This question came to mind today when I came across an August 20, 2009 article titled “Everybody Starts at Zero.” In traditional marketing, be it direct, email or web, marketers smartly consider their audience and its characteristics in developing strategies for reaching them in the most relevant way. They typically have a database or purchase compiled demographic data to build out a better understanding of customers and their probable behaviors.
This article points at that with mobile, marketers don’t have such a luxury when getting started. If marketers start with the premise of appending existing customer profiles with customer mobile phone numbers, they risk the entire future mobile customer relationship.
As many experienced mobile marketers know, you must first acquire permission from customers to contact them via mobile, meaning that the classical marketer’s point of view still applies. It’s just that they need to consider the opt in step as a call to action as part of a marketing program communicated via some other means – email, web, point of sale, direct mail, etc. In other words, think “marketing program to acquire opt in as I would to acquire a product purchase or sales lead” rather than “mobile marketing program.”
In this recent blog post, I highlight a comment by a mobile technology investor that some large and powerful brands seem to be sitting on the fence with respect to mobile, given a shortsighted perspective that their brand strength is of little advantage entering a crowded space where they haven’t had a presence in the past. This article infers a similar observation:
“The good news is that everybody starts at zero. Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike all start with no one in their mobile marketing database.”
Good for small business, less good for larger businesses who may feel their brand lacks the power to successfully leverage the mobile channel. Nothing could be further from the truth of course, and it is that brand strength which can help acquire permission from customers and begin building out an understanding of customer behavior in the mobile channel, via a Mobile Customer Data Asset. Mobile marketing is not counterintuitive; it just requires marketers to view it as an interaction channel as opposed to another attribute in their database. The article concludes with some sage advice:
“Waiting to start mobile marketing until you have a mobile database is impossible. You cannot build a mobile marketing database without doing mobile marketing.”
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