The concept of mobile-first marketing is still fairly new, but consumers are telling us we need to pay attention to mobile in a big way. In our 2015 Adobe Mobile Benchmark Report, we found that “the top 20% of sites are already passing the tipping point where more than half of their traffic is mobile. And at specific times, e.g. holidays, the proportion of mobile traffic can exceed 70%. It is not a question of if or even when, but rather how do we become mobile first, if not mobile only.”
Transforming your entire organization around mobile is crucial to the success of mobile-first marketing. At this year’s Adobe Summit, I talked about this with two marketing leaders — Matt Jones and Igor Bekker — for high-visibility brands.
Matt Jones, General Manager of Mobile for Home Depot
Matt Jones — believing a successful transformation to a mobile-first organization is very possible — put it this way, “To be successful and to really scale across a large enterprise, you’ve got to get a variety of different stakeholders working collectively behind a vision.”
So, how do you start? For Matt Jones, it started like it does for many other brands: mobile app, mobile web, or both. Matt explained, “If we were to go back in time to 2010, let’s say, probably the topic of this discussion would have been mobile app or mobile web, right? One or the other, and where are you going to invest your time and resources? . . . You needed to be all-in one way or the other, and I think, what we’ve learned over time was that really, you need to be great at both, because your customers are not so neatly segmented.” (See the Mobile Benchmark Report for more on this topic.)
Igor Bekker, SVP of e-Commerce and Digital Marketing at Alex and Ani
In Igor’s case, they started with many questions, to which Igor began:
So, before we … embarked on a mobile app project, there was [sic] a few things we needed to solve. Looking at it holistically, there were two problems. Problem number one is, why, what for? Is it just another sales tool? Is this sort of a me, too app, just jumping on a bandwagon … then you have it for [a] year and then you deprecate it? Second problem is, how do you build it, right? Do you go custom? Is it [Are we in] the early stages of e-commerce platforms, where everybody build [sic] their own e-commerce technology, then that technology never spoke to any other tools you brought in, right? Or do we wait for the maturity of the platforms and the APIs to mature, and what is the risk in that?
Who Owns Mobile?
Then, there is the question of who owns mobile. The answer can be as diverse as the universe of brands. For instance, Matt’s challenge is to transform from a single mobile team to an organization-wide, mobile-first approach, as he explains:
I’d say we’re in the midst of a journey right now in trying to figure out how to scale mobile from a tiger team approach that we’ve had for [several] years, which is sort of how we incubated and developed what we’ve built in a large company … to finding ways to spread responsibility for mobile across, frankly, the whole company, down to store manager levels and people that work in store operations. Mobile’s not something that can be successful at the Home Depot with a small team of ninjas. We need to have the entire company behind the effort.
A Slightly Different Challenge to Becoming Mobile-First
For Igor, the challenge to becoming mobile-first is slightly different. “So, Alex and Ani, in comparison to Home Depot, we’re a speck in terms of online sales, but mobile is everybody’s role in the organization. So, digital strategy prides itself on transparency … We open it up to everyone. For example, our founder is a major stakeholder in terms of how … mobile work[s]? Specifically, the app and the experiences the app provides, B2B, wholesale, international customer engagement team, and obviously, e-commerce and digital marketing. So, we all play a key role in the product road map.”
Top Retailers’ Journeys to Becoming Mobile-First
For retailers like Home Depot and Alex and Ani, a primary objective in becoming mobile-first is combining mobile and in-store experiences. They each accomplish this through storytelling and inspiring their customers.
Igor explained how Alex and Ani approaches its storytelling: “When you go to the physical store, we don’t just sell you the goods. Our store associates will be called bartenders. They connect with you on a very personal level, they hear your story. People cry, people get engaged in our stores … [we] have the customer play a key in our storytelling.”
In Matt’s case, Home Depot has a similar objective: to provide an awesome brand experience by becoming part of a customer’s life experiences: “… inspiration is a big part of what drives Home Depot as well. Anybody who’s a homeowner is passionate about their home and wants that home to be a reflection of who they are and they want to be proud of it. When we can drive inspiration amongst our customer base … whether it’s through digital experiences or whether in the store, we’re able to engage with that customer, answer questions for them, provide guidance for them, recommend products.”
Check out the entire session at Adobe Summit 2016 in the mobile track (#705) where I discussed organizing for mobile success with Matt and Igor. We asked more challenging questions about organizing around mobile, and I think you’ll be intrigued by their responses. You can also check out the direct link to the Summit Session 705 transcript here, where you can locate the quotes referred to throughout this article in their entirety.
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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/taking-leap-toward-mobile-first-marketing/
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