Many organisations can be overwhelmed by mobile marketing, leading to the need to bring in a specialist to help them develop a robust strategy and appropriate solutions.
We’ve compiled a list of six key questions to ask a potential mobile marketing provider to ensure that they provide a good fit with your business.
1. Do you understand our business objectives?
Just as you challenge your internal functions, it is essential that your mobile provider understands your business objectives too. Challenge them to see what they understand and what they don’t, while assessing their ability to pick up and translate the information you give them. A good partner will challenge you, pose questions or even prompt you to reconsider your aims and objectives.
A supplier must offer genuine channel-agnostic consultancy because more often than not, the solution offered by most suppliers is derived from their technical capabilities and dressed to meet your business needs.
2. How are you planning to approach our mobile strategy?
The reality of most business investments is that the solution is crafted from a functional understanding of your needs – marketing, finance, sales etc. What steps has the supplier taken or proposed to understand your needs and gain a balanced view of your priorities and measures of success?
One way to start is to hold a working group involving all key stakeholders. This will help to ensure that you consider your mobile strategy as a complete business rather than delegating the task to one department such as IT or marketing. It will also help maintain focus and momentum during the early stages. Mobile marketing impacts many areas of your business and you should therefore involve as many key people as possible from the outset.
3. How can you ensure that our mobile strategy is scalable?
Scalability is important because mobile strategies can cross international boundaries and investment can be flexed around the results achieved. The starting point is to look at mobile marketing not just as a single product. It’s a way of interacting with customers and can involve many different types of solutions – acquisition, loyalty, transactional, content, behavioural, events driven and social.
4. What level of consultancy can we expect from you?
Start by doing your research and shortlisting mobile partners based on their capabilities and sector specialisms. Think about whether they provide a holistic approach or specialise in specific types of technologies or solutions. Your chosen partner should work with you and your business to understand your objectives and advise appropriate solutions.
A professional mobile marketing solutions business will be able to evidence a clearly defined consultancy process. This will be scalable in its own right, offering workshops through to mobile strategy creation and commercial modelling.
5. What type of services can you offer?
Do they offer a full suite of mobile marketing solutions? Do they offer sector solutions rather than just technology? An effective end-to-end solution provider will cover all aspects of mobile marketing including database management, customer acquisition, loyalty and mobile commerce. They’ll have a deep understanding of how to apply this thinking to individual business sectors and will be able to illustrate their recommendations using previous examples which they have implemented.
6. How will you support us on an ongoing basis?
Do they offer a comprehensive support model? A supplier that has a plethora of services might look good on paper but if they don’t have a robust customer support model then you could encounter problems in the future. Look for a mobile marketing partner who can provide the following:
- Creative services to deliver usability and compliance with brand guidelines
- A mixture of out-of-the-box and bespoke solutions
- Consultancy to deliver against strategic business objectives
- Measurement and tracking
- Campaign management and mobile advertising
- Technical integration
Mobile marketing is a very visual and engaging channel and as such requires many aspects of service from technical to creative design, campaign and multi-channel management, regulatory and consumer behaviour insights. A mobile marketing partner will offer a suite of professional services. Look to work with suppliers with experience and strong track records of effective professional service delivery, in addition to being a good fit with your organisation.
