The Clean and Green Club

Mobile Marketing, Part 2: Legal, Ethical, and Strategic Considerations: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, September 2009

Once again, this article owes much to The Mobile Marketing Handbook: Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns, by Kim Dushinski–read this book BEFORE you implement any mobile campaign.

The careful mobile marketer will keep some basic principles in mind, not only to avoid alienating your prospects, but to stay on the right side of the law. First of all, in a potentially intrusive technology, privacy concerns are key. Second, more than in any other medium (even the Internet), you must coax the customer to opt in. And third, the customer or prospect should feel that interacting with you improves his or her life.

With its legally mandated emphasis on authenticity, honest disclosure, and customer involvement/opt-in, mobile marketing is very much in harmony with the ethical methods I’ve been advocating for years (see my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People first, https://www.principledprofit.com).

Still, mobile marketing may or may not make sense for you–or for me. Dushinski’s 16-point checklist is a great tool to determine if there’s a fit. In my case, she convinced me that if I do any mobile marketing at all, it will be a text-based SMS newsfeed that I can pilot first on Twitter; most of the other mobile technologies are either too expensive and complicated for me, or simply don’t apply to a non-location-based business like mine–this is crucial information that could prevent me from wasting a lot of time and money on methods that aren’t appropriate.

One thing I WILL do after reading Dushinski’s book–and soon!–is set up a website that’s optimized for mobile phone users, and includes a press kit for reporters on the go; this is a no-brainer! Optimizing the experience for anyone wishing to access at least my main site from mobile could potentially yield huge dividends, and can be set up simply by simplifying existing content and hosting on a subdomain of one of my existing sites.

Three times as many people carry a cell phone or PDA than use stand-alone computers. And the opportunity for marketers, particularly for those willing to be pioneers while the field is wide open, is huge. Mobile marketing is in its earliest stage, where the Internet was around 1996. If you have an appropriate offering and strategy now, you might just ride the next boom. Just in the US, sales of hard goods (not including downloadable purchases) via mobile is expected to go from $480 million in 2006 to $1.9 billion in 2010 (that’s a nearly 400 percent increase in four years). And some experts expect mobile to become the most popular way to pay for a transaction within the next few years.

But you need a roadmap in this universe, where a wrong turn could leave you bleeding and broke. I recommend The Mobile Marketing Handbook: Step-by-Step Guide to Crating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns, by Kim Dushinski–from which all these tips came. (and there are a lot more I don’t have room for. If you’re going to market to mobile users, read the book.)

Remember that mobile marketing cannot be intrusive and succeed. It must be welcomed, so use pull rather than push strategies. In other words, your prospect must be a willing and eager participant in your marketing, and that means your mobile marketing has to offer actual value. Here are six possible ways to do that:

Tap into location-specific needs when they are physically nearby

Offer timely and time-sensitive information (example: we had a cancellation, so now you can get that earlier appointment you wanted)

Make life easier for them (examples: click to call or launch a web page)

Provide financial incentive

Entertain

Let people connect with each other

Mobile marketing can also add enormous value when you integrate it into your existing marketing. As an example, by adding a mobile-based response system such as a shortcode or photo-loading web page, even a billboard can go from a mere branding exercise to a powerful, trackable direct-response marketing system. Dushinski identifies six different ways to incorporate direct response into a mobile campaign.

Next month: legal, ethical, and strategic considerations in mobile marketing