Benefits of a Successful Mobility Strategy (Part 3) – Brand

Branding has the power to define an organization and allows customers to connect their experiences, purchases, values and emotions to your company. Whether branding plays a small or large role within your company’s corporate framework, it’s important to understand the many avenues to increasing brand awareness and perception in today’s increasingly digital marketing landscape.

Though the two previous articles examined the benefits of mobility on revenue and team, mobile isn’t restricted to operational measures. Mobility can be used to benefit an organization’s brand, which can have an enormous impact on your bottom line.

Competitive Advantages

Organizations aim to invite customers to interact with their brand, products and services through the devices and distribution channels they’re already using in their daily lives. “Download our app” has become a common call-to-action, but simply offering an app is not a sound mobile strategy.

Organizations need to explore which aspects of their mobile apps can give their brands a competitive advantage in their respective markets, as mobile web and interactive applications can be an effective way to engage an audience beyond pure marketing messages. These apps can be used to introduce new customers to the brand, or reinforce brand loyalty with existing customers. They can also be an effective way to speak to your competitors’ customers— directly through devices that are far more personal to them than TV, print or mass-web channels.

All organizations now have the opportunity to differentiate and define their brand in the mobile ecosystem, which is why it’s important that your brand stand out.

New Products and Services

Extending your existing products and services to the mobile sphere may mean more than just making them available on devices like smartphones and tablets; it may mean changing the way your organization sells.

Consider the real estate industry and how it’s changed through the digital revolution. Once upon a time, if you were looking for listings of houses for sale, you would buy the newspaper. Along comes the internet, and the logical extension of that practice is to now browse those same listings on a website. Real estate websites didn’t change all that much for about 10 years… until the mobile revolution came along.

Once people were using internet-connected devices, a whole range of new products were developed to enhance and indeed change the property market. For example:

Using codes on listings that when texted or SMS’d to a number would return the property listing details

Putting QR codes on “For Sale” signs that can be quickly scanned and used to deliver listing details via an app or mobile-optimised website
Augmented reality and location-aware applications for looking at a house through the device’s camera, and having the house price and agent’s details overlayed on the image
The ability to find listings in the area around your current location and based on other listing criteria
Instant finance approvals generated from mobile devices at auctions

As you can see, many of these innovative tools leverage device capabilities such as GPS and cameras to deliver new levels of context and immediacy to the time-consuming practice of searching for a house. The real estate agencies, property developers and financial institutions that have created and embraced these new services are the ones seeing the most benefit from successful mobile strategies.

Demonstrating Innovation

The evolution of new products and services such as the ones above gives organizations the potential to demonstrate brand innovation. For these cutting-edge businesses, innovation is a mechanism for building value into their brand, and mobility is the platform on which it is built.

Technology changes at rapid rates, and brands generally want to be associated with what is new. Right now, “mobile” is still growing and evolving; however, the market is already well-educated in its potential and power.

Organisations that don’t respond with successful mobility strategies will soon find themselves looking old and behind the times. The time to consider mobile is now.

The Benefits of a Successful Mobile Strategy

Revenue. Team. Brand.

These are just three areas where a successful mobile strategy should have visible and measurable positive benefits for organisations. Approaching mobility as an integral part of a wholistic marketing and product development plan is the key to delivering truly positive benefits to your organisation.

Dale Rankine (4 Posts)

Cloud Sherpas Senior Mobility Consultant for the Australian/South Pacific region, Dale has been a member of Australia's digital industry for more than 14 years, as a designer, developer, manager, entrepreneur, trainer and evangelist. He is recognized globally as an expert in product design and marketing, U/X and strategy for mobile platforms, and has been a regular speaker and trainer at events around the world for the likes of Adobe, Vodafone and Nokia. In his capacity at Cloud Sherpas, Dale specializes in assisting enterprise clients in the planning, design and development of native and cross-platform mobile applications and experiences.