This time of year is a great time for businesses to look back at their performance for the calendar year and do some forensics. What happened? What did you do? How did you do it? What should you have done differently? How can you make the most of the rest of the year?
How do you take what you learned and apply it to the coming spring and next summer? How have consumers changed? What new habits are they showing? The questions can go on and on. One thing is for sure: The consumer shift to mobile devices is a significant change in life as we know it.
Mobile is king
Marketers like to talk about sources and channels and diversification. We love big data, segmentation, persona identification and remarketing. That is all fine and good and valuable, but my big takeaway from our forensics sessions and investigations is this: Consumers now live on their mobile devices. This is where people manage every aspect of their lives, where they find their entertainment, where they participate in socializing and where they spend money.
No matter what business you are in, you have to be able to tell your story, make your sale, serve your customer and maintain your relevance on a tiny little screen. This is not surprising as you see people in their daily routines hunched over their phones or as you watch the hockey stick on the chart of mobile users in your Web analytics reports.
But it does pose an interesting problem. Never has marketing been more complicated with so many tools, options, tactics and information. At the same time, marketing has never been this focused. Everything happens on a screen that is not much bigger than the palm of your hand.
People have never been this accessible. Marketers with good data and slick tools can track and find people like no bloodhound ever could. People’s willingness to interact has never been higher.
Consumers are finicky
At the same time consumers are moody, finicky and nervous. They are as easy to scare away as they are easy to entice. And all of this is playing out on an often 2-by-1½-inch screen.
This is a time when marketers have to be more two-brained than ever before. We have to think big and wide with clever strategy and a great message. And we have to think small. We have to think of small interactions on small screens that take up small amounts of time and take up a small amount of the consumer’s thought and emotional spaces.
The concept of “touches” helps to clarify the small part of the strategy. Think of small touch points delivered on a small screen with simple but significant impact powered by big thinking, big strategy and big tools. This is a game of inches, but it takes many miles of work to make those few inches meaningful and profitable.
