal is to constantly track results and to constantly test against your control. By doing so, you’ll be able to test your way into success.


Top Mobile Applications That Should Be on Every Smartphone

Ready to take a dive in? Here are several of the top mobile applications you should have on your smartphone. You’re familiar with several of them already. Some of them might be new to you.

► Amazon: Can’t wait to get home to order something from Amazon? There’s no need to wait if you have the Amazon mobile app. Buy on the fly!

► Bump: This is a terrific application that allows you to exchange contact information, photos, social networking information, and calendar events just by “bumping” your phone with another Bump user.

► Caffeine Finder: The name says it all.

► Facebook: You can update your Facebook page on the fly with the mobile version. You can even update your Facebook Places profile, which lets people know where you’re eating, drinking, relaxing, or just hanging out.

► Fast Food Finder: Wouldn’t it be great if there were an app called “Healthy Food Finder”? Until then, there’s Fast Food Finder.


► Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places: Ready to “check in” to your favorite restaurant, bar, mall, or retail store? If you do it enough, you’ll become mayor or be eligible for discount coupons.

► Google Books: Interested in reading Ben Franklin’s Autobiography or Dante’s Inferno? Download Google Books to your smartphone and you’re ready to roll.

► Google Maps: What would men do without Google Maps? They’d have to ask for directions, which, of course, will never happen. Fortunately, Google invented its Map app.

► LinkedIn: Ready to exchange LinkedIn contacts just by bumping your phone? Or perhaps you want read someone’s profile while you’re waiting for them at a restaurant. If that sounds enticing, then this application is for you.

► Mobipocket Reader: This application allows you to read eBook titles, which makes it perfect for people who want to do a research query away from the home or office.

► Pandora: Are you a music lover? Then you’re probably already familiar with Pandora. Create your own radio station based on your specific tastes and fire away!

► TwittPro: You don’t have to be sitting behind a desk to update your Twitter status. TwittPro lets you stay connected wherever you are.


► Viggo: This application allows you to check on news, weather, sports, entertainment, and other stories you’re interested in.

► Wordpress, TypePad, or Drupal blogging platforms: Interested in writing a blog from your hammock, your sailboat, or your tennis club? You can do it with these mobile apps.

► Yelp: This application can give you restaurant reviews on the fly. Better still, their augmented reality mobile application lets you look through your mobile screen and places tags with reviews over the restaurants on that street.

The Final Word on Mobile Media

Actually, there is no final word on mobile media. Why? Because mobile media is constantly evolving, which is what makes it so fascinating. So keep reading, keep downloading, and keep coming up with new and inventive ways to use mobile media.

And while I can’t say there’s any final word on mobile media, I can say there’s a final phrase:

It’s the future.

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