Yesterday I participated in the "eMarketer Webinar: Mobile Advertising and Marketing—Key Trends and Benchmarks".
I figured it was time to learn what mobile marketing means and how it differs from traditional marketing; particularly as SAP is a mobile company now, with Sybase and all...
Let me start with a definition of Mobile Marketing given by Tweeter @vimi: "Any campaign designed for users to view on their mobile. search, ads, apps, videos, QR codes, coupons, texting, games,mobile site".
THINGS I LEARNED THAT I DID NOT KNOW:
- Mobile is a huge market and people integrate mobile with traditional and social media marketing (e.g. QR codes on postcards)
- It's mainly about ads, apps, games, search, SMS Messaging and targeting better (mobile allows location targeting)
- Messaging is not different, apart from phrasing and length of messages sent to mobile phones etc.
- Mobile platform are plenty and the market is defragmented which makes it hard for marketers. Android seems to be leading and growing.
- There is know how required (technical know how) on how to create and serve up ads on Apple devices and within apps (for example)
- I think it's fair to say mobile is currently used a lot more in B2C than B2B
(This is how I felt at times :-)).
While the slides and webinar were interesting, I did not feel they provided enough basics for a newbie like me. I had a ton of questions. Some were semantic, e.g., what do they mean by "messaging"? SMS text messaging or the content of the message to the audience.... , and how does mobile marketing strategy differ? The focus seemed to be on ads.
I decided to turn to my fellow audience members on Twitter, under the hashtag #eMwebinar to ask some questions and gain some additional insights:
This provided me with an excellent lesson in social media collaboration and marketing; really, best learning experience I've had in a while. I recommend to anybody who is a social media professional to go out and join a Webinar/TweetChat on a topic you don't know much about...so you know what it feels like for your own audience when you might talk about HANA, CRM etc.
On the Twitter hashtag, it was the usual situation:
- A small group of people (I'd say about 7 key participants in the chat) amplified the messages from the webinar to their followers; including me.
- Nobody engaged, talked to each other or responded to questions. There were not even many retweets at this point. We were joined by a hashtag but otherwise totally separate.
After I had posed a bunch of questions into the Go-To-Webinar tool that seemed to go into a black hole, I started to post questions on the Twitter hashtag. The reaction was...
NOTHING
I kept posting questions...
NOTHING
Finally, I sent out a Tweet that read exactly like this: "#eMWebinar - ppl on ths twttr stream. wld luv sum answers 2 my questions vs. just broadcast of webinar content :-). Please respond?"
After a few minutes I started to get individuals tweeting me answers, clarifying my questions, and finally, even eMarketer picked up on some of my questions on Twitter and addressed them on the call portion of the event (although a person from eMarketer told me on Twitter to enter my questions into the Go-To-Marketing tool; which is ironic).
Also positive, I ended up following a number of very knowledgable Mobile Marketers, and many followed me back. So I feel, I was able to build a small network of mobile experts that I can draw on for future conversations on the topic.
KEY LEARNING for using Twitter as part of a webinar (for Marketers):
- Monitor the Tweet stream (don't wait until the Q&A to answer questions).
- Don't just amplify (but overall amplification is good: often people give the information a spin or add some interpretations that helps the newbie; or provide good content to people ONLY on the hashtag and not in the webinar)
- Do include URLs to additional content, basic information etc. in your Tweets (eMarketer sent me a URL to a B2B Mobile Marketing report that I have no access to 🙂 = #fail; not a good "sales" job but frustrating)
- Do connect with other Tweeters; especially as a company, the hashtag is a chance to showcase some thought leadership vs. being silent
- Provide examples and use cases, e.g. for mobile campaigns, especially B2B. The webinar provided no examples; I asked for a case study and none was offered; it was very theoretical, data without context.
TO CLOSE, HERE A SUMMARY OF KEY TWEETS:
- #eMWebinar @noahelkin states that smart phone market share is in favour of Android and growing.
- Big challenge for Marketers embracing Mobile Marketing: Lack of tactical and strategic expertise in-house & on the agency side #eMwebinar.
- Search + display will displace messaging as top form of mobile ads in 2012. Video will have greatest % growth. #emwebinar
- Mobile video advertising is expected to see 81.4% growth in 2012 with a compound annual growth rate of 69% over the next 4 years #eMwebinar.
- More marketers are trying to capitalize Local intent. Thanks to Geolocation technologies. Better way to measure ROI? #eMwebinar
- Local mobile ad spend (leveraging geo-targeting) is set to surpass national mobile ad spend by a 2:1 ratio @gannett #eMwebinar.
- Tablet ads eye-catching and hard to ignore - sounds like nirvana for marketers #emwebinar.
- Back from grave? Email most successful purchase trigger (56%) followed by SMS (41%) trumping FB, Twitter, phone, 4square, shops #eMwebinar.
- On iPad the ad is in the iAd platform that Apple developed to embed ads into their apps #emwebinar.
- So messaging = SMS "messaging" vs. what you have to say to your audience? #eMWebinar// Yes
- My take aways from #eMWebinar Mobile Marketing: It's abt serving up ads on mobile (challenge: fragmented platforms), SMS, games, apps, local.
- (Mobile Marketing vs. Traditional) It's just the strategy that differs and things like user experience etc. which primarily dictate mobile strategy.
- (Mobile) search includes paid+seo and paid search can also be contextual.Good info on paid mobile search bit.ly/5PSnPQ.
I also got a Tweet stating that Mobile Marketing sounds like bogus. Tweet: "(...) what can be really new in marketing? I've never heard about mobile marketing before #eMwebinar"). Plus, I was send a blog that states that B2B marketing cannot be done via social media. 🙂
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