Overview of mobile marketing planning, and a short glossary of common mobile marketing terms. Companion document to presentation by Maria Zhang for National Ski Areas Association Winter Conferences in Squaw and Killington, January & February 2012.

1. Mobile Marketing Guideposts & Glossary NSAA Winter Conference, Jan-Feb 2012
View NSAA “Marketing in the Mobile Age” slides at www.slideshare.net/propeld/marketing-in-the-mobile-age
Mobile Marketing Guideposts
Mobile is a powerful tool for you to connect with consumers, and visa versa. It’s personal, immediate,
engaging, trackable, and infinitely flexible. You know your customers are already there – how do you
determine the best way to engage with them?
Mobile marketing is like any other marketing: it takes planning, budgeting, promotion, tracking, testing,
and adjusting. Where to start?
Planning
Once you have a good plan in place, you can start selecting mobile marketing tools that are a good fit for
achieving your goals. First, write down answers to these questions:
 What are my mobile objectives?
 Who is my mobile customer?
 What do they want?
 Where, when, how do they want it?
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
What are my mobile objectives?
Are you trying to directly boost revenues? Or is your objective to extend lifetime value of customer with
superior service, foster loyalty, and build your brand reputation? Perhaps you’re in cost-saving mode and
need to find ways to get more ROI on your marketing dollar?
For example, for a ski resort:
 Sales: more dollars per guest, more summer guests, boost awareness of kid activities, reduce
room inventory
 Service: loyalty programs, vertical tracking, helping guests find places
 Cost Savings: improving marketing ROI by boosting social referrals or reducing printing costs
You should also assess your constraints. Do you have the people to manage a mobile project, talented
creatives (in house or agency), smart developers, mobile-ready content, budget money, and the time
necessary to make your mobile initiative successful?
Who is my mobile customer?
Everyone’s customer is different. How do you segment your customer types? By age, demographic,
region they come from? Which profiles are best fit for a mobile marketing campaign? Do they own
smartphones? (If they are under 13 or over 65, they may not own a mobile phone at all!)
What do they want?
What is the primary reason your guest visits your destination? What are they looking for?
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2. For a ski resort, perhaps they want to check their mobile for current ski conditions… for summer activities
like mountain biking, mountaintop trails, or watersports… for nearby shopping deals… or for social tips on
the best mountain-top restaurants or après-ski bars...
Where, when, how do they want it?
Are your guests at home, in the planning phase of their trip? Or are they currently visiting your resort right
now? Can you connect back to them after they depart to encourage a follow-up trip?
Budgeting
Interactive media may be challenging to learn and adapt to your business, but studies show that the
smarter interactive marketers achieve a higher return on invested capital than companies with less digital
savvy. And traditional media – especially magazines and newspapers – are still receiving too large a
proportion of overall marketing budget relative to the time consumers are spending with digital media
including mobile.
Lots of factors complicate decisions on how much to spend on interactive versus traditional media. We
won’t prescribe a proportion, let alone a specific dollar value you should dedicate to mobile. However,
know that the best brands in the US are spending 5-25% of their interactive budgets on mobile.
Promotion
Especially in the case of mobile apps and web sites, you need to promote them to increase awareness
and use. You can reach digital consumers with a notice on your web site, Facebook and Twitter updates,
email, text, banners, and sponsorships of other sites and apps. But don’t forget traditional promotion as
well: call center scripts, in packaging, cashier booths, store windows, broadcast, billboards, etc.
Tracking
Make sure to take periodic snapshots of your key performance indicators to assess your reach,
conversion, and loyalty. Depending on your goals and programs, you might be tracking impressions,
clicks, downloads, registrations, purchases, coupon redemptions, unique visits, time per visit, visit
frequency likes, emails, tweets, or locations.
Develop a tracking dashboard – a spreadsheet or dynamic web page that pulls data from across all your
campaigns and compares traditional and digital campaign metrics. For example, you might compare
reach across subscriptions, ad impressions, page views, and Facebook followers; interest across both
clicks and inbound calls; and leads via direct mail responses and web registrations. Evaluate the relative
performance of each campaign and analyze the ROI.
Testing
The great thing about digital media is it’s relatively cheap and easy to do A/B testing on just about any
variable to optimize your results. You can test images, headlines or body copy, offers, layouts, media
placement, paid search terms. Try A against B and see which performs best.
Adjusting
As you move forward, listen to your test results, review your goals, and tweak.
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3. Mobile Glossary
Common acronyms, buzzwords, and AKAs.
3G, 4G, LTE. Shorthand for broadband mobile CRM. Customer Relationship Management
Internet. Carriers have various names for their software, a central location for storing contact,
wireless technologies, all networks having marketing, and sales data on individual
different reach and speeds. prospects and customers.
Alerts. Time-sensitive, opt-in notifications CSC. Common Short Code. Often used for call
pushed to users via apps, SMS, MMS. to action on SMS campaigns, “text to 12345.”
API. Application Programming Interface. Used CTR. Click Through Rate measures response.
by engineers to connect various specialized
services into apps and sites, for example Feature Phone. Basic mobile phone for calling,
location data, payment systems, or CRM usually with no Internet connectivity.
connections.
Geofence. A bounded area that triggers a
App Store. Distribution mall for apps. Big ones notification as the mobile user passes through
owned by Apple, Google, Amazon. the fence. For example, a nearby deal.
Apps. Short for mobile applications – programs Geolocation. See GPS.
that run on a smartphone or tablet.
GPS. The GPS (global positioning system) in
Augmented Reality. Displaying geo-located your mobile phone provides latitude and
information directly in a mobile camera longitude data to applications by reading your
viewfinder, like real-time directions, or virtual location via satellite.
signage.
Handset. Phone hardware – an iPhone, Droid,
Barcodes. Mobile barcodes are similar to Galaxy, etc.
product SKU barcodes – scan it to receive a
HTML5. Hypert Text Markup Language 5. Latest
marketing response. Usually direct consumers
web standard permits rich features within web
to mobile web pages, videos, apps, etc.
and mobile web applications. Possible uses in
Big Data. Mining into huge mountains of cross-platform app development, with
heterogeneous data, looking for patterns, and limitations.
extracting nuggets of insight for businesses and
Landing. Web page where a user is sent upon
individual consumers.
tapping screen.
Carrier. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Telus.
LBS. Location based services that use mobile
Cloud. Services and storage running on Internet GPS data to inform maps, search results, or
servers, not local computers or phones. marketing offers.
CPC. Cost per Click – ad rate paid on user MMS. Multi-Media Message. Like SMS (texting),
action. but for video or audio.
CPM. Cost per Thousand – ad rate paid on Native App. Optimized for a particular mobile
number of impressions. platform: Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry.
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4. NFC. Near Field Communication – a mobile UGC. User Generated Content. Photos, reviews,
phone close to a reader to do payment, social shares used in your sites and apps.
ticketing, rewards, coupons, etc.
URL. Uniform Resource Locator. Usually, this
NPII. Non-Personally Identifiable Information. just means “location of a web page,” but it can
Metrics and stats tied to a single user, but not mean the link to an image, video, or other file on
enough detail to associate an identity to the the Internet.
user.
WOM. Word of Mouth. Often used as shorthand
OS. Operating Systems. Largest smartphone for social media.
operating systems are Google Android and
Apple iOS, with Blackberry, Windows Phone, A much longer and more detailed glossary is
and others holding a much smaller share. available at Mobile Marketing Association,
http://mmaglobal.com/glossary.pdf.
QR Codes. Quick Response codes. See
Barcodes.
SEM. Search Engine Marketing. Buying your
way up the results with a paid ad.
SEO. Search Engine Optimization. The science
of making web pages rank higher in Google,
Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Smartphone. Mobile phone plus mini-computer
for Internet-connected applications like email,
calendar, web browsing.
SMS. Short Messaging Service. Another name
for texting.
Social. Facebook, Twitter, and other services
that connects contacts.
SoLoMo. Buzzword for Social-Mobile-Location,
three key converging marketing trends.
Tablet. Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy, and other
small, portable devices that connect to the
Internet wirelessly. Counts often include readers
like Amazon Kindle. Tablets Generally used
more for media consumption and
communication more than creation and
productivity.
Texting. Instant messaging via phone.
Somewhere between a phone call and email on
communications continuum – immediate but
non-interruptive.
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Propeld | 1603 116th Avenue NE, Suite 115 | Bellevue, Washington 98004 | info@propeld.com | 425-998-8857