Connecting the Mobile Marketing Puzzle Pieces: Product & Marketing

Mobile marketing is tough. In fact, mobile is probably the fastest-moving and most competitive market ever, which is precisely why you don’t want to add challenges to an already-difficult problem.

But mobile marketing has a serious and significant problem: team integration.

“The pieces aren’t joined up right now,” VentureBeat journalist, analyst, and director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers told me in London recently. “It’s actually quite scary… we have a very large percentage [of marketers] who are in control of $10M and higher marketing budgets — they’re spending 50% of their budget dedicated on mobile, but they’re all telling us that it’s completely disjointed, completely siloed, totally tacked on to the end of the campaign just as a channel.”

Here’s the problem … and the solution:

Part of the solution, Rogers says, is connecting marketing and product, and finding ways to synchronize their currently wildly diverging cycles of activity.

Another part is simply recognizing that mobile’s not just another channel any more — not just a line item at the end of your marketing strategy. Email is now mostly mobile. Social is mostly mobile. Search is largely mobile. Display advertising is largely mobile. Video advertising is massively mobile.

In other words, for digital advertisers mobile shouldn’t be a channel so much as a standard, a norm. Within mobile, there are channels. But almost all digital advertising should be created with the understanding that it will likely be consumed on mobile.

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Author

Before acting as a mobile economist for TUNE, John built the VB Insight research team at VentureBeat and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In addition, he led technical teams, built social sites and mobile apps, and consulted on mobile, social, and IoT. In 2014, he was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers." John lives in British Columbia, Canada with his family, where he coaches baseball and hockey, though not at the same time.