Tuesday 22 March 2011

Mobile is the key to truly effective through-the-line marketing

I've blogged before about how marketing that does not use mobile will struggle to be truly integrated.  How can you effectively drive a consumer from seeing a poster to visiting an online destination without something in between?  That "something" can most effectively be Mobile.

Similarly, guiding consumers into the funnel via exposure to above-the-line marketing and through the other end at direct below-the-line communication, necessarily needs that consumer to have interacted with the ATL, either directly or otherwise.  And there is the marketers challenge.

And that is where mobile can play a fundamental role.

Yesterday I sat for 5 minutes looking out of my office window, onto Garrick Street:


And in that 5 minutes, I saw a total of 138 people.  26 of those, just under 20%, were holding their phone in their hand - some on calls and some just looking at it.  You can be pretty certain that the vast majority (if not all) of the remaining 80% of people had their phone within easy reach (many clearly had Apple headphones in so are likely to have been listening to music on their iPhones).  Now I know that a 5 minute snapshot of a Central London street is in no way representative of the wider population, but it does hint at the great thing about Mobile...

If you can produce a poster, ad or piece of guerilla activity compelling enough that people want to respond or react to it, and if you include an appropriate and intuitive mobile call-to-action, then you can drive consumers to interact and initiate a dialogue with you there and then - in the moment - when their interest is piqued and they are most responsive.  Confirm and acknowledge their contact and maintain the dialogue, or if more appropriate, do so later that day or the next.  

Either way, you have in the space of a minute or two, moved the consumer from being an anonymous viewer of your ATL to being a real prospect that you can have a direct, and one-to-one dialogue with.

That's pretty impressive isn't it...?

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