Customer tracking and targeted marketing has become a topic of interest in the last few years and for good reason. We as marketers want to know where our client is and what kind of meaningful message or offer to send to them. We strive to catch them in the moment and capitalize on that moment especially when they are in close proximity to our brand. That’s why the grocery stores have all the goodies right up front so your kids can bug you until you cave to the pressure.
Technology companies have been touting that they have the remedy to make all of our marketing dreams come true with LBS Tracking and Triangulation, but the fact of the matter is that there are smoke and mirrors involved. In order to get a third party (non carrier) location tracking product to work will require the customer to install a mobile application on their handset. This application can then actively ping the marketing production server to request new content when in certain areas and push new marketing content down to the customer handset. In theory this is a really effective way to communicate with our most loyal customers, but there is more to it.
Customers are reluctant to install third party application on their phone due to the fact that they are worried about breaking their phone, particularly if it is provided by their employer. The frustrating part is that I haven’t seen too many third party applications work on my Windows Mobile handset, heck; I haven’t seen many OEM applications that work as designed. For this reason, I mandated that my developers at SkyWire Media to code our products in browser friendly languages like WAP, WML and HTML. This may not work on 100% of handsets that the world offers, but I am confident that we are working on over 90% of current mobile handsets. This is not the case for the third party mobile application…..I would say that they are not supported on 50% of the devices.
The biggest reason that these mobile application technologies have not been successful is due to market fragmentation. This fragmentation is rooted from the fact that each mobile handset developer uses different operating systems on their devices along with disparate hardware and configurations. This becomes a software developer’s nightmare. With the amount of new phone that are released each month, it becomes impossible to write code and sustain a successful quality assurance system. It becomes ground hogs day for geeks causing them to reinvent themselves every day.
The good news is that at some point all OEM’s will create a common, consistent design allowing for a universal language support system. Maybe it will be Java, Ajax or something else. The iPhone is a great example of getting this right. For now the best techniques for mobile marketing are Opt in via Web Site, WAP site or SMS Short Code. Finally, who in their right mind would want any marketer to have the ability to track your every move and keep location based information on file for future analysis.
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