Components of Mobile Audience Marketing

The birth of digital advertising brought with it the sophisticated use of data for audience targeting. While the cookie has served as the de facto mechanism for building audiences across desktop advertising, privacy-compliant location data now serves as the primary component of mobile audience marketing, through the use of location-based marketing strategies like geo-targeting and geo-conquesting.

However, marketers primarily focus on one component of mobile audience-marketing today – reaching the right audience. There’s growing attention on attribution, a second element, which shows that online ads result in physical retail sales. There’s also a third element to successful audience marketing which receives little attention today – understanding that audience before the sale of the campaign even occurs. Marketers looking to build out mobile marketing are missing roughly two-thirds of the picture that’s available to them today.

When creating the initial concept for a campaign, we’ve seen the most successful companies use location-based analytics to inform their sales pitches and presentations before the campaign even begins. They’re using data to learn how frequently customers visit their locations to segment their audience based upon loyalty. They’re evaluating which competitive locations their audience also visits to influence that audience and increase the efficiency of their ad spend. One of the most effective use cases is agencies and sales teams using this data early in the sales cycle to help their clients visualize and understand their audience, which boosts not only their credibility but also their ability to win the business.

The second component of mobile audience-marketing involves building and reaching the audience. There are numerous platforms available today that provide a black-box approach to buying very broad location-based audiences, such as Target shoppers or coffee drinkers. There is an elegant simplicity in choosing a pre-built audience, and there are always campaigns that are a great fit for this tactic.

On the flip side, if there’s one thing that Facebook and Google have proven when it comes to audience targeting; marketers absolutely love to see high degrees of transparency, flexibility and customizability as to how those audiences are made. They love taking control of the creation of the audience. Marketers that plan the most effective mobile campaigns spend a few extra minutes customizing the specific locations and date ranges that comprise their audience. They’re using the data and the visualizations they generated in the first step to increase their return-on-investment.

The last component of mobile audience marketing, and easily the most difficult, is attributing digital campaigns to in-store foot traffic and purchases. Advertisers increasingly ask for this, but there is still no holistic solution that can provide the answer. Fundamentally, this problem remains unsolved because of all of the various data silos that aren’t able to communicate with one another. The ad seen on TV can’t inform your phone or laptop that it’s also seen the ad, while the point-of-sale system or online checkout can’t notify those previous touch points to confirm the sale occurred.

Despite these challenges, true attribution will be available someday. In the meantime, marketers owe it to themselves to test multiple approaches to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. When considered from the “audience” perspective, we see companies looking to evaluate how this audience behaved after the campaign. They’re looking to answer questions like “Did the frequency of visitation increase?” “Did my foot traffic increase against my competitors with this audience?” “From which competitors am I winning market share?” Reporting that provides insight into how a campaign influenced a digital audience’s behavior in the physical world wins bonus points within marketing teams and with clients. There are also benefits to using different solutions that provide audience building, media spend, activation and attribution. By working with various companies, there is limited opportunity for bias in the results, and therefore, marketers can have more trust in the data.

The ability to reach and understand audiences across desktop advertising is mature. As mobile marketing increasingly dominates ad spend, and the use of geo-targeting strategies rises, the use cases and techniques also evolve. Mobile marketing initially adopted many of the tried-and-true approaches from the desktop ecosystem. As mobile advertising begins to mature, so does the ability for marketers to use data before, during and after campaigns. This comprehensive approach ultimately increases the effectiveness and credibility of campaigns.

How AI is Changing Marketing?

In the summer of 1956, 10 scientists and mathematicians gathered at New Hampshire Dartmouth College to brainstorm a new concept assistant profession John McCarthy called “artificial intelligence”. According to the original proposal for the research project, McCarthy along with fellow organizers from Harvard, Bell Labs and IBM wanted to explore the idea of programming machines to use language and solve problems for humans while improving over time.

It would be years before these lofty objectives were met, but the summer workshop is credited with launching the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sixty years later, cognitive scientists, data analysts, UX designers, and countless others are doing everything those pioneering scientists hoped for and more. With deep learning, companies can make extraordinary progress in industries ranging from cyber security to marketing.

Think of AI as a machine-powered version of mankind’s cognitive skills. These machines have the ability to interact with humans in a way that feels natural, and just like humans they can grasp complex concepts and extract insights from the information they’re given. Artificial intelligence can understand, learn, interpret, and reason. The difference is that AI can do all of these things faster and on a much bigger scale. AI has the capacity to create richer, more personalized digital experiences for consumers, and meet customers increasingly high brand expectations.

The knowledge companies stand to gain by using AI seems to have no bounds. In healthcare, medical professionals are applying it to analyze patient data, explain lab results, and support busy physicians. In the security industry, AI helps firms detect potential threats like malicious software in real time. Marketers, meanwhile, can use AI to synthesize data and identify key audience and performance insights, thus freeing them up to be more strategic and creative with their campaigns.

There’s something else AI is very good at, and that’s improving the relationship between companies and consumers. Over the past 50 years, advances like speech technology, automated attendants, virtual assistants, and websites have opened a chasm between companies and customer engagement while also multiplying consumer touchpoints. But AI has the potential to close that gap.

By helping marketers collect data, identify new customer segments, and create a more unified marketing and analytics system, AI can scale customer personalization and precision in ways that didn’t exist before. Connecting customer data from sources like websites and social media enables companies to craft marketing messages that are more relevant to consumers’ current needs. AI can deliver an ad experience that is more personalized for each user, shapes the customer journey, influences purchasing decisions, and builds brand loyalty.

IBM’s Watson Marketing is leading the charge with a platform that capitalizes on all that AI has to offer. Products like lets marketers visualize the customer journey and identify areas where consumers might be experiencing fiction. Companies get a more complete view of the customer journey, which they can then optimize to improve customer engagement and conversion rates. Since it is delivered through a single, unified interface, IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics makes gaining actionable intelligence a seamless process for brands.

We’ve entered the age of deep learning and with human guidance AI is finally reaching its true potential. Today, the technology McCarthy and his colleagues dreamed about in 1956 takes the form of AI platforms like and now is the right time to truly harness the power of AI and put it to work for business success.

Making Mobile first Email Design

Nearly 56% of emails are now opened via a mobile device, which means we’ve been living in a mobile-first world for quite some time. The overhead associated with managing templates across devices, domains, and brands could be onerous but thanks to responsive email design techniques, brands have numerous options for controlling the look and feel of their emails and minimizing the associated work to create a uniform brand experience across platforms and devices. This may all seem like old hat, but it’s worth reviewing how mobile has changed email and how it will continue to define our inbox experience moving forward.

Keep it Small – Remember 102. If your email is more than 102KB in size, then Gmail will clip your message when it arrives and asks the recipient to “download” the rest of it. Recipients are fickle and may deem a message that isn’t fully rendered from top to bottom as broken and simply delete or mark the email as spam. Mobile is all about portability and speed – messages that lack these two qualities (e.g., requiring the recipient to take an extra step) will be seen as flawed. Thus, keep your messages light and to the point.

One column to rule them all - Single column layouts are often the best and most expedient means of organizing your content and calls to action (CTA) for mobile devices. More than a single column will require recipients to pinch, squeeze and manipulate the email. When you consider how mobile content is consumed – on the go, commuting on a train or a bus, etc. – making email easily scrollable with nothing more than a thumb swipe is the way to go and makes for a longer potential engagement. Embrace one-handed navigation and the simplicity of single columns.

Taps not clicks - This may be stating the obvious, but I don’t see a lot of mobile devices come equipped with a mouse. Today, Apple’s human design interface guidelines state 44 square pixels is the target while Android’s guidelines point to 48 as the magic number. The truth is somewhere in between. Whatever size you choose to make your buttons and CTAs, make sure they’re well-padded and spaced so that mishaps don’t happen. Jamming a bunch of options next to each other without a little breathing room is certain to wind up causing recipient frustration when opening or tapping the wrong link.

Mobile is the only screen – The developed world often relies on mobile devices as the only connective tissue between recipients and the World Wide Web. In the developed world, we talk about second screen viewing, syncing across devices, experiences and portability between devices, form factors, etc. In the developing world, the small screen is the primary means of accessing the internet. iOS devices tend to be too expensive for the developing world, so recipients are armed with a wide array of Android-enabled devices of varying quality and size.

If your business exists beyond the borders of the developed world, then researching and testing your content on these cheaper devices is critical to ensure your recipients are experiencing your brand and communications as you intended. The quality of rendering, connection and a screen, along with the ability to download larger emails, will all fluctuate depending on where and how your emails are received. Keeping your emails to 102KB should be strictly enforced for a tighter and smaller overall message size to take into account bandwidth and screens that may not be ideal for reading email.

Time and Devices - This piece of advice is always worth repeating: make sure your emails follow the sun. Sending all of your emails to all of your recipients at 8 a.m. PST or EST means your international audience will either be woken up by a buzzing phone (a big faux pas in China) or the email will be at the bottom of their inbox when they finally awake and check their email. Segment and deploy your emails based on where your recipients are.

Uniform Experiences - Mobile email is the jumping-off point for a wide array of experiences. Pressing a button in an email can open a mobile website or an app. Whatever the intended outcome make sure that the experience is uniform across your mobile properties. The expectation is that if I follow a link from an email on my mobile device, the ensuing content and presentation will be properly branded from start to finish.

Announce yourself - Mobile email list views in Apple Mail or other email clients make subject lines more or less equal in size and readability. Using no-reply or other email addresses that discourage recipients from replying to unsubscribe, or other forms of engagement, means that the list view seems hostile and unwelcoming. Choosing a friendly from that adequately conveys your brand and acts as an identifying, trustworthy marker in the inbox promotes the kind of trust and authenticity that breeds greater engagement and improved inbox placement. Ultimately, you want to let the recipient know who is sending the message and, from the standpoint of a subject line, why they’re receiving this message.

Interactive Future – Google recently announced the general availability of AMP for email and the internet is awash with excitement for the next step in email’s storied evolutionary history. AMP promises to create new unique experiences in the inbox, and other mailbox providers have announced future support for the technology. Currently, Gmail is the only place where recipients receiving AMP messages will have these new interactive experiences. The ability to create micro apps in the inbox means that email will have a much longer shelf life, not to mention a new focus for brands in the coming years. But this is yet another example of email becoming more optimized to match user expectations. The future is more than just mobile; it’s excitingly interactive.