The line is now officially blurred and will continue to get blurrier until it no longer exists.

Why?

For one thing, technology has grown at such a fast pace that, as consumers, we have these expectations from companies. We look at our phones, computers and tablets and if they don’t do something, we say ‘why can’t I do such and such? It should be possible!

While technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, so do the consumers.

Take a step back for a moment

A few years ago before the smartphone or the tablet took off, if you were a consumer shopping online, then you would probably describe the scenario as sitting at home in front of a computer browsing the web

Now consider offline shopping. This would consist of you driving to a retail location, walking through the aisles browsing merchandise. You may pick something up, try it on or check to see if they have your size and then bring it to the counter to complete the purchase.

Now build your bridge

With both scenarios in mind, consider how your most recent shopping experience went. Did you have access to online information at the exact time you were shopping offline? Did you interact with online content by searching for locations of retailers, online coupons or even inventory of an item you were interested in?

Online and offline are no longer two separate entities. The shopping experience has blurred.

We are now shopping online and picking up in-store.

We are in the store and ordering items via our mobile device.

We are being served mobile offers that are tailored to our preferences.

We are using our mobile device to pay for items at the check-out counter.

We are using smartphones to scan barcodes on items to avoid the check-out line.

We are checking for inventory in nearby stores when items are sold out.

In a recent article on Advertising Age http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/mobile-commerce-brings-online-offline/231327/, Michael Lingenfelter, senior consultant at Maia Strategy Group, states

Marrying the online experience with the tactile and visual in-store experience, combined with the ability to take the product home with you, is the key to utilizing the potential of mobile commerce

And this is exactly where brands need to focus because as we all know, the consumer is in charge and the technology available is only further enabling them.

This post originally appeared on BizChanger.com on January 11th.

Now I am not talking about the various lengths we go to in order to ensure our target audience sees our message, I am talking about the actual interaction between brand and consumer.

I was watching a presentation the other day put on by Celtra http://www.celtra.com/ about mobile advertising formats and the way brands can design and deliver marketing messages to extremely targeted audiences. As I was watching the demonstration of how one would design a mobile ad that enabled a consumer to swipe mildew off their mobile screen to reveal a bottle of Tilex and the ad campaign for Starbucks that allowed mobile users to actually design a cup and submit it for a contest, I started thinking about how mobile has really removed all separation between consumer and product.

With touchscreens, we are physically performing an action and that action is ‘touching’ the brand. Some may say we accomplish this with online advertising but I would argue that navigating a mouse and clicking on something is a lot different than feeling it.

Now let’s think about other mediums like email, TV, radio, billboards, print media and events. The degrees of separation of apparent. With the exception of email that people can consume, touch and navigate on their phones, the rest do not afford brands with the ability to directly interact and engage consumers.

You cannot touch TV or interact with the brand and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people watched your commercial or did something because of it.

You cannot touch radio or interact with the brand and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people listened to the commercial or did something because of it.

You cannot touch a billboard or interact with it (QR codes are the exception but how many of us have our scanners at the ready as we drive by these things at 40mph?) and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people not only drive by it, but noticed it and did something because of it.

See the pattern here?

Mobile removes the barrier between consumer and brand. We touch the brand, we play with it, and we do something as a result. And it’s all tracked and measured. There is really no medium that can compete with that.

Are you integrating mobile into your current investments? How are you using this medium to reach and engage with your core audiences?

- We place billboards in areas that are highly trafficked by our target audience or in strategic locations that are relevant  to our business.

- We work with editorial teams to place print advertisements in appropriate places within publications.

- We optimize our websites to be found by people searching for relevant topics.

- We mail our materials to the people who are most likely to take action and buy or influence a decision to buy.

- We attend and participate in events that are revelant to our business and what we offer.

As we add mobile marketing and advertising to the mix, brands now need to consider how their mobile efforts align with what the consumer is doing and looking at.

According to a recent study by eMarketer :

The ability to align ad creative with site content undoubtedly creates a more cohesive user experience and helps brands more closely approximate users who may be in-market for related products and services.

While connecting the ad you are serving to the content that is being viewed is one way to be relevant, if you take a look at the results of the study, geographically
relevant ads are ahead of contextually relevant ads when it comes to tactics.

How to be geographically relevant

1. Work with a mobile ad network that is able to serve your ads based on the mobile users location.

Not all ad networks require the publishers (mobile websites and mobile apps) to provide them with location information. If location is important for you, then ask the question and also ask how they are doing it.

2. Decide how you want to be geographically relevant.

You may decide to target based on your store locations or perhaps you want to target consumers who are located in or near your competitors. In other instances, brands target based on the temperative in a location or an event like a concert or football game. Consider how you want to be relevant in terms of the location of the consumer.

3. Ensure your ad copy and graphics make sense to the region and season.

Consumers in Boston may not be as prone to click on an ad for an ice coffee in December as someone in Florida. When you are targeting geographically, consider how your consumer would want to see you ad and what would make sense for them to react upon based on where they are, the season and even the time of day (if you are not 24 hour business, you may not want to serve your ads at midnight for example).

Step 1: Anticipate threats

The backbone for any successful crisis communication plan is to visualize and catalog anything that could possibly go wrong. What if the customer is charged double? What is the power goes out in the middle of a service? What if the customer tries to return something without a receipt?

Step 2: Conquer the threats

Now for each scenario you listed in step 1, draft how you would resolve the issue. Would you direct the customer to a support email? Phone number for a contact center? Would you issue a refund or a gift certification for a future visit?

Step 3: Empower your employees

The minute that a response requires approval from several steps ‘up the ladder’, you potentially lose credibility with your customer. Empower your employees to respond appropriately within the guidelines you define. If step 1 and 2 are well documented and thorough, your employees should be comfortable responding to and handing things that arise.

Step 4: Ensure all communication methods are monitored

Now while your customers may be standing in front of you with a complaint or compliment, there are other methods for them to communicate to the world about your brand. Consider review sites like Yelp, Orbitz, and Patch.com and assign someone within your company with the responsibility to monitor these sites. You also need to take into account social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If there are conversations being had about your company on these sites, you want to ensure that you not only know about it but that you chime in.

Step 5: Monitor and adjust plan accordingly

There will always be new ‘situations’ that arise in which you need to proactively engage in a plan that may sometimes be ‘out of the box’. Document these instances and train your team on how to handle them. Step 1 and 2 will continuously evolve over time – especially if you offer different/new products and services on a regular or semi-regular
basis.

Positive reviews and negative comments are both very important to your business and you can learn a lot from them. The important piece is to ensure that you have a plan in place to communicate with your customers especially if there is a crisis involved.

{image by MarkyBon}

Mobile coupons make a lot of sense for several reasons.

1. The ability for a brand to serve you an ad when you are in their actual store or within a certain vicinity of a retail location is really only available with mobile.

2. If you have the coupon on your phone that’s in your pocket at the store location, you are highly likely to use it.

3. It is electronic which enables the viewer to pass the coupon along to friends and social networks.

4. Brands have technology available to push coupon offers and alerts to target consumers.

5. Consumers can opt-in to receive coupons in an alternative format (text message, email, app, etc.)

One of my go-to coupon apps is the Walgreens app. They have a coupon section that changes every day or every couple of days. Each time I am in a Walgreens location, I check the app to see what coupon is being promoted to see if I could take advantage of the offer that day. I have never been a ‘coupon clipper’ and my adoption of mobile coupons has been purely based upon convenience and relevancy.

Yes, I like savings and every time I watch ‘Extreme Couponing’, I get the ambitious desire to clip coupons and get an entire grocery cart’s worth of food for free but I am not likely to do it.

Mobile coupons make it simple for me to save these savings to my phone, quickly check for applicable discounts at the exact point of purchase and pass along to my friends and family.

Now start to combine hyper-local mobile ads that serve coupons and you could start to see an increase in the number of consumers shopping in your location that had not originally intended to.

Do you use mobile coupons personally? Are you seeing higher redemption levels in your stores that offer and promote them?

{image by posguy99}

First off, if you are not optimizing already for mobile, then I hope by the end of this post I have convinced you to put it high on your list of priorities. And if you are already delivering mobile optimized emails, then enjoy the statistics from the report and use them as a baseline against your own analytics.

Here are 4 reasons why your email needs to be ready for mobile in 2012:

1. Email open rates up on mobile and down on desktop

As we continue to literally have access to all our accounts at any time using our mobile phone, it’s no wonder that open rates are exponentially higher on mobile devices than desktop. With that being said, it is imperative that the emails you deliver to your subscribers, partners and employees be optimized for viewing on any screen size.

2. Consumer Services ranks highest for mobile email opens across all industries

This seems about right seeing as the consumer service industry is operates on a 24/7/365 schedule. Mobile has made it easier to have a proper work/life balance when issues do arise and a consumer needs support at any time.

3. Consumer Products click-through rates highest across industry segments for mobile and desktop

People who are receiving emails regarding consumer products have seemingly opted-in to receive offers, updates and announcements so we can safely say they are more likely to click-through on these types of things. But as you can see from the next data point extracted from the report, this is highly dependent upon the email being optimized for mobile.

4. Click-through rates overall were exponentially higher on desktop

If you cant read the email and don’t know what you are clicking on, then how likely are you to click? Probably not likely. This seems to be the reason why desktop continues to squash mobile when it comes to CTR on email messages.

Also interesting to note was that open rates on mobile were heaviest between 5am-7am and 11pm-4am and click-throughs were heaviest between midnight and 3am. Food for thought when you are deciding when to schedule email communications (doesn’t seem like the Tues or Wed between 1pm and 3pm ‘best practice’ is valid).

{image by fiveforfun}

As the article states ‘You need to have a strategy in place regarding where and how the ads will appear within your app. This strategy has to accomplish or more precisely balance two opposing goals. On the one hand, the primary goal is to get the user to engage with the ad, or in other words, click it. The flip side is that you do not want to annoy the user.’

Ever since I got my iPhone, I have spent a lot of time playing games (anyone an Angry Birds fan here?). I will often try the free version before I buy the full version. But with the free version comes mobile ads. I noticed that each game serves ads in varying ways. They all have the same ‘real estate’ to serve ads but treat it differently. Here are 2 ways in which I have experienced ads in game apps.

Example 1: Fruit Ninja serves large-scale ads to players after the ‘game over’ screen.

There are no banner ads visible while you are in play. I like this approach for a couple reasons:

1. It provides the advertiser with a larger area in which to serve an ad.

2. Since the game is over, you have the undivided attention of the player.

3. The ad is not interrupting the game or causing unnecessary distraction at critical times.

Example 2: Angry Birds Rio serves banner ads across the top of the screen during the game.

As you can see from this image, parts of the game are actually cut off by the ad. I do not like this approach for a couple of reasons:

1. The ad is distracting to the player while they are playing.

2. As a player, I have touched the ad in this place on numerous occasions without intent (I was trying to play the game).

3. The click-through rate is predicted to be poor since gamers are not likely to abandon a game mid-session for an advertisement.

If you are seriously considering or are already monetizing your app inventory with mobile ads, you need to seriously consider your placement strategy. While it’s great to make money off your app, your audience comes first. If nobody is using your app, then you have no inventory therefore nothing to offer an advertiser.

While we place a high emphasis on relevancy and serving ads that are useful to users, the real estate you devote to ad serving within your app is going to be a key factor to your success. Consider how your app is being used and what the effect of an ad would be on the experience. Consider additional real estate, like landing pages between
levels or once the game is over like Fruit Ninja does. Consider the types of ads you serve to your audience and what they would find useful and relevant.

Kingsborough came in [to PayPal] and honed the in-store payment initiative, which was underway well before Kingborough arrived. He focused on appealing first to consumers and making it simple for them to grasp, before ensuring the merchants could be able to understand the value of the system. Then he went about getting the cooperation of merchants, criss-crossing the country to call upon retailers and payment infrastructure companies to get them on board. Along the way, he helped PayPal pick up necessary components like location-based service WHERE, whose CEO Walt Doyle was personally persuaded to sell by Kingsborough. The plan is now to start rolling out the payment system in the second quarter though the first U.S. trials have already begun with Home Depot.

Read more at GigaOm.

Governor Deval Patrick and Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray met in November with top executives from PayPal, including then-president Scott Thompson, to talk about expanding the company’s operations here. PayPal currently employs just over 100 people at its office in the North End, where it is developing software to bring its services and advertising to mobile devices like smartphones.

Read more at Boston Globe.

First off, let’s discuss the differences and benefits of each. A mobile website is a version of your current website that has been optimized and reformatted to fit on a device’s screen. A mobile website is cheaper to build and easier to update because it is compatible with any type of device with Internet-browsing capabilities. Mobile websites can be built to look and function just like a mobile app, but the drawback is it can’t take advantage of the native functionalities of a device, like its camera. Another plus is that mobile websites are easy to find with a simple search, whereas apps are not usually included in search results.

Mobile apps are downloaded to and stored on a user’s to device. An app costs more to develop and needs to be optimized for different operating systems (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc). Apps are submitted to an approval process by each operating system before they are added to app stores or marketplaces. Each update also requires an approval. So, it’s important to weigh in the cost of developing an app and time required to have it approved. However, they can contain complex graphics and make use of the device’s own features. Mobile apps can store information about a user and save them time when making a purchase or filling out a form. They can download information over the Internet so that it can be accessed without an internet connection. Brands can also take advantage of the device’s capabilities to take photos or send push notifications. While the app may not rank in searches, there are plenty of ways to promote it.

Choosing whether to build a mobile website, mobile app or both really boils down to the content or purpose and target audience. Consider what you want to offer with your mobile presence. Media, like movies or games, are best on an app because of the better graphics. For mobile shopping, a mobile website might be a better option unless you offer extra content that is unavailable on a mobile site. Consumers are unlikely to download separate apps for several different shops instead of an app that compares prices at multiple retailers. However, mobile apps are a great way to stay connected with loyal customers. If you offer exclusive deals and discounts with push notifications to app users, customers will be more likely to download your app.

Keep in mind your customer base or target audience as well. For bigger companies, creating both an app in addition to a mobile site makes sense because they have a larger customer base. But for local or smaller-sized businesses, the cost may not be worth it. You may not have enough downloads to justify the cost. Instead, take advantage of existing location-based apps, like WHERE, Foursquare or Yelp, to promote your business. Usually, you can update your business’s information and run ads or deals through their service.

Having a mobile presence is becoming more and more important as consumers spend increasing amounts of time on their mobile phones and tablets. In order to decide your brand’s mobile strategy, consider the contents you want to provide and its purpose, whether or not you can afford the time and money required to create and maintain apps for different devices, and what your customers would prefer to use.

Share your reasons for creating a mobile website, app or both with us!

{image by CT State Library}