The world is changing fast – and so do our expectations. The intimate relationship people hold to their smartphone and other connected devices results in promising advantages when it comes to interacting with your customers, but keeping up is key. The third session of Google’s Mobile Academy focused on offering tangible solutions in how to put mobile first and get prepared for the very near future.
Understanding your customers
Mobile makes for many moments throughout the day in which you can have people connect to your brand and tune right into their needs. Your customers want to be helped right when they need it – and you have to help them with that. Mastering the mobile experience is all about understanding your customers. This will teach you what they require to fulfill their goal, and thus ultimately fulfill your own. That is when conversion happens.
In order to truly grow, you cannot rely on gut feeling or simply hoping for the best. Your organization will need to get a solid optimization process in place. Try to use as many sources as possible, such as Google Analytics, and look at data from different angles. Then, narrow down on what is happening and try to figure out exactly why it’s happening.
When combining different data sources, you're one step closer to a solid hypothesis which you can then validate through A/B-testing. Combining those insights with actually getting out of the office: observe users and speak with them, learn from them. It’s putting in extra effort like this that’s making you become a true mobile first leader. And don’t forget to share your learnings throughout the organization, both wins and failures. Constantly spreading insights is a prevailing way of moving your entire company towards successful mobile growth.
Setting up for success
When implementing data driven decisions into your company, five principles come into play. Google’s Peter Scharff illustrates each and every one. First of all, you will want to move all things linked to mobile transformation at the same time. From executive vision to getting the right people in place. From technical capacity to having the customer centralized, and aiming for innovation.
Second, you have to have KPI’s supporting both mobile and transformation. Decide what the actual KPI’s are that drive value, from hard conversions to soft conversions such as calls, store visits and e-mail subscriptions. Do realize that the things that you don’t track will eventually be squeezed out by the things that you track.
Third, make for additional capabilities and arrange for mobile-first minded personnel, in the form of business and software developers and designers. They should be aware of all mobile technology, have the freedom to apply it and be totally data-driven and focused on the customers’ needs. In addition to this you need owning Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), ensuring that your mobile site continuously gets better.
The fourth principle centers around the idea to have one team built around a customer journey. Consider merging marketing and sales with consumer services, to be able to grant full ownership and create a seamless user experience. This ensure all your innovation efforts are being built around the one true center: the customer. Fifth, and last, never cease to innovate. In this rapidly changing world, it’s your organization learning faster than your competitors will make the big difference. Being on top of it is the one and only sustainable strategy for both short- and long-term. One last piece of advice: encourage all employees to submit whatever ideas they have to make things better.
Mobile measurement
In this era where digital marketing is largely dominated by technology and automation, you need to revise where your competitive advantage lies. It’s unlikely that the digital superstars of tomorrow will win because they were able to build the best search campaigns. Instead, what we will probably see is that businesses converge to catch up with the leaders that excel in these areas today.
Increasingly complex customer journeys make for an environment with more advantages than ever, with measurement data and resulting insights as powerful tools. Your company will find itself in the forefront, when having gained a better understanding of customers’ needs than the competition. For a great part this applies to analyzing cross-device behavior, and tracing back what leads people to visit physical stores or pick up their mobile device and check your mobile website or app.
Cross device tracking is indispensable when it comes to attributing value to your channels. To know what channels are used and when, especially prior to a purchase moment, leads to applicable knowledge and the creation of sustainable future ideas. Especially when making radical data driven decisions, you have to be sure to trust your data. Businesses that succeed in using information advantages such as these are positioned to win in a digital world that is becoming more complex by the minute.
Taking advantage of data signals
Knowing your audience is key. Making use of gathered data increases your chances of winning them over in the moments that matter, for instance tapping into the possibilities of all eight Google platforms with no less than a billion active users. You are looking towards reaching a deeper level of understanding of your customers. You will want to identify patterns that tell you not only when they make a visit or a purchase, but also when they need you most and what they like in general – simply who they really are.
What you will need to do is start investigating how you can put your own sets of data to use. From your CRM databanks to information gathered through your website, to campaign data. This allows you to map the full customer journey and will ultimately assist in optimizing and personalizing your message, making it exactly right for the perfect person in the perfect moment.
After collecting all available and necessary data you can start crafting your audience strategy. This not only lets you engage with your existing customers in a more meaningful way, it also provides reaching out to new users who you’d otherwise never would have connected with. Measurements like these support a dynamic form of marketing in which agile strategic decisions allow you to easily side-line your competitors.
