Mobile to the Max Highlights

Greetings from San Diego at Internet Retailer’s “Mobile Marketing and Commerce Forum.” This smaller industry event is highly niched, focused purely on helping SMB online retailers maximize opportunity through the mobile channel. As m-commerce experts and a broad range of speakers share their insights, a few themes emerge:

The mobile wave may be more of a tsunami. Not only do more and more people own mobile devices, people are more and more attached to them. One statistic shared was that 116 million Americans own smart phones; 70 million own tablets; and 2 of every 3 phones purchased today is a smartphone. Even eBay quoted about 9,000 cars sold on via mobile device each week. Mobile is here – and people are using it to simplify their day-to-day. Perhaps I’m stating the obvious here, but this continued surge of mobile adoption is an opportunity for brands to capitalize on what’s possible across mobile devices to carve out additional market share.

Get started now and expect to fail fast. As with most things that involve technology, the spoils go to those who jump in early. This means you need to push your team to advance your mobile capabilities as a brand, knowing that not everything you do will be perfect, but expect to learn from the experience to refine good to create great on the next 2.0 version. Smoother, faster, with more “wow” are good places to start. But you have to build it before you can make it better. This goes for apps, mobile-specific destinations, and more.

Build a small team and recruit the best talent. If you’re ready to take your mobile marketing and commerce to the next level, create a tiny team internally and give them that task. Let them get creative and get excited about it, with all the support they need to bring their inspirations to life. But if your own internal folks are too buried in the day-to-day to see the light of what’s possible, don’t hesitate to get outside help from partners and agencies with great experience. You’d be surprised at what’s possible – and those surprises can help your brand experience via mobile truly stand out.

Keep your goals front and center. Before you begin any mobile-based initiatives, write out your goals. What do you wish to gain? Who do you want to serve? What is the end result you’re looking to achieve? Keep those front and center so you don’t get distracted by the “shiny objects” and cool ideas that come up – many of which can take you off course and cause delays to market.

There’s much more to share, so stay tuned for future posts with even more content from the show sessions.

This entry was written by Patti Renner and posted on October 10, 2012 at 12:40 pm and filed under Mobile Marketing with tags marketing, mobile. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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