Facebook just posted some excellent profit numbers that has Wall Street and financial experts talking. It is usually helpful to follow the strategies of the industry leaders, so you may want to take a moment to understand what they did and how they boosted their earnings.
Mobile Is Marvelous
Overwhelmingly, their earnings came from mobile ads. That’s fitting and even predictable in some ways. Sometime in the next twelve months there will be more mobile devices on planet Earth than there are people living on the planet. In a word, mobile devices have taken over. The PC has been dethroned.
If you don’t yet have a mobile strategy, you need one. Not only do people take their mobiles with them wherever they go, but they’re also shopping with them, researching products with them, and compellingly, they’re communicating with their social networks with them.
You need to be a part of that story; you need a mobile strategy, to be immediately followed by a mobile presence. That can take a number of different forms, and what form it ultimately takes comes down to three factors. Those three factors will be outlined in brief below to get you started.
Your Market/Target Audience
Before you can build your mobile presence the first thing you have to do is to deeply understand who your customers and future customers actually are. Are they predominately men or women? What age groups are they? What average education level do they have? What income level do they enjoy? All these and many more factors matter in terms of shaping your strategy and the message that will go with it.
How Your Customers Use Their Tech
Are your customers more prone to use their gear to make in-store purchases, or are they likely to just buy online and have the product shipped? Depending on your answer here, that’s going to shape your strategy. One will involve the building out of an in-store app, while the other can rely on a more traditional eCommerce storefront, optimized for mobile users.
A Means Of Engagement
Forget monetization strategies. You’ll get sales if you engage with your existing customers and those whom you’ve targeted as future customers. The mechanism that will lead to those sales though is your customer engagement. For that you need a consistent voice and a message, but more than that, you need to open the door to a conversation. Your message is simply the greeting. It’s the ice breaker that starts the conversation. The goal here is to not only begin a dialogue with the people who use your products and those who are thinking about using your products, but also to enable them to make your company and its products and services part of their story.
If you give them the opportunity to do this they will, and that’s the most powerful form of advertising you can ask for.
You may not be able to achieve Apple’s level of success in this regard, but they should be looked at as the Gold-Standard of customer engagement. Apple doesn’t have customers, they’ve got fans. They’ve got fans because their products are intuitive, sexy, fun to use, and because Apple makes them part of the story. That’s the magic you’re after, and it will drive your profits upwards. Facebook has recognized that and focused on its mobile advertising strategy.
