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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