Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

This blog was co-written by Ashley Paula and Kate Kohler. 

In our recent seminar presentation on the Power of Mobile Content, we focused on the value of mobile content strategies for PR professionals and clients, and discussed how to leverage mobile for digital campaigns through meaningful content creation and distribution.  It’s clear that mobile content strategies are valuable to communications professionals and our clients, but we must understand how to track and measure that value.

There are many benefits of mobile content marketing from a measurement perspective. Since a majority of mobile sites are designed for the small screen, for example, they usually include more links to additional webpages, which increases our ability to monitor and track website activity. When implementing mobile content campaigns, it’s important to focus on elements and metrics that will map to an organization’s marketing objectives. In this case, we’ve identified three focus areas that highlight how mobile campaigns can be executed and measured to map up to greater marketing goals: engagement, awareness and conversion.

Engagement

Gamification is becoming an increasingly popular and effective element when implementing mobile content to increase an organization’s engagement with its customers. Take the navigation startup, Waze for example. Waze is a community-based traffic and navigation application available on iOS and Android devices, which allows users to post traffic updates and alerts and interact with other application users.  To increase and maintain engagement, Waze implemented Gamification elements. Waze users win points based off of navigation frequency, distance and number of reports or alerts they post. Each user has a scoreboard with five levels: Waze Baby, Waze GrownUp, Waze Warrior and Waze Knight. With each level comes increased reporting permissions and influence on real-time routing.

There are various ways to measure engagement within mobile campaigns like Waze. Platforms such as Web Trends, Google Analytics, and various others are available for your mobile application, this would  allow you to track engagement through the amount of people who post updates and alerts to the app, how many people use the navigation regularly, and how many times the average user navigates with the application. Additionally, options exist like measuring how many people and the rate that people are advancing to the higher levels (Waze Warrior, Waze Knight. Measuring engagement helps to show that people not only use the application, but how many are making it part of their regular commute and are thinking about it enough to go on and give advice back to others in the community.

Awareness 

During our November seminar on mobile content, we highlighted Waggener Edstrom’s Hot Spots application created for the popular SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. To increase awareness of Waggener Edstrom, the agency leveraged the concept of Social, Local, Mobile (SoLoMo) to create an application that would cut through the noise and be useful to attendees.  Hot Spots was a free mobile application for Windows Phone 7 and the iPhone, which singled out the most popular nearby parties and talks based on Foursquare check-ins. Waggener Edstrom promoted the application’s landing page with a #wedig hash tag.

Awareness is an important marketing goal as it helps to highlight just how far your message traveled. One way to measure a campaign like Hot Spot is by the number of people who were talking about the app, in this case there were over 900 mentions of either the app or the #wedig hashtag used to promote the app’s landing page on Twitter. This metric gives us information about how many times the app was shared, but adding to this could be the reach – or the total number of followers of all the people who talked about the app on twitter, since this would should you the potential number of times the message was seen. Other awareness metrics include the number of pieces of coverage the campaign received, share of voice within SXSW conversation and the sentiment of conversation surrounding Hot Spot.

 Conversion

Due to the current shift from e-commerce to m-commerce with mobile applications and social media expected to account for 50 percent of web sales by 2015, many companies are not only deploying mobile websites, but constantly optimizing their mobile sites and applications to increase sales.  Recent studies have shown that consumers prefer mobile-friendly websites are more likely to purchase products or services when they visit a company’s mobile site. For example, when browsing Amazon’s store online, no matter the device, we will be more inclined to purchase an item if the site’s navigation is simple and quick. Measuring customer focus, product preferences and mobile site effectiveness is much simpler on mobile as well.

Since mobile sites are on smaller screens with less content (ideally) and more navigation, it’s easier to measure areas that are of specific interest to a customer. Instead of dividing products up by large general categories, mobile sites can be much more specific and using analytics services, have a better idea if people who view one group of products are more likely to buy than those who view a similar but slightly different group of products. Additionally, we are able to track whether consumers on a phone are more likely to purchase than those on a tablet – and modifying mobile campaigns for the type of device your audience is most likely to purchase from can help to increase purchases and conversions of your product.