Mobile Marketing: Are You Ready for the Revolution?

Do you have a mobile strategy for your business?

Are you interested in discovering what the future of mobile marketing has in store?

To learn how to market your business with mobile, I interview Tom Webster.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Tom Webster, the Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Edison Research. He's authored studies such as The Social Habit and Twitter Users in America. He's co-authored a new book with Tim Hayden called The Mobile Commerce Revolution: Business Success in a Wireless World.

Tom explores how mobile marketing impacts your business.

You'll discover why successfully mobile marketing goes beyond technology, how consumer behavior is already being shaped by mobile, and how to respond to the mobile commerce revolution.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Mobile Marketing
Why Tom wrote his new book

Working in consumer behavior and market research, Tom has tracked human behavior for decades. He helps brands figure out why humans do what they do. His particular area of interest is to capture the opinions and study the behavior of people out of their homes and on the go.

For Tom, understanding mobile marketing goes beyond the technology. It's about being able to understand people's needs, wants, and desires while they are in transition, out and about, and away from home.

This idea was the impetus behind his new book, The Mobile Commerce Revolution: Business Success in a Wireless World

Listen to the show to learn how it's been possible for Tom's company, Edison Research, to study mobile behavior for decades.

What is the mobile commerce revolution

Every year, experts in various trades are asked if this is going to be the year of mobile when, in fact, the year of mobile has already happened. According to Tom, the mobile commerce revolution is already upon us.

You'll hear Tom describe the Starbucks mobile app as an example of how much consumer behavior has already been shaped by mobile.

There's no special technology to the Starbucks mobile app. It's nothing more than a bar code on your phone that's tied to a method of payment. Yet it's eliminated the need for a wallet and made it simpler to purchase items using something Starbucks customers already have in hand: their smartphones.

The use of this smartphone app has become such default behavior that it’s prompted customers to make a purchase at Starbucks when they otherwise might not have.

If you base your mobile strategy on the technology, then you will not make it. Mobile isn't about technology. It's about being able to understand and enable human behavior.

Listen to the show to hear what companies with successful mobile strategies are doing that others aren't.

How marketers should respond to the mobile explosion

It's easy to be lulled into thinking that big data and clickstream analytics will give you everything you need to know to develop your mobile strategy. However, the first step when you develop a successful mobile strategy is to examine human behavior.

Tom describes the mobile web as having three distinct eras. We've moved past the first two eras of optimizing for mobile and responsive design. We are now moving towards a new era of contextually relevant experiences based on a customer's unique needs and wants in the context of their specific location. Mobility enables this capability to happen.

There is a serious measurement gap between the online and the offline interactions because our focus has either been on search or on purely technology solutions.