Partner Article

What?s hot in mobile marketing?

To reach consumers via the evolving mobile channel, digital marketers have rushed into mobile marketing, creating mobile websites and applications for smartphones and the ubiquitous iPhone. All of this activity generates customer data and while websites are still the primary source of online revenue and customer engagement for companies, there is little doubt that mobile will soon dominate the online marketplace, with recent reports suggesting that that mobile e-commerce sales will grow from $3B in 2013 to $31B by 2015.

Leading brands are focusing on building mobile-friendly sites and mobile apps, which means marketers must now measure mobile campaign performance as well web campaign performance. One challenge they face is the need to unify that data so they can gain a 360-degree view of their customers’ online interactions.

Mobile marketing in action

A great example of where this is all heading is a global commercial airline with a highly advanced vision for the future of mobile marketing. When their digital marketing team first approached Ensighten, their web analytics data was completely separate from mobile analytics data, which meant they couldn’t accurately measure mobile campaign performance or understand how customers used their app. They needed a way to fix that and gain aggregated insight into customer behaviour on both their website and on any mobile device.

A key objective was to collect first-party data—including bookings, upgrade conversions, and flight or seat changes on their app— and utilise a suite of analytics tools to integrate that data with geo-location information and screen clicks.

With implementation support from a top analytics firm, Stratigent, the airline has implemented Ensighten Mobile (a mobile-specific variant of the Ensighten Manage real-time tag management system) to analyse mobile campaign performance and app usage patterns. Combined with Ensighten Manage, the airline can now look at customer interaction across its website, airport kiosks, and even in-flight Wi-Fi — giving them a comprehensive view of digital customer engagement, and the ability to target their customers more effectively with relevant offers.

Mobile marketing in 2013

In 2012, brands began to explore analytics on smartphones and tablets. This year, I expect marketers will also want to track interaction on increasingly sophisticated game consoles and TVs. We’ve been seeing how mobile marketing continues to expand its scope: from the typical smartphone or tablet to Android-based TVs based and game consoles such as Xbox, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo. These devices are quickly becoming “media centers” that allow you to do more than just watch TV or play video games. Almost anything you would do on a personal computer can be done on these devices, including browsing the internet, playing music, or online shopping.

This represents a huge opportunity for digital marketers. For example, if you watch Netflix on your gaming console (which is just an app on your device), details on the movies you watch, shows you browse, and ads you click can easily be collected via an analytics tool. Aggregating and analysing this data will yield new opportunities for marketers.

Big data is a big opportunity for marketers

These days, there’s a lot of talk about big data. Marketers are becoming one of the biggest consumers of data from an increasing range of sources — devices, websites, social media, and so on. Some might say: “We can’t boil the ocean so where do we start?” My suggestion is to zero in on the data that is relevant to you: work out exactly what you want to track and put a plan in place to focus on that, and that alone. An airline wouldn’t collect the same website data as an office-supply retailer, so determine the best data to collect for your online business. Determining the data you want to collect is ultimately the first step in measuring your mobile campaigns more effectively. It might sound like a drop in the bucket, but it’s better than boiling the ocean.

About the author

Adrian James is managing director of Ensighten UK. Based in London, Adrian heads up the company’s sales and customer support operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In prior lives, he was managing director at SiteTagger, and has also held leadership positions at digital marketing agency Bourne & Web, and analytics leader Omniture, along with marketing roles at Oracle and Siebel.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ensighten .