Awesome Mobile Content MarketingB Y , M A R C I A K A D A N O F F & B I L L G O D W I N

Towards Awesome

Mobile Content Marketing

Is Mobile Content Marketing awesome? Not yet.

And it really should be. Today’s mobile devices – be they smart

phones or tablets – are always with us, always on, and are fully

capable of understanding and predicting context – where you

are in space and time.

C H A P T E R 1

Context. Where you are in space and time determines

what content you are most receptive to.

In the US, we talk about “4 screens” as if they are equally valuable:

the computer, mobile phone, tablet, and television1. More and

more we are realizing that this is false. All four screens are not

equally valuable when it comes to the consuming content or

providing content that drives people to take action.

Mobile phones and tablets are more valuable than desktop

computers (or televisions for that matter) when it comes to

delivering the content that matters.

• Delivers a desirable demographic. As of late 2012,

the number of people with smart phones in the US

exceeded the 70% mark2. Smart phone users tend to

be — compared to those who carry feature phones 3

— richer, younger, better educated, better looking, and

more intelligent 4.

1 For some the 4th screen is a television; for others it’s a dedicated gaming console. We

won’t argue the point. Both these platforms are dying a slow death of attrition.

2 As of Q3 2013 according to two sources: NPD and ComScore: http://www.insidemo-

bileapps.com/2012/11/15/npd-smartphone-penetration-rises-to-70-percent-in-q3/

3 Source: Pew Internet Project. This page is upzdated whenever there is new informa-

tion: http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/February/Pew-Internet-Mobile.aspx

4 OK. I made up the better looking and more intelligent. But the other attributes are all

real factors as you can see by looking at this analysis of what are called “skews”.

http://openmarketing.com/blog/are-people-who-use-smart-phones-also-smarter-

better-looking-with-brighter-breath-and-better-sex-lives/

“”

• More intimate. Due to the small and personal nature

of the devices themselves.

• Stronger call to action. While we don’t necessar-

ily know why, all the data we have suggests that click

through rates on mobile ads – a medium that is widely

studied and reports – is some 10x higher than click

through rates on their desktop equivalents. This is after

correcting for what many call the “fat finger” problem

meaning the fact that many people erroneous click on

a smart phone or tablet 5.

Some attribute the higher click through rate to novelty. We

actually think it is because of the small screen which makes the

call-to-action harder to ignore. Also, multi-tasking on a smart

phone or tablet is hard due to the smaller size and limited

operating system of these systems. This makes for fewer distrac-

tions.

• More social. Studies show that 55% of social media is

read from a mobile phone or tablet 6.

• More mobile. Duh.

5 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Measuring-Fat-Fingers-Problem/1009470

6 http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/interactive/55-of-social-networking-consump-

tion-occurs-on-a-mobile-device-27327/attachment/comscore-share-of-time-spent-

online-pc-v-mobile-feb2013/

And the ecommerce data tells us that mobile phones and tablets

are the fastest growing segment when it comes to ecommerce.

In short, mobile phones are proving valuable for the delivery of

hard-hitting, action-oriented content.

U.S. Mobile Commerce Sales via Smartphone and Tablet, 2011-2016

M-commerce sales were up 81% in 2012 to $24.66 billion,

and they’ll rise 55.7% to $38.4 billion in 2013, research firm

eMarketer says. 7

retail m-commerce sales % change % of retail e-commerce

7 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57561156-37/ipad-mini-in-hot-demand-in-

china-analyst/

While the data presented above is limited to the US, the trends

are not. In Europe, mobile phones have long been in a leadership

position in terms of how people consume content. And in China,

the iPad mini is the fastest growing platform by far.

Given these trends, you would think that the content marketing

industry would be “all over” mobile as the next big thing. On this

you’d be partially right. Content marketing professionals are big

advocates of mobile. But the advice you’ll get “on the ground”

is a bit short on specifics. This eBook attempts to jumpstart the

conversation by giving you the tools you need to figure out what

it takes to be awesome.

We start in Chapter 2 with a discussion of what we call Table

Stakes. What it takes to make your content available on mobile

phones and tablets.

To make it fun and engaging, we encourage you to skim through

this eBook and then interact with the O’Chute Game 8, a fun and

engaging way to evaluate whether your own content marketing

is both awesome and mobile.

8 http://openmarketing.com/ochute-game/

Table Stakes. What it Takes to Deliver Mobile Content.

What Works When It Comes to Mobile Content

What Doesn’t. Some Big Surprises Here.

Earned. Owned. Paid. How to Put Together a Plan That Makes Sense.

Forms. Who Ever Said This Was Going to Be Easy.

HTML5 and the Mobile Search Conundrum

Mobile Analytics & Testing. What You Need to Know.

Ready, Set, Awesome

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 8

C H A P T E R 9

Mobile Analytics. What You Need to

Know.OK, you’ve put together a dynamite mobile content marketing

program. Everything is going along swimmingly – as they say

in Britain. Now it’s time to figure out whether your program is

meeting its objectives and/or can be fine-tuned to get you to

bigger or better results. After all, awesome mobile content

marketing only happens if you get awesome results.

C H A P T E R 8

Often times the first questions you want to ask and answer

are around customer acquisition:

• Am I visible in search?

• What search terms are people using to find me on

mobile?

• Are these different search terms than people use to find

my site on the desktop web?

• Are people clicking through on content I placed in

Facebook or Twitter?

• Which site is a better source of referral traffic?

The Black Box Problem

Sadly, these questions are almost impossible to answer with

any precision on mobile. A stunning 86% of search traffic on the

Apple iPhone and iPad is encrypted. And encrypted traffic is a

black box. You don’t know the search terms that were used and

you can’t get referral information. (Referral information tells you

that someone came to your site from another site.). Instead, all

data shows up in a single line item in Google Analytics: “Referrer

Not Provided”.

This is maddening (to say the least).

So our message here is use caution when interpreting data from

Google Analytics or any other source that is supposed to tell you

what is going on with your mobile traffic. Almost all these charts

and graphs capture only about 15% of what is going on – and

may not be representative at all.

1 This happened with the launch of iOS 6. http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/11188-

apple-s-ios-6-update-means-86-of-google-referral-traffic-is-encrypted

Inside Your Mobile Application

If you have a mobile application, you are able to break out of

the black box a bit so long as you insert a piece of tracking code

inside your application.

It pays to use someone else’s tracking product. This isn’t an area

where it makes sense to “build” so much as “buy” … especially

as there are a lot of free or nearly free products on the market.

Products we like and recommend include: Flurry, Apsalar, and

Localytics. These products can be used alone, in combination

with each other, or with Google Analytics.

These products cannot get around the black box problem –

exactly – but they do allow you to ask and answer questions

that can help you understand your engagement, retention, and

ultimately your ability to monetize your application, such as:

• How many people are using my application more than 1x?

• How many people are using my application more than 3x?

• Is there a particular profile of people who are using

more than 3x?

Downloads Don’t Matter

According to Localytics, many people download and even pay

for mobile applications and never bother to launch them even

once. And among those who launch their applications 1x, 26%

will never launch them again.

Without loyalty, you cannot hope to monetize your application.

(The mobile app industry is pretty wimpy about loyalty – by the

way - defining loyalty arbitrarily as 3x usage. Localytics stands

alone in defining loyalty as 11x+ usage.)

Trend Analysis

Perhaps the easiest analysis you can do is look for trends over

time in the metrics that matter to you.

On the desktop web, analytic products track trends in unique

visitors to your website, the number of page views, and time

spent. With a mobile application, the comparable metrics are:

• Number of sessions

• 1x, 2x, 3x, nth usage

• Time spent per session

With trend analysis, you are looking at these and other metrics

over time to see if you can identify trends.

What you can see above is that sessions per user and revenue

are correlated, so that as sessions per user goes up, revenue also

tends to go up. People who wrack up more sessions are more

likely to become paying revenue producing customers – all

things being equal.

Natural Experiments

A natural experiment is just what it sounds like. It’s an experiment

that just happened - it wasn’t intended to be statistically valid and

in fact there’s no control group. Results are directional (only) but

still better than the alternative – which is no data at all.

Say on February 8th you launch a content marketing program

on Facebook and Twitter and via email. There’s nothing else you

did differently on February 8th. Oh, yes, except you killed all paid

media for the day. So the only initiative you have going on that

day was content marketing on channels you owned.

Your application is instrumented with one of the mobile analytics

products we mentioned. Included is functionality for cohort

analysis – the ability to track a group of people who all were

acquired on the same day – over time.

Looking at these results, you can see that on February 8th,

you brought in customers who came back at a higher rate in

subsequent days than did customers brought in before or after

The results above – by the way – come from MixPanel. But they just as easily could

have come from Apsalar or Localytics.

February 8th. In other words, engagement was higher for the

customers you brought in on February 8th than for customers

you brought in on the previous days where you relied primarily

on paid media.

There’s a lot of data that shows that higher engagement levels

leads to more loyalty and ultimately to conversion-to-sale.

Cohort analysis is a very powerful tool – especially when you use

it to analyze natural experiments. But … be warned. Don’t try to

tackle this analysis yourself, armed only with a spreadsheet and

a database. Cohort analysis it is a major undertaking that can be

both painful and time-consuming.

Funnel Analysis

On the desktop web, we use funnel analysis a lot in both

ecommerce and lead-generation settings to figure out where

we are losing people on the path to conversion. To get started,

define the steps that people need to go through to purchase

your mobile application, become a lead, or what have you. Each

step in the funnel needs to be defined as a custom event and

events need to be linked together in sequential order. Within the

funnel, it is not possible to skip step 3 and go directly to step 5 –

for example. You have to pass through step 4.

Funnel analysis tells you how many people make it from one step

to the next and allows you to zero in on steps in the funnel where

you are losing a lot of people and therefore a lot of revenue.

Google Analytics, Flurry, Apsalar, and Localytics all support it.

Below is a simple funnel with only three steps in it: step 1 - launch

the application; step 2 – get exposed to the in app offer; step 3

– respond to the in app offer/complete the purchase. Here you

can see that 34% of users launched the app and went on to see

the offer displayed and of these 22% went on to complete the

in-app purchase for a total conversion rate of 8.19%.

Segmenting this funnel to isolate only first-time users shows the

Source: http://apsalar.com/blog/2013/01/using-funnel-analysis-to-measure-user-conversion-rates/

conversion rate on in-app purchases dropping to 6.37%.

In this example, funnel analysis uncovered a revenue opportu-

nity. Improve the customer experience among 1x app users and

there is a potential to boost in-app conversion rates. One way

to do this might be through content – perhaps offering a video-

based tutorial.

When it comes to the mobile funnel, it pays to keep it simple. If

your regular funnel on the desktop web includes a form with data

capture, your funnel on the mobile web may need to include an

abbreviated version of that form. Similarly, think about ways you

can simplify or strip away steps in your conversion funnel.

A/B Testing

The success or failure of your mobile content marketing program

depends on many factors … but one of the most important is

your landing page and whether you’ve optimized it to drive

conversion.

A landing page is just what it sounds like – the place we take

people or “land” them after they are exposed to a marketing

initiative.

The landing page is critical because it’s the last place a person

goes before they convert – or don’t convert.

You can either create customized landing pages for the mobile

web or make your existing desktop landing pages responsive

so they work both on the desktop and when accessed from a

smart phone or tablet. For mobile applications, it almost always

pays to do a custom landing page for mobile, so you can show a

screen shot of what your mobile application will look like on that

platform and provide a click through button to take prospects

directly into the App Store (Apple) or Google Play (Android).

Either way, A/B testing is a best practice.

The methodology is very simple. Take 50% of your traffic and

send it to version A of your landing page, send 50% of your traffic

and send it to version B.

Version B is better than Version A

If your objective is leads or sales, you need to recognize that as

much as 60+% of activity will start out on a mobile phone but

end up on a desktop computer 2:

Smartphones are the most common starting place for online

activities

2 Google/IPSOS study, August 2012 available here: http://services.google.com/fh/files/

misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf

By the same token, PCs are often the starting point for more

complex activities that continue on mobile 3:

PCs are most often a starting point for more complex

activities

What this means to you is that you need to measure results of

your A/B test across multiple devices.

A company called Drawbridge – http://drawbrid.ge - is pioneering

the way here. What they do is use a statistical algorithm to match

up a particular user’s desktop cookie with their mobile cookie, so

as to develop a more complete profile. By doing this, they can

track conversions that start out on mobile but get completed

on the desktop. The technology is very unique, shows a lot

of promise, and is worth looking into, particularly if you use

ecommerce to sell products or services.

2 Ibid.

Landing Pages as a Substitute for In-Store Testing

Neither Google nor Apple support testing of different app

store listings.

The alternative is to create two (or more) landing pages outside

of the app store(s) that drives traffic to your App Store listing.

Obviously this interjects another click in the path to the conver-

sion-to-sale – but here this doesn’t matter. You’ll be judging the

success of your test only based on which landing page drove

the most click-throughs to the checkout facility (often it’s not a

page but an installation popup) within the App Store or Google

Play listing.

L A N D I N G P A G E A P P S T O R E L I S T I N G C H E C K O U T

In terms of what to test, on mobile, the most likely elements

to test include:

• The headline

• The visual

• The copy

There are other factors you’d normally want to test – but here

you want your landing page(s) to look as much like the App Store

listing page as possible. Why? Because the decision you want

to make is around how to vary the App Store listing to drive the

maximum number of downloads.

Conclusion

Is this a complete guide to mobile analytics and testing? Not even

close. But it’s enough to get you started asking and answering the

questions that really matter. Acquisition, activation, retention,

and the key drivers of revenue.

C H E C K L I S T

• Have you looked at installing a one or more of the

mobile tracking products that are available? Some

good products to look at that are free or very low

cost include: Google Analytics, Flurry, Apsalar, and

Localytics. Drawbrid.ge shows promise for cross-de-

vice tracking.

• Are you focused on the right metrics? Remember

over 25% of customers download mobile applications

only to use the application 1x. There is lots of data

that engagement and revenue go hand-in-hand. At a

minimum track trends in:

- Sessions

- Time spent

- 1x usage

- 3x usage

3 http://www.drawbrid.ge/technology

4 For an excellent guide see this infographic: http://www.invesp.com/blog/cro/test-

landing-pages.html.

• Have you set up one or more natural experiments

and used cohort analysis to read the results?

This sounds a lot more difficult than it is in practice,

especially with a free product (Apsalar) or low-cost one

(Localytics).

• Have you defined a funnel for mobile and is that

funnel different than it is on the desktop? An

emerging best practice is to simplify both the forms

and the steps in the funnel itself – as much as possible

- for mobile.

• Have you thought through your mobile landing

page strategy? Developing customized landing pages

for smart phones and iPad are worth the extra work to

maximize downloads for your mobile application.

• Are you testing the right stuff? Testing isn’t impossible

with mobile … it’s just a bit more difficult. The most

important elements to test are:

- the headline

- the key visual

- the call to action

• Factor in cross-device usage. Studies show that as

much as 65% of searches and ecommerce transac-

tions start out on smart phones only to end up on the

desktop. Important for you to know as you sit down

and analyze your funnel, for example.