Your Mobile Strategy Can’t Just Be About Phones

As the world becomes increasingly digital and connected, the number of potential touch points that companies have with their customers is expanding — fast. Today, mobile is quickly becoming the remote control for our lives and opportunities for mobile connection are everywhere. For businesses, it’s a hub of interactions across digital channels & physical locations, and paves the way for more and better customer experiences in both real and virtual worlds.

To thrive in this new landscape, brands must understand that “mobile” no longer means “smartphone apps.”There’s great opportunity amidst this change, and brands that stay focused on the big picture stand to gain the most. To leverage the momentum, companies should take the time to level-set their efforts with three strategic exercises:

Examine your goals and strategy: Today, opportunities for mobile connection are everywhere: With more and more options for mobile interactions, businesses all too often get their digital strategy wrong — or don’t reassess it often enough.

At the highest level, digital initiatives should revolve around a clear plan about what to build and why. Do not just copy competitors or blindly follow the hype cycle. Instead, ask yourself these questions:

• What are we aiming to accomplish?
• Have we mapped out our customers’ digital journey?
• Will our mobile offering solve a real problem for our customers and deliver a unique, mobile experience?
• Do we need specific mobile device capabilities — e.g., camera, contacts, sensor data or geolocation — to deliver or improve the experience?
• What cross-channel customer behaviors can mobile help impact and influence?

Make sure to use the right metrics: When measuring success and identifying areas for growth, remember: the promise of mobile is to make people’s lives easier, and not to constantly occupy their attention. Research shows that mobile has reduced attention spans and increased multi-tasking. So,shift the focus from reach and frequency to moments that matter the most to your customers and business.

Stop thinking about mobile as a siloed part of the business: Mobile isn’t a simple extension of desktop-based engagement models,rather it cuts across the entire business. This means the metrics used to assess mobile strategies should expand beyond mobile interactions themselves. Look for evidence of mobile impacting web or in-store sales — that’s the metric that counts.

And don’t underestimate mobile messaging. Apps and mobile-optimized websites are tried-and-true ways brands connect with users on mobile, but they are no longer the only options — nor do they help proactively serve customers in their moment of need. That’s where mobile messaging comes in. Interactive notifications with action buttons provide users an effortless way to respond, while allowing brands to collect rich insights for future segmentation and targeting, and use these to trigger follow-up messaging.

According to Forrester, up to 75% of the interactions consumers have with mobile phones are micro-moments — a mobile moment that delivers information through only a glance to let the consumer either reject or act on it immediately.

Brands should not just copy competitors or blindly follow the hype cycle. In order to take full advantage, companies must regularly assess their mobile strategies, align measured results with business goals, and focus on serving customers needs in micro-moments.

The team at Actuate Business Consulting, a knowledge based management consulting firm in India, believes that mobiles offer brands an opportunity to connect the dots between a variety of entry points, customer experiences, data sources, and interfaces. These opportunities are only expanding as those interactions proliferate beyond our phone screens and for those who successfully leverage it, the platform of mobile is wide open.