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A toolkit is a wonderful thing—loaded with hammers, saws, screwdrivers, power drills, measuring tape, sander and all kinds of other tools. Each time we need to complete a job—hang a picture, fix a broken door or patch a hole in the wall—the toolkit swings back into service. But even though we may have a couple hundred tools in our toolkit, each repair job typically requires only a few. For hanging a picture you may need a measuring tape, level, hammer and pencil, but fixing a broken door may require a hammer, chisel, screwdriver and sander. It’s different every time: the tools we need depend on the job at hand.
This analogy holds true for the marketing strategy toolkit I would like to introduce you to in this blog post. It contains several mobile business strategies, but the key to success is deciding which tools in the toolkit are best suited to achieving your marketing and business objectives and then prioritizing those strategies.
My job of describing a comprehensive end-to-end strategy toolkit is actually pretty straightforward; your job of deciding how best to apply it in your organization may be more difficult.
Knowing which strategies do not apply to your organization is equally important: focus on the ones that make sense for you. For example, many organizations need to first decide whether to focus their initial efforts on business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-employee (B2E) strategies. Many organizations mistakenly focus too much effort on B2C strategies when a focus on cost‑effective B2B or B2E apps for transforming enterprise-wide business processes could be a more powerful way to generate quicker return on investment (ROI) from mobile investments. The opportunities across all three of these domains should be continually considered.
Introduction to the toolkit
To help chart a successful path for your organization, consider each element of the following toolkit to accelerate your mobile business success:
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Image source: Destination Innovation: Creative Mobile Marketing and Commerce Strategies (designed by Gayle Hurmuses)
This toolkit is meant to accelerate your mobile business impact. It contains an extensive range of strategic and tactical tools that any organization can utilize to be more innovative in achieving many business objectives. Document and prioritize your mobile marketing and mobile business strategies.
Address pain point triggers
The foundation of the toolkit, pain point triggers, begins exactly where it should, with a consideration of customer needs and pain points. Understanding customer pain points as well as business pain points should enable you to select appropriate strategy directions. Focusing on customer needs and pain points may more often lead you to B2C solutions, while focusing on business pain points may lead you to B2E solutions.
Ask yourself the question, “What problem are we trying to solve?” Then select key priority pain points to address, identify potential strategy and technology directions, and create promising paths for moving forward.
Leverage mobile technology enablers
The next drawer of the toolkit, mobile technology enablers, recommends taking a totally different approach for setting your strategy direction. The focus here is on the technology first. Since smartphones deliver entirely new technological capabilities, consider key mobile breakthroughs and determine whether or not you can turn a particular one (or more) into a business breakthrough.
You should now answer the question, “How would implementing this technology in our organization drive a business breakthrough?” These breakthroughs may address known customer or business needs, but in some cases they could address needs that no one has identified yet. After key mobile technologies are selected, strategies and technology directions should be identified, creating additional prospective paths for moving forward.
As described in the previous sections, there are merits to taking both a pain point–centric approach and a technology-centric approach. Each of these approaches may result in very different strategy and technology recommendations, and that’s acceptable. Factors such as costs, risks, likelihood of meeting business objectives, customer readiness, employee readiness and technology readiness should all be part of the reconciliation process for management’s consideration when choosing the best path forward.
Accelerate your mobile innovation impact
The next row of five drawers in the toolkit contains a wide range of strategies and tactics to help accelerate your mobile innovation impact. The focus here is on identifying innovative mobile strategies that could impact your business model, product, operations and service innovations in various departments of your organization.
Since business model innovation is the most powerful game‑changing form of innovation, the first question to consider is, “Can we use mobile technologies and strategies to implement an entirely new business model?” The next question to ask is, “Can we use these mobile technologies and strategies to spawn product, operations, service and business process innovations?”
Accelerate your mobile marketing impact
The top four drawers of the toolkit contain an extensive range of strategies and tactics to help accelerate your mobile marketing, sales and customer support impact.
- Branding and presales mobile marketing strategies
- Raise awareness and brand visibility of your offerings.
- “Closing the sale” mobile marketing strategies
- Move prospects through the sales cycle to close the deal.
- Mobile commerce strategies (m-commerce)
- Process sales transactions.
- Mobile customer support strategies
- Support clients and set the stage for repeat business.
The strategies that apply to your organization will depend upon several factors:
- Your customers’ needs and pain points
- Your business objectives and pain points
- Your industry
- The country or countries you are targeting
- The mobile sophistication of your target market
- The innovation culture within your organization
- The marketing and technical sophistication of your employees
- Your role in the organization
Consider all of the tools and tactics described above to create an overall mobile strategy that will help maximize your business results. Is your organization ready to plan, create and implement a well-thought-out mobile strategy?
Businesses and government organizations are recognizing the power of utilizing mobile devices as a key means of communications with customers and citizens. Watch this series of IBM MobileFirst videos to generate ideas about how you can transform your organization using mobile.
And let’s connect on Twitter.
* This blog post is adapted from my book, Destination Innovation: Creative Mobile Marketing and Commerce Strategies.
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