Highly Competitive - software industry insights

‘Tech Savvy’ for Midsized Companies Means ‘Customer Savvy’

 

Technology is no longer simply back office automation or work productivity tools addressing the day to day of the business. Technology has become a core pillar for company strategies, as well as for change and success. The biggest transformation any midsized company can make to become a business that sustains growth over time is to strategically and proactively use technology to achieve the goals of the business. Such a transformation through technology often takes midsized companies into new markets and new ways of doing business. The strategic positioning of technology leads to strengthening the organization, improving competitive edge and opening new doors for growth and opportunity.

In parallel to technology considerations, the single most important success factor for most companies is The Customer. These days all activities related to the customer must be ramped up and more responsive to customer needs and desires. Companies must change how they function to better serve customers. Proactive use of technology in many areas is essential to ensure top notch customer experiences and interactions at any time and place.

Midsized companies that make the customer a core focus will achieve better outcomes. When deciding on how to best leverage technology, companies should use customer strategies to drive and define technology strategies. When companies combine technologies with effective practices and processes around meeting customer needs on every level, competitive edge and revenue growth usually follow as natural outcomes.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) completed a global study focused on midsized and smaller companies to assess the impact of technology on business performance and growth:

Adopting technology in an intelligent way is critical to the future business success of many SMEs. More than 90 percent of leaders said that IT is important to their business's future, and almost two-thirds said that new technologies will lead to higher revenues and profits or more jobs at their company.

The study presents clear evidence that midsized and smaller businesses with higher rates of technology adoption grow faster and create more jobs than their counterparts that maintain low levels of technology adoption. Looking at U.S. SMB companies, BCG projected that if 15 percent of technology 'laggards' and 30 percent of technology 'followers' evolved into high technology adoption companies, the result would be the addition of more than two million jobs and an additional $360 billion flowing into the U.S. economy.

 

Midsized companies that want to be top competitors should evaluate all functional and operational areas that help the company shine as a customer-responsive organization to see how improvements can be made with the right technologies:

• Marketing and business interactions through mobile devices and digital channels
• Customer service and support
• eCommerce and payment services
• Gaining insight from data analytics for everything Customer
• CRM and Marketing Automation platforms
• Customer onboarding and education channels
• Deployment of Cloud / SaaS solutions for enterprise capabilities that keep up with customer and market trends

 

The goal should always be to wow customers. There are many robust technologies that can help midsized companies do that every day, in every interaction and channel. Companies that are "tech savvy" quickly show how they are "customer savvy".

 

Image Source: Sabre Travel Network

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

One on One Engagement: Mobile Content Marketing

 

Mobile-first is a phrase often heard when discussing web and content design, as well as marketing strategies. The mobile-first focus propels companies into strategies that reflect the amazing growth of mobile usage for business purposes, both on smartphones and tablets. And we are likely to see more vendors move towards mobile-only strategies, as mobile becomes the core customer communications platform for their businesses.

Many reports show that B2C vendors are quickly taking rewarding advantage of marketing and selling through mobile channels. But B2B vendors greatly lag their B2C counterparts, continuing to miss out on a significant opportunity that brings distinct competitive advantage. B2B customers bring with them the positive experiences that B2C vendors give them on mobile – B2B vendors must engage well on mobile if they want to continue to gain and retain these customers.

The average person spends two hours per day looking at a mobile screen. Think about that. Two hours out of every twenty-four – 8% of an entire day – on a mobile device. That's more time than users spend watching TV or using a personal computer. Whether it's at home, at work, or in between, users seem to be inseparable from their mobile devices.   (Source: High Impact Prospecting )

For midsized vendors the message is clear: mobile is wide open right now for smart vendors to reach more customers in very direct and compelling ways – every day. It's time to jump in to create effective mobile marketing strategies and a creative approach to mobile content marketing.

 

Mobile Content Design

Mobile devices offer new ways to create and deliver content which opens up many new possibilities for content marketing teams. Content marketing strategies and content creation have to recognize how different mobile content is from content that is delivered on traditional computing devices. For instance, Google search algorithms are constantly updated to reflect the rising creation of mobile content of all kinds, so it's important for content marketers to develop the right mobile content that aligns with successful semantic search results.

                        

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mobile marketers also have to understand the mobile behavior of target customers: how do they use their mobile devices for different activities? Tablet usage is different from smartphone usage, so marketers need to segment user behavior by device. The available space on a smartphone is obviously premium real estate, while tablets offer a larger canvas for content. The wealth of information that comes from tracking and analyzing how people use mobile devices adds significant intelligence to correctly engaging customers one on one, in ways that they will accept.

Beyond the knowledge about how people use their mobile devices, marketers need to consider what these people are doing when they are consuming mobile content. They could be commuting on a train, plane or bus; in the office; or at home. In different settings, mobile content has to compete with all kinds of distractions. To grab and hold the usually brief attention of the mobile user, content should follow a mobile-smart model:

• Bite-sized content that quickly gets to the point
• High impact "wow" content
• Easy-to-spot actions to take
• Streamlined layouts
• Visual elements instead of text, whenever possible
• Easy-to-read fonts
• Vibrant colors for overall content

There are vendors experimenting with longer form content for mobile engagement. Instead of longer content as the initial view, it may be more effective to offer links to that longer content or to videos. This approach gives control to the mobile user who can then decide when to view additional content that can be time and resource consuming. Vendors can then track click through and conversion metrics to determine the success of longer form content approaches to learn more about customer desires and attention span, and to fine tune marketing efforts.

 

Mobile Content Marketing Strategies

Mobile content marketing is a component of overall content marketing strategies. It should fit well into a unified and consistent experience for customers, no matter what device / channel is used for engagement. And for some companies, mobile is becoming the dominant component, so content marketing strategies must reflect the growing significance of mobile for marketing and selling.

81% of mobile leaders say that mobile fundamentally changed their businesses    (Source: IBM )

Many midsized businesses lack any sort of mobile strategy, let alone planning for effective mobile content marketing. These businesses are missing tremendous opportunities to reach more customers and are likely giving away competitive advantage to other vendors.

  

Image source: Content Marketing Institute

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

  

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Timely, Relevant and Wanted: How to Succeed with Mobile Push Marketing

 

 

Not only are people spending more time on mobile devices, much of it is dedicated to using apps. Because of the intimate nature of mobile, marketers have to take on new ways to effectively target consumers both for in-app and mobile website engagement.

Push notifications or messages only happen if mobile users opt in to activate them. These notifications focus on very specific purposes: relevant / requested vendor offers, customer service alerts, new content availability, social updates, various reminders, or notifications tied to current consumer location. Push messages require an immediate action, which has compelling value to vendors:

• In-the-moment marketing that is simple but with lots of room for creativity
• A new way for delivering memorable customer experiences
• An inexpensive way to keep in touch with already interested customers
• A highly detailed targeting and metrics tool

But marketing through push notifications comes with a serious warning. Marketers must be very respectful of the trust mobile users are extending by giving vendors access to their mobile devices – and their attention. Similar to marketing automation and content marketing, mobile users expect highly personalized relevant content. The difference is that push notifications are extremely targeted to very specific interests and actions of individual consumers, often related to the exact moment or current location. If marketers fail to deliver what consumers want in push messages, the messages are ignored and deleted – and the consumer is likely opt out of future push notifications as a waste of their time.

 

A recent JiWire study found that 75 percent of shoppers act after receiving a location-based message.

 

Consumers who are heavy app users are also the most interested in push notifications:

According to a report from Maz, consumers spend 40 percent more time reading content in apps than on Web sites, but marketers are still hesitant to ramp up in-app ad spend. At the same time, Juniper Research just put out a report that predicts that in-app advertising spend will grow to almost $17 billion by 2018, so that reality may be changing in the near future.

    

While in-app marketing is growing in importance, not all customers want to interact with a vendor through apps. Mobile websites continue to draw customers. Consumer actions on mobile websites can dynamically set off the display of personalized content, as a "push" response. And push notifications can be used to drive consumers to specific web pages.

 

Push Notification Relevance Depends on Continuous Analytics

As with marketing automation, a robotic one-size-fits-all won't cut it for consumer-personalized push messages. And as with content marketing, marketers must avoid anything that smacks of blatant sales propaganda. The focus has to be on the consumer perspective, what they need and want.

This is an interesting new direction for effective marketing. Push notifications require personalization on steroids to generate the right timely targeted offerings. This calls for continuous advanced analytics, detailed segmentation, and location-based services. Vendors should already be constructing well-informed segmentation and profiles of customers for marketing automation, content marketing and product development. Push notifications now take it deeper and add new dimensions to customer behavioral data.

Push notification processes introduce the opportunity for very detailed metrics to determine the engagement quality of the communications: what specific actions were taken, which messages were opened immediately, how many app opens occurred, the amount of time spent in the app. The preferences set by mobile users also generate useful data, particularly if the options are quite granular.Marketers have immediate intelligence about what works and what doesn't, and can make quick changes to approaches.

Beyond the specific needs of continuous improvement of push messages, this new customer intelligence should be shared with all other customer-related functions in the company. Push notifications should never exist in a vacuum, but must be part of an integrated cross-channel strategy for customer engagement.

 

The Omnichannel Customer Experience

While mobile is a unique world, mobile marketing still needs tight integration with all multichannel strategies such as a direct marketing. Push marketing must exist as a consistent component of the omnichannel experience for each customer. It should complement messaging tactics on all digital devices for orchestrated actions and engagement across channels.

The consumer intelligence gained from understanding how mobile users react to push notifications should strive to relate the impact of such messages to subsequent cross-channel behavior. As the sophistication of push notification analytics grows, many possibilities should emerge for highly engaging and creative push interactions anywhere anytime.

 

Image source: 99mobileapps.com

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Mobile Marketers: Think More Like Mobile Developers

 

 

Business-related mobile apps are increasingly being created by organizations, large and small. There are an abundance of developer platforms, many as cloud services, that keep costs down. The same can be said for analytics tools that monitor the various aspects of mobile user behavior. Mobile marketing also benefits from such analytics, whether the marketing effort is related to specific apps, to products and services, or to the promotion of the brand.

The success of anything on a mobile device, particularly a smartphone, is completely dependent on fully understanding how individual people use the device. Different tasks can be executed in different ways, from user to user. These behavioral patterns dictate how mobile apps, websites and marketing communications must be structured in order to quickly engage potential users and customers. And mobile user behavior continuously changes.

Marketers will fail if they approach mobile as traditional online digital marketing accessed through desktops / laptops. In some ways, to be effective as a mobile marketer you have to think like a mobile developer – you have to get "up close and personal" with mobile users and their devices, to better understand how to engage them effectively on mobile terms. With the growth of in-app marketing, thinking like a developer has even more importance.

 

Instant Quality Experiences

Mobile is all about the user experience 24/7. When shopping, using apps or interacting with brands, the mobile user experience is an instant customer experience – and it had better be outstanding. People expect access to what they want when they want it – and they want the experience across mobile devices to be consistent. Mobile attention spans are miniscule so vendors must instantly open up remarkable experiences or the potential mobile customer is gone.

Mobile users are fast and decisive when it comes to shopping and researching products. 70% of mobile searches lead to an action within 1 hour, as opposed to 70% of desktop searches leading to an action within 1 month. Often the next action for a mobile searcher is a phone call – Spafax has found that "inbound phone calls are 15 times more likely to convert to customers than an inbound web lead that downloaded a White Paper or e-book".

 

Tracking User Behavior

For marketers, mobile not just a single channel – it's extremely multi-dimensional and complex. For mobile developers and marketers alike the complexity comes from the diversity of devices, interfaces, browsers – plus deciding between mobile web or mobile app as the means of interacting with users. The high value real estate of device screen size is another dimension of complexity – everything on the display has to be of highest value to users and exactly what they need.

Analytics tools are a must to better understand mobile user behavior. Behavioral analytics provide deeper understanding of the digital life of different kinds of mobile users. Different analytics track user activities on apps and sites (taps, time spent, engaging UI elements, action sequences, etc.); other analytics track higher level events like downloads and purchases.

Mobile phones come equipped with multiple sensors that provide valuable data to behavioral analytics. Of course privacy is a serious consideration, but more and more mobile users are comfortable with always-on location sensors and sharing personal information, whenever the vendor provides the benefits and value that they want. Marketers should leverage the mobile device itself as an organic marketing opportunity.

 

With solid analytics results in hand, marketers can do more with targeted marketing on mobile devices -- including push communications -- via in-app and mobile websites. My next mobile marketing post will talk more about the value that mobile users gain from push communications – when done right.

 

Image source: technorati.com

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective