| Great mobile content is useless without equally great marketing |
| Wednesday, 01 June 2005 | |
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NMA - There's a much-used adage in mobile: content is king. And who am I to argue? Okay, that means that I'm going to argue a little bit. By Craig Barrack is the founder of Mobile Networking The traditional view of marketing focuses on the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. Many portal operators are now coming to realise the value of three Cs: connecting consumers with content.Having the world's best content is only of any value if your customers can find it. If you sell off the page or through the handset, you have limited space to promote. This is akin to having a library where you can only browse titles through a letterbox. We all realise the drop-off with each click on a browser and the consequent need to put the most relevant content closest to the user, as books on one-to-one marketing extol. The smaller the device screen, the more important this becomes. Amazon is justifiably proud of its long tail. It generates a massive proportion of its sales from titles that aren't in the top 20, so its sales curve is elongated. This makes perfect sense. We can buy The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter at any bookshop. If our tastes run to the more eclectic, we can either scour the high street and end up placing an order, or use the Web, where locating the most obscure title is easy. The same might apply to mobile content. Except it doesn't. The sales curve is skewed towards the top-selling items. Some operators have revealed that, in any given month, they sell less than 10% of their content. In other words, 90% of their inventory isn't purchased at all. For some content providers, that can be a rude awakening. Having striven to get their precious corner of real estate on the portal, they discover that the pickings aren't nearly as rich as they anticipated. Companies like Cibenix, SurfKitchen, Purple Ace and ChangingWorlds have solutions that aim to personalise the content that's presented to each mobile user. Mobile marketing specialists like Enpocket and Flytxt are using their experience to build mobile CRM solutions for operators. Some of these specialise in the client running on the handset, others in the server element, linking content via meta-data (information to categorise each item) and analysing buying patterns. This can manifest itself in two main models: push and pull. An example of a pull mechanism is where the content presented on a browser is customised. So if I buy a lot of dance music, I'll be offered similar content the next time I visit. A push model is where targeted content promotions are sent to the handset by SMS, MMS or via a browser client. That sounds a lot like the four Ps of marketing. There's a risk of resistance to spam if the push technique is overused or poorly targeted. Provided those pitfalls are avoided, customer relationships should be improved rather than damaged. To take an email analogy, I don't object to an online travel agent suggesting holidays that I might take, or an etailer suggesting books I might buy, but I do object to incessant offers for Viagra (honestly, I do). This fills me with great optimism, because that's like real business. Too often the term 'm-commerce' seems to preclude common sense or the rules that govern traditional business and selling through other media. This development rectifies that problem, as it shows a sign of maturity in mobility. It's only by offering mobile users content they're genuinely interested in, rather than short-term tricks, that the industry will show sustainable growth. If you sell mobile content and haven't considered this course of action, then the chances are you're not just missing a trick, you're missing 90% of the game. Craig Barrack is the founder of Mobile Networking; craig@ mobilenetworking.co.uk © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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