11 Things CMOs Need To Know About Mobile Marketing Strategy And App Development

I honestly cannot believe I actually have to write this but this just in, pretty much entire world is on a mobile device on pretty much the whole time they are awake. In other words, the world of mobile marketing and its ridiculously enormous benefits should come as no surprise to anyone.

I have written countless articles on the topic of mobile marketing going back years. I don’t say to imply I am some sort of soothsayer or anything like that. I merely bring that point up to highlight the fact that mobile marketing is not something someone in the marketing world should just be waking up to.

Ok enough about that.

I’ve put together a high-level list for CMOs or any marketer for that matter to consider when looking at their mobile marketing strategy. 

1. Mobile App or Mobile Website?
Many companies rush forward and create an app just because their competitors have one. But not every company needs an app. Often a mobile-optimized site will meet most requirements. Mobile apps, however, generally allow for more creativity, and better interaction with your targeted users.

According to Janna Badalian, Director of Marketing at MobileSmith, “When it comes to customer engagement, native mobile apps can give your website a run for its money.You can engage various groups of customers and offer them a superior user experience – even without a reliable Internet connection.”

2. How Are Your Customers Using Mobile?

Use analytics to understand how your target audiences are using mobile. Are they transacting or using it to gather information? Are they mostly on Android or iOS; smartphones or tablets? Translating this data to your IT will help them make the right decisions and prioritize development plans. However, sometimes requirements can get “lost in translation.” Marketers usually know best what their customers expect from a mobile app, and they can get their idea to market quicker if empowered with the right app prototyping and development tools.

3. Get to Know ASO

What is ASO? App Store optimization. The App Store can be a great source of new customers or it can be a competitive nightmare where your app never sees the light of day. Getting to understand ASO is a critical part of gaining traction and maintaining traction in the App Store. Sites like apptamin.comoffer great information on the subject. 

4. Get to Know Your Competitors
Download your competitor’s apps. Not just you, but everyone on your team should get to know what’s out there and how the competition operates. Not only will you get some ideas, you will find out what they are not doing well which will give you an opportunity to identity ways to beat them. 

5. Check Cost Per Download
This is a fundamental issue that hits the business side of marketing your company with an app. It’s one thing to develop an app, it’s entirely another to motivate customers or potential customers to download the app. 

6. Consider In-App Advertising
CMOs should look at the app landscape and focus on popular apps with frequent usability. Popular apps like Twitter allow in-app advertising or mobile advertising, and that’s one way to quickly distribute your app. 

7. Use Social Media to Acquire Users
You should consider every distribution point that you think is efficient, but certainly use mobile social media platforms. The technology offers an almost immediate access to download your app. Your creative plan to drive consumers to download must be spot on, or your app will fail. 

8. Double-Down on Mobile

The future of marketing is mobile: Mobile is the most personal device we possess, which makes it the best device to market to. In addition, time spent in mobile apps has already surpassed time spent on desktop Web, and for some parts of the world, mobile devices are the first and only computer people possess. 

9. Use Mobile App Marketing Automation
CMOs are already familiar with marketing automation on the Web; however, mobile apps present a lot of unique challenges and opportunities. On the Web, marketing automation is predominantly a B2B market, whereas apps are primarily for consumers. Also, the primary use case for marketing automation on the Web is lead nurturing, whereas with mobile apps it’s about engagement, retention, and lifetime value. Therefore, CMOs responsible for mobile apps should adopt marketing automation solutions specifically designed for mobile. 

10. Take Advantage of Real-Time Location
Location is one of the great opportunities for marketers on mobile. CMOs should experiment with iBeacons and geo-fences, not only to be able to segment users based on where they’ve been in the past, but also to design marketing interactions for users as they enter or leave certain locations. For example, switch the user experience in the app to “in-store mode” once a user passes by the iBeacon at your storefront, or send a survey to hotel guests as they leave the geo-fence of the hotel. 

11. Be Lean!
Mobile holds tremendous promise, but it’s also uncharted territory for a lot of CMOs. We can’t rely on gut feeling of past experience to build a successful mobile app. Instead CMOs should adopt a culture of data-driven decision making and build their app incrementally. That involves relying on A/B testing and analytics for optimizing both the in-app experience and all marketing interactions, such as push notifications. 

HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

Defining Clear Goals

As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.
Metrics Tools





Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.
Sentiment Analysis






Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.
Social Media Product Suites





These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.
Making the Data Usable

This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.
What do you think?

What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media?