Analyst Speak: Ignore the hype and tailor your mobile activity to your audience
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Edward Kershaw, VP of mobile media, The Nielsen Company
Unless you really understand the mobile behaviour of your target consumers, you’re in danger of wasting your money. Although stories about the iPhone regularly feature in the press, it’s vital that you’re not blinded by the hype, otherwise you’ll end up with a distorted picture of the mobile market. While agencies and developers may love creating apps for the iPhone, do the majority of your target audience even download apps?
It’s not my intention to knock the iPhone, but as a celebrated icon of our time it’s a good example for putting things in context. In Q2 of this year almost 770,000 people in the UK had an iPhone, of whom fewer than 60% downloaded some form of app or software. As post-campaign analysis for mobile marketing is still in its infancy, you need to ensure your pre-campaign targeting is as precise as possible. So if you’re looking to create an iPhone app to target 25-34-year-old men who have recently downloaded apps, then your total potential audience is no bigger than 96,000 - just one in every 63 Britons who own a mobile. Even if you manage to get 5% of this target audience to download your app, that’s fewer than 5,000 people.
There are lots of other consumers who are very engaged in mobile media, just in different ways, and if you’re trying to reach the mass market there are certainly more efficient ways. For example, aside from SMS and MMS, the most popular UK media activities on mobile in Q2 were playing pre-installed games (9.5m Britons), followed by using the mobile internet (8.8m), emailing (5.1m) and receiving text alerts (3.5m). If we go back to our example target group of young men, the last of these activities represents a potential audience of almost 586,000 people and a method which is relatively cheap to employ.
So whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher, you need to look closely at the mobile life of your audience; their handsets, usage of mobile media, attitudes to technology, even their typical mobile tariff. Then work out how best to reach them. Will a mobile website be right or should you focus on engaging people through text messaging? Or is an iPhone app the best way to reach them, after all?
