Oliver Weidlich, director of design and innovation at Mobile Experience and co-founder of Mobile Mondays in Sydney, indicates that if you’re thinking of going down the mobile marketing route, you need to ask yourself some serious questions.
“There’s a couple of things you need to take into consideration. Do you know who your mobile audience is going to be and what sort of devices to they have?” he asks.
“What are you trying to achieve? Are you aiming for a rich and engaging event experience or are you just trying to provide information about your business and you want to have a presence on mobile web?”
“Do you have a ‘responsive design’ website, one that caters to web, tablet and mobile, and is the content provided in an appropriate way for each of those platforms?”
“The question of ‘need’ for an app comes down to how integrated you need to be with that particular device’s hardware. Back in the day, website hardware didn’t need GPS, but coming up is Near Field Communication location technology which does require a native app. If you’re going to use payments and things like that so consumers can interact with a small businesses loyally, and you want to leverage NFC, then you’re going to require a native app.”
While apps have their place in the mobile world, their accessibility is limited to those business owners wanting to have an information-led relationship with their clients.
As Barber points out, apps are notoriously difficult to integrate into your existing web real estate, where you forego money spent on a great website to have an app that consumers only access when they want – no prompting available.
“One of our clients, HometownLocator.com in the US, is a good example – they have about a million web pages all about the demographics and local information about the people that live in every town, county city state in the US with all their census-like data and all of the local business,” he says.
“They couldn’t use an app, because they’re ‘deep-linked’ out of Google and get most of their traffic (something like 15,000 search results a day) through Google searches.”
“An app for that just won’t work – how do you drive someone to deep-link into an app when you don’t know what device they’re using?”
“They were facing a bill of 200k or 300k to develop a series of apps and finding out where to direct their marketing, but instead they spent a fraction of that to completely mobilise their existing site.”
But there is a caveat. Social networking apps are equally as useful to CRM as email blasts, according to Max Bonpain, head of marketing of telecoms at Samsung.
“In Australia you’ve got roughly half the population using smartphones. Even the video phones have WAP and internet access; convenient internet access that lets you do mobile commerce. But at the end of the day the most popular use for them is social networks,” he says.
Bonpain points to apps that allow consumer engagement with not just one business but those that add themselves to group apps, leveraging their location to attract customers but share the cost with other SMEs.
“It would suit the group apps, like Cupstart.com for coffee shops, where you register your details and the coffee shops you like to go to, you put some money on that, and when you want a coffee you put in the one that you want and when you arrive there it is already paid and they have it ready for you,” he says
“This isn’t for one coffee shop – any café can join. So in terms of café SMEs, this is good for them because they would not have the money to create this for themselves.”
App or web, you and your customers are on mobile, and if you fail to speak to them on this platform, it’s increasingly likely that your competitors will.
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Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
