Let’s say you’re a brand manager for Purina dog food. And let’s say your boss asked you to find new ways to use mobile marketing to target your customers. Okay, easy enough.

But let’s say your boss also wants you to improve the targeting of your mobile marketing campaign vs. your last effort. Hmmmm. That might get a little harder.

Then, to make things even more challenging, your boss says, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could serve one mobile banner ad to our Purina customers, then serve a different ad to households that buy our competitor’s brand, and then skip over people who don’t own a dog?

Impossible?

Amazingly, You Can Target Mobile Ads on a House-by-House Basis. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of mobile ad campaigns we’re able to create through my mobile marketing and social media agency, 60 Second Communications.

The graphic below explains how the program works.

This May be the Most Revolutionary Advertising Platform Ever. 60 Second Communications can do this, in partnership with 4INFO, by cross-tabulating shopper data from frequent shopper cards with geo-locational mobile data. The result is the ability to serve highly-relevant mobile ads to people based on their previous purchase behavior.

In the example above, Purina would ask 60 Second Communications to develop a mobile display campaign that served up a specific set of banner ads that rewarded existing customers for their loyalty. (Side note: Purina is not a client of 60 Second Communications. We’re just using them as an example.)

They would also ask us to create a separate set of ads that encouraged Iams customers (or Beneful, Pedigree, Science Diet, etc. customers) to try Purina at a 15% discount.

And they would also ask us to skip over any households that didn’t own a dog (based on the fact that certain households don’t buy dog food).

Amazingly, 60 Second Communications can do exactly the scenario outlined above. It’s revolutionary technology and it has the potential to change the way marketers use mobile display ads from now on.

Why Privacy Advocates Shouldn’t be Afraid of This. For starters, people receiving the ads will have opted-in to a frequent shopper card program, so they’ll be receiving the ads based on a voluntary program that they signed-up for.

It’s also worth noting that the data collected is simply statistical data. In other words, we don’t know that Jamie Turner bought Purina last week, we just know is that a certain percentage of people in a certain area bought Purina and we cross-tabulate that data with geo-locational technology so that highly-relevant ads are served up to the people who will benefit from them the most.

Think of it this way — if you’re a 28-year-old newlywed, aren’t you glad that you’re getting direct mail letters about Hawaiian Honeymoons rather than Florida retirement communities?

It’s the same deal with mobile display ads in the sense that you’re getting appropriate messages from products and services that you’re most likely to buy.

This is Just One of Many Ways to Use Mobile Display Ads. Here are some other fascinating ways 60 Second Communications can use mobile display to spread the word about your products or services:

• Send Prospective Customers a Map to Your Location: If you’re interested in connecting prospects to bricks-and-mortar locations, you’re in luck. It’s pretty easy to use GPS technology to identify where a prospect is located. Once the prospect clicks on your ad, they can be driven through to a map that identifies the store that’s nearest their current location. When they click on the map, the contact information for that location is displayed on their smart phone. This technique is perfect for bookstores, car dealerships, auto repair shops, hardware stores, movie theatres … come to think of it, this technique is perfect for any bricks-and-mortar business.
• Run a Viral Coupon Promotion: Interested in driving a lot of business to your location? Then you can run a display ad that allows users to send an SMS text message to themselves and to their friends with a discount code in the message. Once people receive the code they can keep it on their phone until they arrive at your location. Best of all, they can forward it to friends who will also take advantage of the promotion. Remember to include an expiration date for the promotion so that it caps the length of the discount.
• Run an Email Promotion: One of the best things about digital communications is that, in many cases, it costs virtually nothing to expand your reach. When a user clicks on your ad, you can encourage them to spread the word about your promotion by emailing friends about it. Imagine the impact on your business if you’re a restaurant that wants to drive people to your Cinco De Mayo event or if you’re a music venue that wants to drive ticket sales for an upcoming concert. By encouraging people to email their friends, you’re driving extra business to your company without having to spend a dime more on marketing.
• Add an Event to Your Prospect’s Calendar: What if you’re having special sale that runs a few weekends out? Or, what if you want prospects to mark their calendars for an Arts or Music Festival? Or what if you’re a TV network that wants to promote the season premiere of a hit show? Good news – you can run a display ad that sends a push notification to prospects that can add your event to their calendar. Once they approve the notification, your date is added to their calendar with a reminder notification that pops up a few days or a few hours before the event.

Okay, now that we’ve covered some of the cool ways you can use display ads to connect with prospects and customers, let’s circle back around on the issue of targeting.

More Targeting Options for Mobile Display Ads. In doing research for Go Mobile, the book I co-authored with Jeanne Hopkins, I asked my friend Raphael Ravilla to share his insights on the fascinating world of mobile display ad targeting.

Raphael says that there are so many options for targeting people with mobile media that it’s often hard for marketing directors to figure out where to start.

Do you want to target people who only visit the top 100 websites? Sure, you can do that. What about targeting only people who are AT&T customers? That’s no problem. How about targeting only Android users? Yup, that’s easy.

But it gets even better. Do you want to target by WiFi usage? For example, do you want to send an ad to business travelers who are accessing the mobile internet in airports across the globe? You can do that. Or what about wealthy individuals who are vacationing in high-end resorts? You can do that, too.

You can target by time of day, you can target people who have recently switched mobile service providers and you can even target people who are within a very narrowly-defined geographic location (which is perfect for restaurants, bars, coffee shops and other small businesses).

And That’s Still Just the Beginning. What if you were interested in targeting people who have exhibited certain behaviors? For example, what if you wanted to target only people who were reading an article on CNN’s mobile site and who had previously clicked through on an ad for a red Chrysler convertible? You could do that. No problem.

In my interview with Raphael, I asked a tough question – “What if we only wanted to reach doctors, who owned Mercedes-Benz automobiles, who lived within 5 miles of the seashore, who make more than $250,000 a year and who have downloaded the Food & Wine app to their iPads? Would that be possible?”

Surprisingly, Raphael’s answer was yes, that by combining mobile targeting techniques with data available from companies like Experian and Trans Union, you could target those individuals.

(What Raphael was kind enough to gloss over was the fact that there are probably only 20 people in the U.S. who match those exact criteria, which would make a campaign that tightly-defined unpractical. But you get our point – you can get very specific with your targeting using mobile display ads. And the more tightly-defined you get with your campaign, the more interest your prospect probably has in your product, which improves the ROI of your campaign.)

Buying Mobile Display Ads. You can buy mobile display ads in a variety of ways: CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), CPC (cost-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-acquisition). Let’s take a look at which type of mobile display ad might work best for your company.

• CPM: When you buy on a CPM basis, you’re basically buying a guaranteed number of impressions. By impression we mean the number of times your ad is displayed to an individual. So, for example, if you’re buying ads on CNN.com and paying a $3.00 CPM, then you’re paying $3.00 for every 1,000 people who see your ad. (Before you run out to CNN with $3.00 in your hand, please remember that there are minimum spends and that you have to show your ad to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people before the economics of a CPM approach work out.) Buying on a CPM basis is good if you’re interested in creating brand awareness for your product or service. It’s not as good if you’re interested in driving people to a mobile site where they could buy something there – like a book, a song or an event ticket. For that, you’d probably want to use CPC or CPA.
• CPC: Buying on a cost-per-click basis is good if you’re interested in paying Google, Yahoo or Bing only when someone clicks on your ad. In other words, you can run an ad on Google and agree to pay them 25¢ for every person who clicks through on your ad. It might take 100 people to click through on your ad to make a sale, but if it costs you $25 (i.e., 25¢ x 100 clicks) to sell a product for $250, then it’s a no brainer – fire away. Interestingly, CPC is also good if you’re not expecting a lot of click-throughs on your ad. Why would you want to run a CPC ad that doesn’t get a lot of click-throughs? Because you’re still getting the brand imagery associated you’re your ad. In other words, tens of thousands of people are still seeing your brand name on the ad and, assuming the don’t click through, you don’t pay a dime. It sounds crazy, but it’s true.
• CPA: Cost-per-acquisition (also known as cost-per-engagement or cost-per-download) ensures that your mobile marketing campaign will deliver the exact action you’re seeking. You only pay when someone actually buys your product. Now, before you jump out of your seat and run off to find a CPA deal, understand that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Companies that will run CPA programs for you will often need to charge set-up costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars. So, it’s not as simple as it looks. After all, nothing is free. Well, except air. And love. But other than that, most things cost money.

Mobile marketing provides an amazing variety of ways for business like yours to connect with prospects and customers. If you’d like to find out more about mobile, send me an email or visit the 60 Second Communications website.

Better still, if you know of anyone else who might benefit from this article, please feel free to forward it to them or share it via social media. It’s an exciting new world out there and there are plenty of opportunities to grow sales and revenue from it.

Jamie Turner is the CEO of social media and mobile marketing firm 60 Second Communications and is the Founder of the 60 Second Marketer.  He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

During the 20^th century, marketing was relatively easy. The primary tools were TV, radio, print, outdoor and brochures, so connecting with customers was pretty straightforward. But times have changed. While today’s consumer still uses traditional media to gather some information, most consumers turn to smartphones and tablet computers to continue their search and make purchases.

Research conducted by comScore and Millennial Media indicates that more than half (52%) of respondents use their mobile phones to determine if they need a product. 42% of them use their phones to conduct deeper research about a product. And 38% use a mobile device when making a purchase¹.

The bottom line is that if you’re in business, you need to be in mobile. After all, your prospects and customers are using mobile to connect with the brands they love, so the opportunities to leverage those connections are significant.

Getting Started in Mobile Marketing. What follows is a step-by-step guide designed to help you launch a mobile marketing campaign and learn how to effectively manage it.

We’ll conduct a brief overview of the tools available to you, including mobile websites, SMS, mobile apps, mobile display ads and other items in the mobile marketing toolbox. We’ll also provide information designed to help you understand how to use mobile to target your audience based on demographics, behaviors, location and other techniques. And we’ll provide you a step-by-step checklist to help you get started in mobile.

If you believe mobile is the future, which it is, and you believe you can use mobile to grow your sales and revenues, which it can, then keep reading. This guide will provide you much of what you need to set-up, launch and manage an effective mobile marketing campaign.

Laying the Foundation. Research conducted by Google highlights the fact that we’re a nation of multi-screeners. In other words, we don’t simply use TVs or computers or smartphones or tablets to gather information about products or services. Instead, we use TVs and computers and smartphones and tablets to gather information.

Given that, it’s important that any mobile marketing campaign integrate seamlessly into a larger marketing program. Traditionally, this meant that the mobile campaign would be reverse-engineered to fit back into the larger marketing program. In other words, businesses would develop their marketing campaigns and then insert a mobile marketing campaign into the larger program.

But a more sophisticated approach is to actually think mobile first. After all, Gartner has famously predicted that by the end of 2013, the primary way consumers will connect with brands is via their mobile devices. In other words, mobile should be the foundation of your marketing program, not an after-thought.

Context is King. When thinking about using mobile to lay the foundation of your marketing program, it’s important to consider the environment your prospect will be in while using mobile to connect with your brand. Will they be exiting a restaurant and using their smartphone to find a movie theatre? Will they be using a tablet in an airport to check sports scores? Or will they be playing a game on their smartphone while in line at a bank?

The likely result is that they’ll use their mobile devices in all of the above-mentioned scenarios and many, many more. After all, part of what makes mobile marketing relevant is that people have their mobile devices with them virtually all the time. That includes while they’re at the store, while they’re watching TV and while they’re in the office.

Given that, it’s your job as a marketer to engage them with your brand in a contextually-relevant manner. In other words, it’s your job to provide them information about your brand that takes into consideration where they are at the time they’re receiving your messages.

It’s also important to establish the goals and objectives for your mobile marketing campaign. In most cases, your goal is to facilitate a financial transaction between your organization and the user. This can come in the form of a purchase or, if you’re a non-profit, in the form of a donation.

In other cases, the goal is simply to provide information to your constituents. If you’re an online publisher, your primary objective is to provide content that keeps the visitor engaged and interested in coming back for more. The same holds true for sports teams, religious organizations and government entities – the goal isn’t necessarily to generate direct revenue as much as it is to connect with constituents via a mobile device.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to sell something or simply provide information. The important thing is to formalize your objective so that you and members of your team have an established goal and a clear understanding of how you’ll get there.

Overview of Mobile Marketing Tools. One of the biggest challenges for many marketers is that they don’t have a sense of the tools that are part of the mobile toolbox. They might understand what a mobile website is and might even understand how it differs from a mobile app, but they still haven’t had a chance to see all the tools at one time. In other words, they haven’t explored each element to see how it might work with the other tools available to them.

While there are new mobile tools coming online with relative frequency, there are eight that are particularly important.  What follows is a brief summary of each:

• Mobile websites: This is a simplified and streamlined version of your desktop website that’s been designed to appeal to a mobile visitor who is using their smartphone or a tablet to connect with your brand.
• SMS and MMS: Short Message Service and Multimedia Message Service are systems that enable brands to send texts or rich media (graphics, video, audio) to prospects and customers.
• Mobile apps: Not to be confused with mobile websites, these mini-software programs reside in the smartphone or tablet and can be used by brands to provide information or e-commerce with prospects or customers.
• Response codes: There are a number of different kinds of response codes, the most common of which are QR codes, Microsoft TAGs, ScanLife, SPARQCodes and others.
• Mobile display ads: These are also known as mobile banner ads and are an effective way to drive new prospects to a mobile website.
• Mobile Paid Search: Identical to desktop paid search except for the fact that it’s customized for mobile. The largest and best-known players in this field are Google, Bing and Yahoo.
• Location-Based Marketing (LBM): There are two sub-categories of LBM which include Location-Based Services like foursquare, SCVNGR and WHERE as well as Location-Based Advertising which uses mobile display ads to geo-target prospects within a certain geographic location.
• Near Field Communications (NFC): Similar to BlueTooth, NFC uses a small chip embedded in a phone to connect wirelessly to a reader device such inside a kiosk, debit card terminal or turnstile.

An effective mobile marketing campaign uses a combination of some or all of these tools to connect with prospects. Most prospects will begin their search for products and services by using one of these tools. It’s the goal for a mobile marketing campaign to meet the prospects where they are when they use the tools to connect and, ultimately, make a purchase.

Understanding the Mobile Marketing Industry. You won’t need an in-depth understanding of the mobile industry in order to launch an effective campaign, but it never hurts to understand the overall environment. That way, you’ll be able to manage and delegate certain responsibilities with greater confidence and effectiveness.

Any mobile device needs an operating system in order for it to work. There are a wide variety of operating systems used around the globe, some of which include Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, RIM’s BlackBerry, Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

According to Nielsen and StatCounter, the top operating system in the United States is Android followed by iOS. In the United Kingdom, it’s BlackBerry followed by iOS. Australia is iOS followed by Android and China is Symbian followed by iOS.

What’s relevant is that the operating systems used around the globe vary country-by-country and having an understanding of which ones are most prominent in your country will help you better understand how your consumers are connecting with your brand via mobile.

The operating systems reside in smartphones that are designed and assembled by manufacturers. Manufacturers include companies like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, HP, Apple, RIM BlackBerry and Nokia. RIM and Apple manufacture virtually all of the phones used in their operating systems. Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, purchase their phones from HTC, Motorola, Samsung and HP.

The manufacturer is different from the carrier. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are the four largest carriers in the United States. Other carriers around the globe include Vodafone, Orange, China Mobile and Idea Cellular.

Key Terms and Definitions. Now that you have a sense of the key players in the mobile marketing industry, it will help to become familiar with several key terms in order to increase the depth of your knowledge. These definitions are adapted from Go Mobile the book I wrote with Jeanne Hopkins.

• Ad Network: An organization that places your mobile display ads across a variety of mobile websites and mobile apps.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked your mobile ad or scanned your response code. CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on your ad by the number of times your ad was delivered.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of respondents who opted-in or converted from prospects to customers. Conversion rate = Total participants/Total audience. Also called the acquisition rate.
• Cost Per Thousand: A metric used to price the cost of advertising banners. Essentially, a CPM is the price you pay for every 1,000 ad impressions delivered. CPMs typically range from about $6 to about $15 on up.
• Double Opt-In: When someone initially opts in to your alerts or special offers, you send a response, which confirms their participation in your program.
• Impressions: The total number of times mobile subscribers have viewed a particular ad, text message, landing page or website.
• Landing Page (aka Jump Page): The first page a visitor to your mobile site sees. It can be the home page or, more likely, a page designed to continue the message initially established via a mobile display ad, paid search ad, response code or some other mobile marketing tool.
• Mobile Marketing Association (MMA): The global nonprofit trade association established to lead the growth of mobile marketing and its associated technologies.
• Pull Messaging (wireless pull advertising, content pull messaging): Any content sent to you upon your request. For example, when you request the local weather from a website or an app, the content of that response (including any ads) is pull messaging.
• Push Messaging (wireless push advertising, content push messaging): Any content sent by publishers to your mobile device at a time other than when you requested it. Push messaging includes audio, SMS, email, surveys or any other pushed advertising or content.
• Smartphone: A mobile phone that offers more features and connectivity than a regular mobile phone. Smartphones can store information, send and receive emails, run applications, visit websites and a variety of other tasks.

Now let’s learn about the targeting opportunities a mobile marketing campaign can provide you and your business.

Finding Your Customers and Prospects with Mobile. One of the better features about mobile marketing is that the opportunities to target prospects and customers are very robust. You can target based on demographics, behaviors, location, previous websites visited, interests and other techniques.

The starting point for any successful campaign is to define the demographics of the target audience. This typically includes age, education and household income (HHI) but can also include overlays like geographic location or ethnicity. Targeting based on demographic information is relatively simple for mobile marketers.

Behavioral targeting enables mobile marketers to target consumers based on real-world actions and behaviors. So, for example, a business can target consumers who have visited a sports website as well as an automobile website. Or, they can target consumers who have a preference for fine wines and international travel. The possibilities for targeting based on behaviors is virtually endless.

One of the most important aspects of the mobile consumer is that they’re mobile. In other words, they’re not typically stationary. Instead, they’re walking, driving or in close proximity to a physical location. You can target prospects and customers based on region, state, city, zip code or even geo-locational targeting down to a few miles or even a few hundred yards of a retail location.

Retargeting is also one of the more robust aspects of mobile marketing. This enables marketers and app developers to retarget consumers who have visited their websites or downloaded their apps. It’s a great way to convert an interested prospect into a happy customer.

In some cases, you may want to target consumers based on the characteristics of their mobile device and connection. For example, you may want to send a different marketing message to owners of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile devices. If that’s the case, no problem – you can do that with mobile.

In other cases, you may want to connect with consumers at specific time or place. That’s a perfect opportunity to incorporate contextual advertising into your mobile marketing mix. Contextual advertising includes day-parting and situational targeting (e.g. at an airport or at an event), which works towards making the message that much more relevant and appropriate.

Finally, you may want to connect with consumers at a time when they’re engaging with mobile websites or apps that are related to your industry. So, for example, if you manufacture golf clubs, sending a mobile marketing message to someone reading an article on the Golf.com mobile website is a no-brainer. Or, you can engage with someone who is using an app that’s related to your product or service – for example, a winery might be interested running ads in apps targeting wine and food lovers.

Leveraging the Complete Power of Mobile. Research indicates that the redemption rate for mobile coupons is ten times that of traditional coupons.  Part of this is because of the novelty of mobile and part of it is because of the ability for mobile to be customized to be more relevant for the consumer.

For example, a geo-targeted display campaign that incorporates the user’s location into the ad will almost always out-perform a display campaign that doesn’t reference the user’s location. And a campaign using response codes such as QR codes or Microsoft TAGs has an innate ability to engage users because the process of scanning a code opens the door for other, more involved transactions.

Subway Restaurants in the U.K. launched an SMS campaign that used geo-locational technology to provide discounts to customers. Visitors to Subway locations were prompted via in-store materials to text a short code to get discounts. Once users opted-in to the program, they were sent texts with discount codes which could be redeemed at store locations. What made the campaign particularly successful was the fact that the SMS messages were only sent when visitors were within close proximity to a Subway Restaurant location. The relevancy of those messages helped ensure a successful campaign for the brand.

Mobile paid search campaigns are another valuable tool that can be leveraged by marketing professionals. Keyword prices are still relatively low, so the possibility of having a positive ROI for a mobile search campaign is significant.

Starwood Hotels uses click-to-call mobile paid search campaigns that now drive a majority of mobile bookings for the chain. The ads use geo-locational technology to target prospects who are conducting searches near their hotels. The click-to-call numbers are delivered to the prospect’s smart phone and include a map to the nearest Starwood hotel. The result is that mobile paid search ROI increased by 20%, mobile bookings increased by 20% and mobile traffic tripled during the course of the campaign.

There are a number of key metrics to keep track of when running and managing a mobile paid search campaign. A successful campaign will usually have a click-through rate of 1 percent or better. As a general rule of thumb, a CTR of less than 1 percent means your ad is not targeted properly.

Keeping an eye on your average position is another relatively important metric. On a regular paid search campaign, up to 11 ads are shown on any given page, but on mobile devices, only 2 or 3 appear. Google also uses a quality score to calculate how relevant your ad is to searchers.

The quality score is based on a number of factors ranging from click-through rate to time spent on the landing page. The higher your quality score, the more effective your campaign. A way to keep your quality score in good standing is to include mobile-related keywords in your search terms. So, for example, include the term “locations” (e.g., “Italian restaurant locations”), addresses (e.g., “Home Depot on 42^nd street”) and zip codes in your keyword search terms.

It’s Not too Late to Get Started in Mobile. In the end, a successful mobile marketing campaign includes a variety of tactics and techniques. Focusing on one area – mobile apps, for example – doesn’t do justice to to the full suite of mobile marketing tools. In addition, it doesn’t take into consideration that the mobile user engages with their smartphone or tablet in a wide variety of environments and situations.

By analyzing the full spectrum of mobile marketing tools and selecting those that will best meet your needs, you’ll have a greater opportunity for a successful campaign.

What are some of your favorite mobile marketing tools? And which mobile marketing campaigns do you feel do the best job of representing the full power of mobile? Let us know in the comments section below.

Jamie Turner is the Founder of the 60 Second Marketer and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

1)  Millennial Media and comScore, Mobile Insights for Retail Brands study, 2010