Alberta Business Marketing

When it comes to seeking immediate gratification for personal communication and entertainment, mobile technology is the new norm. From tots to boomers, all age groups and 75% of Canadian households use mobile phones. For teens and tweens unable to afford data plans, the iTouch and other wifi-enabled devices offer a quick internet fix and addictive applications.

So as marketers, how do we stay on top of trends and reach target audiences quickly and easily?

The answer lies in pint-sized form: mobile marketing. Canadians are very interested in communicating with their friends through mobile. At LIPSO Systems Inc. we have learned that in addition to providing multi-channel solutions, data driven consumer insights are what matters to customers the most.

In 2009, 35.3 billion peer-to-peer text messages were sent in Canada, which is a 70% increase from 2008. As this trend grows, year-over-year commercial marketing campaigns become more integrated with mobile solutions to extend branding efforts into the social media landscape and reach consumers anywhere and anytime.

Beyond texting, Canada’s overall wireless revenues totalled $15.9 billion in 2008, and half of all phone connections in Canada are now wireless. Most interesting of the Canadian mobile trends are voice revenues, which are declining per subscriber, while the industry still grows in double digits. 2009 saw a 35% growth rate thanks to data plans, which are now housing hundreds of thousands of app options, interactive games and mobile versions of users’ favourite websites.

When it comes to hardware, Canadians are shelling out for top-of-the-line iPhones, Blackberries and exploring the open-source movement with various devices supporting the Android operating system, making wireless phones among the fastest growing consumer products in Canadian history. Thanks to all this data use, the retail industry is seeing a significant bump in web traffic. 46% of North American consumers use their mobile phones to compare prices while they’re shopping in stores, and mobile web shopping has increased 40% in the U.S. since October 2008.

While these numbers are compelling and speak to the need for all organizations to explore opportunities on mobile platforms, the underlying reason to integrate mobile into your marketing communications strategy is the same reason we rely on media relations, events, in-store promotions and print advertising.

As a nation of storytellers, Canadians’ history has been marked by challenges to overcome geography, adverse weather and other political and cultural differences to tell our stories. Over the past twenty years Canada has established itself as a leader in communications networks and technology, and it is no surprise that Canadians are eager to receive information, interact and transact on their mobile phones.

Christian Trudeau, President, Transcontinental Marketing Communications
LIPSO

Tags: Mobile
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

A previous post of mine talked about the rise in retailers focusing on mobile marketing strategy to increase their awareness, drive traffic to stores and keep customers engaged via their mobile device. The mobile ecosystem is evolving extremely quickly and I’d like to continue the theme of retailers but will take this opportunity to focus in greater detail on mobile commerce.

Mobile commerce means different things to different people, depending on who you’re talking to. I’ve come across the following definitions of Mobile Commerce:

• PSMS (Premium SMS) where a user’s mobile bill is invoiced due to a user sending a premium rated SMS to a short code (MO) or by the user accepting a subscription type billing for alerts.
• NFC (Near Field Communication) where an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) equips handsets with Hardware/Software that facilitates a wave and pay type of solution. (May also use RFID – Radio Frequency Identification, Bluetooth, enhanced SIM cards)
• Other often used terms are Mobile wallets, where users can use third party providers like PayPal to facilitate transactions.
• Mobile banking is another popular term that gets thrown into the mix, however M-Banking has very little coverage in this post.

The M-Commerce I’m talking about is payment of products or services via credit card (debit card) using an encrypted mobile internet protocol to facilitate purchases. You’ll also hear the term PCI DSS compliant in this mix (for those not familiar with this acronym, it means Payment Card Industry Compliance Data Security Standard). It’s designed to mask/encrypt the credit/debit card information.

Our discussions with retailers have yielded some thought provoking information, most significantly that consumers are making purchases from their mobile devices on NON mobile friendly e-commerce sites. Not surprisingly the benchmarks for time on site is lower, bounce rates are higher, basket size is lower and drop-off is higher when comparing the experience to established e-commerce portals. Nonetheless the major point here is that PEOPLE ARE BUYING!

This begs the question of the ROI (the Hard ROI not media ROI) of developing a commerce portal that is mobile friendly where benchmarks narrow. To me, this seems like one of the easier business cases to build especially considering the enormous momentum of web friendly handsets, affordable data fees, and increased propensity by consumers to use their Credit Cards on mobile devices.

Mobile marketing will reach new heights because transactions will close communication and campaign loops to purchases. Now we have scenarios where end of the season clearance sales will live inside mobile portals. It’s also worthy to recognize other channels of mobile marketing that will benefit from commerce like SMS. Reward your loyal SMS subscribers with first to know and exclusive offers and alerts of discounted items. Use mobile display banner ads and yield exceptionally high click through rates of featured items and convert to checkout. Develop mobile friendly versions of emails for those consumers who read e-newsletters on handsets. Explore affiliate mobile networks (and cross retailer downloadable applications) and pay the content owners or application owners upon conversion to sale. I’d like nothing better than to see SMS joke of the day ads replaced by “Be the first to own an iPad! Click here”.

Some thought starters…

Go to your webmaster and ask him/her to pull the web reports on types of browsers accessing your site. Parse the data and look at bounce rates of mobile browsers vs. traditional browsers. Take a quick audit of your page views accessed through mobile browsers, what information is being viewed? Some of my guesses are Store Locator/Maps, Store Hours, Specials and Price Comparison tools.

Pull the report from your email CRM activities, see how many page views are coming from Mobile browsers – and then look at your newsletter on your handheld.

Start asking for mobile numbers and opt-ins from your sign up section of your website – you’ll be shocked at how many consumers are willing to give up their mobile number.

Look at using web to mobile tools like “send to my mobile” for online flyer/catalog searches that will send wish lists, product information, mobile coupons, store address etc. direct to you via a shortcode (or by updating your native application through the PUSH API).

Tag offline media like flyers, FSIs, POS, print, newspaper, OOH with mobile messaging calls to action and start changing impressions to interactions and now transactions.

If your site has e-commerce does your commerce provider have the ability to use webservices? You’ll need to decide on a transcoded (operation of changing data from one format to another, such as an XML to HTML, so the output will be displayed in an appropriate manner for the device) mobile site OR to build from scratch (potentially using a mobile internet middleware solution) optimizing navigation and content for groupings of mobile handsets based on form, feature and function. Do NOT compromise on user experience.

The advent of mobile transactions will better equip marketers to assess the dollar value of a mobile number, which in my mind is critical for next generation mobile strategy. Our industry must move beyond last of the budget and end of the year throw in experiments. Above all focus on utility, don’t think of mobile as native application, OR messaging, OR mobile web, OR mobile advertising – these are all ANDs.

Finally don’t build your mobile strategy on an island – it must integrate and fit within your overall communication plan.

Brady Murphy

Tags: Mobile
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Chances are that you don’t know what your 14 year-old is saying most of the time. Neither do we. But what we do know is that a whopping 85 per cent of teens own mobile phones before they reach the age of 16 (Teens & Mobile Phones). Of these, 57 per cent believe that their mobile phone significantly improves their quality of life (Why Back to School Marketing Should Include Mobile). They send an average of 2,899 text messages per month (Breaking Teen Myths)—which represents about one-and-a-half 500-word essays per day—just to their friends. Ignoring the most important communication and consumption medium amongst teens will be a sure-fire way to fall behind the pack.

The marketing world is changing, and connecting this demographic with your brand is the next evolutionary step to reach your customers. Adopting a properly designed mobile strategy has been proven to increase foot traffic to stores and generate sales. Other than the holiday season, the Back to School shopping cycle ranks as the largest revenue producing period for the retail sector. Over $1.5 billion was spent on children’s clothing, accessories and stationary in Canada while more than $7.6 billion was spent stateside in the third quarter of 2008 (Back to School, by the Numbers). Although parents are paying for the goods, the purchasing decisions are strongly influenced by the kids. The demand is there and the medium is established; the onus is now on the retailers.

If you visit your local mall or school, you would be hard pressed to find a student without a mobile phone. Teens and tweens carry their mobile phone with them everywhere they go, as a necessity for communication and an expression of their social status. For a brand to reach this critical demographic, it must include mobile communication in its marketing mix. There are a variety of benefits a mobile Back to School campaign has, including:

1. The ability to draw foot traffic to stores and retailers, therefore increasing sales. Retailers can use SMS alert with mobile coupons to drive traffic (some retailers have traffic counters to measure lift post alerts), other transaction enabled mobile sites use display mobile ads to increase traffic and convert clicks to sales.

2. Personal connection with teens via their most prized possession which is always on them. Mobile opens up a static channel where the user can always be reached in a medium where they are open to hearing marketing messages and are consistently using. Brands benefit from the connection with increased awareness and recall, not to mention the associative innovation benefits.

3. Remarketing ability (Holiday Shopping and more). When one campaign door closes, another campaign window opens. One of the primary benefits of utilizing SMS in a marketing campaign is capturing mobile phone numbers in the form of an opt-in list that can be used for subsequent marketing campaigns. It is imperative that dialogues continue and proper value exchanges are served to those loyal mobile users. We must strive as an industry to quantify the value of a mobile number. Without assessing a value, mobile will be reduced to one-off tactical tests which only industry laggards can afford to invest in.

Now more than ever, brands need to reach back-to-school shoppers in new, innovative, and most importantly, relevant ways. A long-term strategy is the key to raising brand awareness which will translate to increased sales.

Brady Murphy

Tags: Mobile
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Today, as I was riding in on the subway, reading the New York Times on my new iTouch, I stumbled upon an article about Apple's launch today (Wednesday Jan. 27) of its tablet product, or iPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_zI21XEo0Q

Being an Apple fan from way back I couldn't help but feel a sense of real excitement. It got me reflecting on how much the Apple brand has meant to me over the years. And I'm not alone. The excitement that's building up in the media and among the Apple Faithful is almost palpable and very real.

I bought my first Mac (Mac Classic II) back in 1993ish. I was working at an agency and wanted a way to be able to work on those weekends when I was going back home to Kingston to visit the folks. The idea of a portable computer was exciting. Imagine, being free to take your computer anywhere. It was only 14 or 15 lbs. Oh, you PC people chained to your desks. How quaint.

Then when the first Apple notebooks came out, I was fortunate to be working on the Apple account and helped develop a launch campaign for them. (Best. Account. Ever.) The objective, as outlined in the brief, was to get the public over the mental hump of being able to work anywhere. Imagine sitting in a park or in a coffee shop clicking away on your laptop computer. Why, you could even work from home!

Then of course, the iPod changed everything. The recording industry, advertising, interaction (or lack thereof) between people in public places...everything. The iPhone then revolutionized how we think of what a phone is and what it can do. People could earn money and express their creative by developing Apps. We were now all working for Apple.

Walk into any mall where an Apple store exists and you'd think they were giving stuff away for free in there.

And now the anticipation for the iPad is reaching a fever pitch. People can taste it. The article in the NYT suggests that it's going to do for newspaper publishing what the iPod did for music. They're counting on it because we all know where the newspaper industry is headed. But will our collective love for all things Apple mean that we'll be willing to pay for things like the Star or the NYTs online through the Slate, when so much of the same information can be found on free sites elsewhere.

That's just one fascinating question we as marketers should be watching and reading about -- probably on our iPads.

Bryan Tenenhouse

Tags: Around the World, Customer Experience, Digital, Mobile
Posted in Advertising | | Comments Off

This opinion piece by Ken Engelhart, Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers was first published in the National Post on Thursday Nov 12 - we think it's worth sharing here.

Canadians in recent years have been reading about studies that claim our communications sector is slipping below world standards. The latest study to reach that conclusion was performed by no less an institution than Harvard University's Berkman Center. It is time for a rebuttal. I believe that Canada has great communications networks and internationally competitive prices.

It is often argued erroneously that Canada has a poor take-up of wireless services. The statistic commonly referred to in support of this notion is the penetration rate for wireless services. This measurement takes the total number of wireless phone subscriptions in a country and divides it by the total population. According to this measurement, Canada trails most countries in the OECD.

About 66% of Canadians have a cell phone and we are badly behind countries like Greece where 200% of the population have a cell phone. The foolishness of this measurement should be apparent already. 200% of a population does not exist. What these figures indicate is that there are two phone subscriptions for every man, woman and baby in Greece. In Canada, and in most advanced countries, most adults and teenagers have a cell phone. In Greece however and in many European countries, many people have one cell phone and several subscriptions.

Because Europe is on the GSM system, people have multiple SIM cards that they put in and out of their phones, depending on where they are and what time of day it is, to get the best price or service. These multiple SIM cards are generally a sign that there is something wrong with the cell phone market in that country. They certainly are not a good measurement of the take-up of phone service in an economy.

The best measurement is minutes of use per capita. A report by Merrill Lynch on Sept. 28 showed Canada to be the eighth best in the world using this metric. It is sometimes noted that the U.S. has a much higher level of usage than Canada and this is true. However, the point I am trying to make is that we are well ahead of Britain, France, Germany, Spain and most other countries in terms of the usage of wireless phone service.

More confusion exists with respect to wireless pricing. Many of the studies that the press describes involve "basket" analysis. For example, a study might look at the price of a "basket" of services such as 300 minutes of voice calling and 200 text messages. The latest study of this kind was a recent OECD study. The OECD study showed that the U.S. has the highest prices in the world. Clearly this finding is absurd. The U.S. wireless market is the envy of the world and has the lowest prices. Something is clearly flawed in this OECD analysis.

The OECD uses very small baskets even for their "high" users. The average Canadian uses almost twice as many minutes per month as the OECD's "high" user. Since North American wireless packages are much larger than even the "high" OECD basket, the OECD study erroneously shows that Canadian and American prices are high.

The standard and correct way to compare prices among countries is to take total voice revenue and divide it by total voice minutes. On this statistic (called "average revenue per minute"), Canada has some of the lowest prices in the world. Canadians pay on average 8 cents per minute for phone service. The cost is 12 cents in the U.K., 14 cents in France, 15 cents in Italy, 16 cents in Germany and 24 cents in Japan. (It's just five cents in the U.S.) Canada has very low prices internationally. This is particularly impressive given that we have much more network capacity per customer than most countries including go the U.S.

Canada is in 10th place in the world and first in the G8 in the number of wireline broadband subscriptions per capita. That is pretty good for a country as geographically vast as Canada. However, individual people do not buy wireline broadband services; households do. So the best way to measure broadband is by looking at the number of subscriptions per household. Since Canada has larger households than most European countries, we do much better when looking at this metric. When subscriptions per household are used, Canada's ranking jumps to fifth, sixth or eighth best in the world, depending on the data source. This should be a source of pride for a country that does not have the population density that many of our trading partners have.

Canada's communications companies spend $8-billion to $10-billion each year to compete with each other, in the process making Canadian networks among the worlds' best. Rogers was among the first six carriers in the world to introduce a wireless broadband network operating at 21 Mbps. Our two main competitors, not wishing to be left behind, have followed suit. Canada now has three high-speed wireless networks while the U.S. has none. I think that is something to be proud of.

Tags: Mobile, technology
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