Mobile Engagement Platforms: Mastering Mobile Marketing with Impact

Mobile Engagement Platforms: Mastering Mobile Marketing with Impact

Executive Summary This paper will demonstrate how consumers increasing use of mobile activation points is driving marketers to re-evaluate their engagement strategies and capabilities to collect centralized business intelligence. It introduces a new product category, the Mobile Engagement Platform, which parallels the emergence of dynamic social media management systems.the findings highlight how key distinctions and value propositions of these related platforms are empowering marketers to deliver compelling consumer experiences, generate valuable market data, measure return on investment, and manage campaigns and resources. i ii iii iv v Introduction Social Media as a Case Study Value of the Scan Engagement Game-Changing Empowerment Through Mobile Engagement Platforms Conclusion

3 i Introduction From print to television to Internet to social media, marketers have a long history of successfully opening and maximizing new channels to reach consumers. In the early days of emergence, experimentation and creativity bring about successes, failures and best practices that empower all marketers to deliver the best consumer experience. As adoption of the emerging channel occurs, marketers are then pushed to find and create tools to manage, measure, and integrate the new channel in their marketing mix. Today, this same process is occurring in the rapidly growing mobile engagement channel. Consumers are quickly becoming accustomed to engaging with mobile activation points (QR Codes, UPC codes, NFC icons, image recognition, etc.) surrounding them in the physical world.these technologies more efficiently provide additional access to the digital realm. A recent survey of over 1,200 U.S. consumers conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey and imoderate Research Technologies (2011), 81% know a QR Code when they see one, and 70% find scanning to be an easy process. Based on our own data through the ScanLife platform, QR Code scanning has increased 266% in the past year alone, from approximately 6 million in Q2, 2011 to almost 16 million in Q2, 2012. According to McKinsey iconsumer Research 2012, mobile technology accounts for one-third of all online consumer research, and almost half the time (44%) this research is done in a physical store to get product information, check price comparisons, and scan codes for additional content and offers. Smart marketers are taking advantage of this emerging behavior by using QR Codes as an integrated part of their marketing mix to help their most interested consumers reach the point of purchase or action more quickly and easily. Codes provide instant access to product information, store locations, loyalty programs, social presence, etc. Companies are also exploring new tools to manage, measure, and gain the most actionable business intelligence from this extremely valuable mobile engagement activity.

ii Social Media as Case Study: Creating opportunity, order and value out of chaos 4 There are lessons from the emergence of social media marketing that parallel the current promises and challenges in mobile engagement. When Facebook and Twitter launched in the mid-2000s, suddenly a new channel was opened, empowering marketers to engage with consumers directly and personally. Most importantly, these were not passive consumers; they were people actively requesting engagement with brands and products. Because the activity was highly valued by marketers, it drove demand for quality and relevancy to keep consumers engaged and satisfied. This led to challenges with human resources, budgets, and organizational management to deliver consistent, positive experiences with each media within the channel. Furthermore, in these early days, monitoring, garnering data and demonstrating ROI were difficult with no robust utilities to aggregate data across the multiple outlets. Essentially, there were no systems in place to drive productivity, management, consistency, and the deep analytics marketers needed to create order and value. Initially, listening tools like Radius6 were developed to help with the monitoring, but they were incapable of addressing management and analytics. This led to the emergence of social media dashboards, including Hootsuite, Mediafunnel, and Salesforce, to garner and manage greater analytics from social media assets. Eventually, full-scale social media management platforms such as Wildfire were developed to further empower marketers with custom page development tools, advanced targeting methods, and robust analytics. A similar product category is emerging in mobile engagement marketing, and for the very same reasons. The behavior is now moving toward mainstream, and marketers must harness that activity in scalable ways to derive the most possible value.

iii Value of the Scan Engagement 5 Just as with social media, when a consumer engages with a mobile activation point, they are expressing a desire to connect with a brand in a personal and direct manner. In that respect, one could equate the value of a scan with that of a like. But, scans go further in that they enable the consumer to tell a brand, I am engaged with your product right now in the physical, real world. Engagement implies that the user is interested enough to take a phone, launch an application and do something like scan a QR Code. In other words, it allows advertisers to engage those people who are the most interested in the advertiser s message. In this respect, that consumer is even more highly valued. The results of a recent study by MGH (2011) are therefore not surprising: Of those who scanned the code, 21% shared the information and 18% went on to make a purchase afterward. To put that in context of ROI, the average cost of a QR Code campaign using an advanced Mobile Engagement Platform is approximately USD $0.10 per scan. Let s assume an item is priced at USD $10, and 2 out of 10 people that scan the code end up purchasing the item. Therefore the marketer is spending approximately $1 to get a return of $20. Furthermore, even if the scan does not lead to a sale, it can still lead to actions that get them closer to the brand, including Facebook Likes, video demonstrations, CRM entries, and much more. This means that mobile activation strategies, the most pervasive of which are QR Codes, provide marketers with access to a critical input stage in a consumer s path to purchase or action by providing opportunities for engagement during the consideration and preference phases of the traditional sales funnel. Moreover, there is a high return on investment rate for utilizing this channel.

iv Game Changing Empowerment Through Mobile Engament Platforms Moving from Static to Dynamic Communications: Where We ve Been and Where We re Going 6 In their first experience with QR Codes, marketers are most often using those directly encoded by a QR Code Generator to access a home page for the company, store or product. However, this method of direct or static code generation has limitations when it comes to delivering rich, dynamic consumer experiences that take advantage of every opportunity. Home pages are generally not optimized for a mobile web experience, causing consumers to have to pinch and zoom in order to find what they are looking for, such as a phone number, store location, or product information. Hardly an optimal experience, marketers have responded by identifying the need for mobiletailored landing pages on their sites for the codes, requiring added development time and budget resources. Over time, the impact of mobile-friendly development for dozens or even hundreds of campaigns adds up. From a technical perspective, direct codes have printability and size issues, especially if the URL encoded is long. Many codes are printed at sizes that are too small to even scan, frustrating customers when interest is at its peak. Also, with a direct code, the URL is forever encoded, which is a problem for inventory management, printing deadlines, and plain old human error. A code that does not work, leads to a wrong URL, or goes to irrelevant/ outdated content is useless to a consumer and can have a negative impact on brand perception.

7 Finally, direct codes do not support dynamic content delivery; therefore, marketers are limited in how they can engage differently with unique customers. For more on the risks of direct code generation, please see our paper, The Risks of Non-Managed 2D Codes. These technical issues with direct codes have historically made it difficult for marketers to manage and deliver positive consumer experiences. Since necessity is the mother of invention, these issues have driven a new product category to empower marketers in an emerging channel the Mobile Engagement Platform. Captivating Consumers with Elevated Experiences: Mobile Optimized and Relevant At the core of a Mobile Engagement Platform is a hybrid technique for code generation and encoding called the Managed-Direct Encoding method, wherein the code connects to a cloud server within the Mobile Engagement Platform and the server instructs the phone which action to take, such as connecting to a URL, launching an email, etc. This distinction of connecting to a back-end server solves multiple issues that have made mobile activation points difficult to manage and use in the past to create positive, rich and relevant consumer experiences. First, some Mobile Engagement Platforms have built-in mobile landing page generators with a slew of code actions that can be embedded, thereby empowering rich, branded consumer experiences and reducing development time and cost for mobile landing pages to a few mere clicks on the platform. Often, these code actions create expanded value, as they encourage consumers to take further action with other marketing assets, thereby enhancing engagement, and reducing their average cost. Another experience distinction of Mobile Engagement Platforms is their ability to empower real-time dynamic content delivery based on scanner metadata (e.g., location, demographic, number of scans, etc.), providing relevancy to consumers. Most of this data can be integrated from the platform into a brand s own IT and CRM systems for real time interactions with the customer proprietary information stored there. For example, existing rewards program customers can be given unique offers, while new customers receive invitations to join the rewards program for additional discounts. Dynamic Language Detection Adjust Engagement by Time of Day Same code - different languages Coffee Coupon Dessert Coupon

8 Beyond these critical consumer experience drivers for optimization and relevancy, Mobile Engagement Platforms address the other technical hurdles of direct QR Code generators that impact the consumer experience. The platform s flexible design easily accounts for variations in URL sizes, print media, or inventory management strategies. With a Mobile Engagement Platform, not only can the content in a campaign change as needed, marketers have the ongoing ability to adjust the entire consumer experience in a variety of ways, such as turning a video demo into an instant-win promotion. Mobile Engagement Platforms address many challenges for marketers while helping them create rich, relevant, and dynamic consumer experiences. Yet, the platform s above-and-beyond value comes from robust analytics that measure ROI and generate never-before-possible actionable business intelligence. Data, ROI, and Business Intelligence: Rising to the Integrated Marketer s Challenge Direct QR code generators are simply that generators. If they provide data at all, it is typically the basics like number of scans on the code. They provide no data on those scans, such as location, time of day, user profile, or actions taken beyond the scan. In contrast, Mobile Engagement Platforms enable marketers to gain insight into highly valuable data that they were never able to capture before, such as the actual time and location of consumer engagement with products or marketing media. Furthermore, mobile activation points that are managed by a platform are unique in that, while they provide richer data on their own usage and value (i.e., number of scans, location, time of day, consumer-provided demographics, etc.), they also provide data on other media usage and value (i.e., packaging, in-store signage, outdoor advertising, print advertising, etc.). For example, retailers often invest in print media (ads/direct mail/catalogs) to drive traffic to the stores, but how do they know a printed piece actually drove a consumer in? If retailers placed a unique QR Code on a print media, they could provide a mobile landing page with store location information and an offer to visit the store to scan another unique QR Code to receive a promotion or discount. This print media/in-store tie-in effectively provides valuable data on whether the print media is actually driving foot traffic and worth the investment. So, not only do Mobile Engagement Platforms give rich data on the effectiveness of the codes, they also provide the unique opportunity to measure physical world marketing assets. No other market research tool can deliver this kind of real world insight.

Engagement Timelines Mobile Engagement Platforms track the time of scans and render reports based on this data. For example, a marketer running an 8-week campaign with QR Codes on a print ad could see which weeks had greater scan spikes during the campaign. This also means they could compare when those spikes occurred against other media deployed in the campaign (outdoor ads, TV ads, etc.), and determine how those media integrated with QR Code placements on products to drive sales. Another example of the value of scan data is tracking time of day. For example, if that marketer looked at time-of-day data from that 8 week campaign, she may notice spikes that provide actionable business intelligence on when to run TV or radio advertising to correspond with when the audience is most likely to shop at the company s store and/or consume the product. In the past, it has not been possible to capture this type of data that identifies when consumers engage with a product and measures the effectiveness of integration across multiple channels. This unique ability to analyze consumer behavior and efficiently plan marketing channels based on actionable business intelligence, is what makes Mobile Engagement Platforms especially valuable. 9 Location Mobile Engagement Platforms also overlay location of scan data, providing both macro and micro views of consumers and marketing assets, creating actionable business intelligence. For example, in that same 8-week product campaign, a CPG company can determine at a macro level in which regions the campaign was more likely to succeed in their next campaigns. Or consider the value of micro-location scan data on outdoor signage to help a retailer more effectively manage an outdoor signage budget. Never before have marketers had this kind of real world and transparent auditing power. Messaging Effectiveness Measuring whether a message in an ad is delivering maximum resonance to consumers is a difficult endeavor for marketers. While focus groups can provide insight, they are representational and not broad, vast samplings. Furthermore, the way focus group members view an ad in a controlled environment is not necessarily indicative of how they would react to an ad in the real world. It is in this context that mobile activation scans can provide high volume, real world data on the effectiveness of the message in an ad. For example, a marketer could run two different print ads for a one-week run to test which ad garnered the most scans, and thereby know on a broad scale which messaging was more effective. This kind of comparison can be made in seconds through an analytics dashboard. Demographics Some Mobile Engagement Platform providers also offer mobile activation point scanning applications for consumers to download to their mobile phones. Providers who offer these applications link the data from the scanner and user profile to the platform in order to generate demographic data, allowing marketers to know if the consumers scanning are in their sweet spot from a targeting perspective. Furthermore, because Mobile Engagement Platforms can tie to an enterprise s IT and CRM systems, they can also enhance demographic data stored there and be used for rewards programs.

Centralized Code & Analytics Management Over time, companies find they have dozens or even hundreds of mobile activation campaigns to track and manage across an organization. Often those activation points are being generated from a number of different sources, which may lead to inconsistency, lack of data, and even complete failures of functionality. As Mobile Engagement Platforms are cloud-hosted and centralized, they automatically store and track all codes in one place. Furthermore, these platforms have admin and user account controls, making them optimal for agencies or large organizations that need to create and manage a large number of codes across geographies, different business units or clients often at a moment s notice. These codes can be organized into folders, campaigns, user accounts, and admin accounts, to make it simple to manage everything in one place. Consider the Marketing Director at a retailer looking at his stores radius of outdoor signage influence based on location data from the platform to maximize budget spending. What is optimal for the New York store may not be true of the Chicago, London, Tokyo, or dozens of other stores. Or perhaps the message of a broader campaign needs to be more localized to the geographies to increase effectiveness, requiring each store or regional marketer to have his or her own unique codes to develop and manage. Because these platforms allow for centralized, but granular data, and multiple user accounts, corporate marketers can be empowered to make high level decision, while ensuring consistency in policy and execution. v Conclusion The popularity of social media has empowered marketers to reach highly engaged consumers through a new channel. However, in order to effectively deliver through the new channel, marketers had to address challenges with user experience, productivity, management, and consistency. 10 Social media platforms were invented to deal with these issues while providing deep analytics that create opportunity, order and value from the channel. Now, the even-greater value potential of the mobile engagement channel and its challenges have driven the emergence of Mobile Engagement Platforms. This product category empowers marketers to quickly, efficiently, and consistently create rich, dynamic user experiences to reach the most valuable consumers at a critical phase on their path toward purchase or action. The platform delivers relevant mobile marketing LEARN MORE campaigns while providing relevant consumer data with actionable business intelligence in a way that can be managed centrally across many users in an organization. As a result, effective marketers are once again creating opportunity, order, and value out of a highlyvaluable emerging channel by adopting Mobile Engagement Platforms. Scanbuy Inc. 10 East 39th Street, 10th Floor New York, NY 10018 info@scanlife www.scanlife.com Copyright 2013, ScanLife. All rights reserved.