Understanding the pillars of mobile marketing

Contributors

Writers

Priscilla Thomas

A content writer who has worked for Infosys Technologies and other technology startups in India and abroad.

Avanish Tiwary

Avanish is a Bangalore-based journalist who writes on business with a specific focus on technology companies.

Priyanka Bhatacharya

Priyanka has covered every aspect of the IT industry as a tech journalist since its early days. She is now an independent writer, working on subjects like digital marketing, enterprise technology and high-performance computing, among others.

S.Sahu

A freelance content writer, S. Sahu was the former editor of TCS's house magazine at Tata Consultancy Services. He developed tech marketing collateral for the company and helped compile and edit books and journal articles on TCS's technology innovations. He also ghostwrites print and online publications.

Prajwala Hegde

Prajwala is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist who writes on social issues, stories of human interest, and art and culture, among others.

Rajesh Nanarpuzha

Rajesh Nanarpuzha is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at IIM Udaipur. Previously, he has worked as a brand manager in Dabur, and as a business consultant in the retail and consumer goods domains at Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services. Rajesh has an MBA from IIM Indore and a doctorate in marketing from IIM Ahmedabad.

Designer

Priyokumar Singh Naorem

He is a passionate UI & UX designer who thrives on creating engaging creative solutions.

Artists

Dyuti Mittal

A freelance illustrator, artist, graphic novelist and designer. She has designed and illustrated several book covers. Her personal illustrations so far have attempted to seize the fleeting absurdity and mood of places, things and people she encounters in a childlike, intuitive and expressive manner with closure, beauty and innocence – the things that she desires.

Sumakshi Singh

She is an artist and an educator who has taught and lectured at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Oxford University, the Victoria and Albert Museum among other institutions. Her installations, paintings, thread work and sculptures have been exhibited in Saatchi Gallery - London, C24 Gallery - New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art – Lyon, among other notable galleries and museums from around the world.

Parul Gupta

A commerce graduate from Delhi University, Parul pursued a masters in fine arts from Nottingham Trent University in the UK. As an artist, she is interested in line as a subject which has led her to follow architectural lines in built environments. She says she is also interested in how we perceive the environment that we inhabit and what happens when a subtle shift is made in things which we have been used to seeing in a certain way. We present six of her artworks here.

Shweta Malhotra

Shweta Malhotra is a graphic artist and designer from Mumbai, based in New Delhi.
After working with ad agencies and design studios for close to 8 years, she branched out on her own and currently works independently.s Her overall design aesthetic is minimal, bold and graphic, a response to the maximalist visual language prevalent in India.

Rithika Merchant

Rithika Merchant (b.1986) received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design, New York in 2008. She has exhibited extensively since her graduation. Recent exhibitions include a duo show “Reliquaries: The Remembered Self” at TARQ, Mumbai; “Language of the Birds: Occult and Art” at 80WSE Gallery, New York; and group shows at Summerhall, Edinburgh and Artry Gallery, Kochi. Her work has been included in multiple group shows at Stephen Romano Gallery and The Morbid Anatomy Museum, New York. Born in Mumbai, she now divides her time between Mumbai and Barcelona.

Aniruddh Mehta

Aniruddh Mehta is an artist based out of Mumbai, India. Trained in graphic design from the London College of Communications, Aniruddh is a self-taught illustrator and currently works as an independent freelance designer. He believes in finding the right balance between art and graphic design. He has worked closely in collaboration with Bhavishyavani Future Soundz, Qilla Records, Taxi Fabric, Adidas, Dell and United Colours of Benetton. He also goes by the moniker, ‘thebigfatminimalist’ and his style ranges from bold minimal forms to more intricate pieces exploring patterns and geometry.

Paramesh Jolad

Paramesh is an artist who enjoys working in both the realistic and abstract style of painting. He loves working with water color. Featured in this issue are a set of water color works that he has created exclusively for us on the subject of digital transformation.

Concept and Direction

Nimish Vohra

Head of marketing at Regalix, Nimish drives research in emerging technologies and customer experience, and takes a keen interest in creative arts.

Enquiry

+91 9560509289

aishani.majumdar@regalix-inc.com

Mobile, which has come to play a significant role in the consumer segment, is slowly nudging its way into B2B marketing and creating its own space. As mobile becomes more relevant within the B2B framework, marketers need to see how they can effectively integrate it with their overall marketing plan.

The Regalix study on the usage of mobile as a marketing tool revealed interesting insights, use cases and new trends in mobile marketing. While keeping our eye on the survey results, we talked to R. Sudarshan, CMO at Dell, to find out how he sees mobile marketing and what Dell has achieved through the mobile platform.

In this exclusive interview with Digital CMO Digest, Sudarshan accepts that Dell could have started mobile marketing much earlier. He talks about some of the biggest challenges in B2B mobile marketing, new developments that will shape this space, and the importance of knowing customers using mobile data.

/ / When and how did mobile become important in B2B marketing for you?

We started a year and a half ago, and the reason we started it was that we found that the time spent by people online, looking at their IT purchasing decisions, was dramatically increasing. Customers who were spending 4 hours a week online a couple of years ago are spending more than 5.5 hours today. When we looked at the data closely, we found that almost all the jump was coming from mobile.

/ / How has the industry adapted to the ways of mobile marketing?

I believe it’s all about the intent. The principle that we acquired, and others should too, is, we said whatever we have done so far is good, but let’s start afresh. Let’s look at it from the point of where the industry is going, what customers’ preferences are and how have those changed. The biggest challenge is not the tool, not the budget, not the capability, it is the intent.

Most of the large corporations are getting there. And a lot of start-ups are demonstrating that it is not difficult nor expensive to adapt to mobile. The shift is automatically happening. We will have to figure out the next jump and that is where winning lies. Figuring out the trend early and turning it in your favour.

"Traditional digital marketing model had remained flat, whereas the increase in quantum came from mobile."

/ / Our survey results say that 64% of companies have integrated their mobile marketing campaigns. How does it work for you?

We make sure we have integrated our mobile strategy with all other marketing initiatives. Starting from optimizing our search pages for mobile, tablet and other devices, to making our emailers mobile-friendly, we take exhaustive measures to integrate our marketing initiatives with mobile.

For me, mobile marketing is largely about serving rich media content and in a way that customers would find value in.

In the last two years, rich media content, which is primarily videos, has dramatically scaled. And that has led to more and more videos being created and consumed. Interestingly, the best place to serve up videos is mobile, and the best place to consume such videos also happen mobile.

These gaps in understanding, along with a lack of budget, are the primary mobile marketing challenges that marketers need to overcome.

Customers use mobile for different reasons. It’s important to know where your customers are in their life journey, so you can make sure you are serving the right content to them at the right time.

An example is when a customer has just concluded a very large storage deal and he is bombarded with storage content. That just doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of sending him the content for the product he has already bought? So how do you contextualize your content?

"The propensity to learn in this medium is fantastic. I have looked at HP’s campaign and learnt from it."

/ / How big is the contribution of mobile in lead generation? 73% of the respondents were unable to measure ROI.

Honestly, that is where I think overall, digital has to scale. We at Dell look at it in terms of engagement, how many impressions we got, what kind of audiences were there, and then we see how many leads we generated out of it. However, the intent of why you do mobile marketing is beyond lead generation.

We measure it on 3Rs: Reach, Relevance and ROI. It is important to measure the anchors across all the three. The good thing is that all three things are going well; so our holistic approach seems to have worked.

to be a full-fledged business, that will take at least two more years.

"The perceived importance of mobile in B2B marketing has dramatically shifted in the last two years."

/ / The research says companies were unable to track the reach of mobile marketing. Is that right?

No, I don’t think that should be a problem. If you look at mobile as an integral part of digital marketing execution, it’s not difficult. But if you start measuring it in an isolated way, then you run into challenges like how do I define value, how much do I invest in mobile. We never had a debate on how much to invest in mobile.

Our position has always been clear: mobile is an integral part of digital and it doesn’t matter what it costs.

/ / Our research says that not many companies are able to mine their own data. What is the challenge?

For data mining to give desired results it has to be in-depth. Getting customer insights and understanding customer behavior should be priority from the beginning. Good thing is, at Dell we had started doing this very early. It demands a lot of time, and I am not sure if companies have that much time to spare for data mining and understanding customers. The market is very competitive today. If you wait six months to come up with a plan, you have already lost the opportunity.

"Using mobile to enable the sales team is another focus area that will emerge soon."

/ / When will payment get integrated with mobile marketing?

Sales enablement is not happening right now and it is kind of a lesser issue. But it will happen in the future. When we start, it has to be a fully-functional, all-services mobile offering. Thankfully, this is not the year for solving this issue.

/ / What are the new developments you see happening in the mobile marketing space?

I think a lot more full-service offerings will emerge. End-to-end services-like assisting customers in exploring, to looking for something specific, to enabling purchase-all this could happen on mobile, end to end.

Today not much interaction is happening on mobile, so that will become big. We also see augmented reality becoming big in B2B marketing, where mobile will play an integral role. We are looking at how to do that from a marketing perspective. If I have my way, I will have my own augmented reality view within three months. It’s easy to work on a small concept and get it started. But for it to be a full-fledged business, that will take at least two more years.

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