Building Bridges through Mobile Marketing

Sydney.
Rachel de Sain is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; she is Strategy and Commercial Manager for Mobile at Sensis. Her focus is on mobile advertising and marketing. Sensis operates brands such as Yellow Pages, WhereIs, TradingPost and Citysearch, and has recently come around to placing this content in Google and Google Maps as well - in this, mobile has become one of the most fundamental parts of the business.

Sensis gets around 2.5 million searches from mobile devices per month, and this doubles around every four months. Mobiles now have a 101% penetration rate in Australia, but over 49% of Australians have owned a phone for over 7 years, so it's not a new technology any more, even though technological features keep changing. Benefits for consumers are that mobiles are always on, that they choose whom to communicate with, that communication is personalised, and that it is relevant on the fly - if therefore provides confidence for consumers. For advertisers, the always-on nature is also attractive, and customers using mobile phones to connect are genuine customers, not windowshoppers. Also, the return on investment is measurable. Overall, though, the mobile is about building bridges, it takes users from one platform to another, and this is crucial.

The measurability of the effectiveness of mobile advertising is crucial. While privacy remains enabled, location, age, gender, and spending patterns of users are known, and this enables targetted advertising, which in turn increases the return on investment for advertisers. Click-through rates on Bigpond and Sensis mobile sites are around 1-12%, but the interaction rate with advertiser content after clicking through is around 30%, which is significant. Additionally, users take the result of searches with them - for advertisers, that means that users find them more reliably.

The Telstra 1234 business search service now sends a free SMS back to the user, too - and advertisers may soon also be able to take advantage of this by sending information about promotion events to people who have previously searched for them. Telstra is also launching the QR codes (or semacodes) which enable mobile phone users to scan in specific barcodes in order to get links to mobile sites with more information; these sites can also be dynamic and can offer different promotional material or special offers depending on the time of day or day in the week.

This also allows for further integration between print, display, and mobile advertising - and such marketing campaigns have been proven to maximise customer reach and spend. (21% of users participating in the recent Lexus L'Exhibition integrated campaign actually called a dealer.) In Japan, QR codes have even been included in TV broadcasts. Another addition which is likely to come to Australia sooner or later is using the mobile phone for payment as well - this, then, closes the final gap in the loop. Rachel describes such approaches a building bridges between advertisers and users.

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