Post 8 of 12 – Choosing a Mobile Partner

So far in this series we have talked about the things you need to consider when looking to establish your mobile strategy. We have read about the types of things you can do to link your mobile strategy into your existing business goals. I have spoken about how to use the mobile channel to enhance your existing communications and sales channels and we have read how to test our organisation’s understanding of what mobile can do for our business.

We know our mobile strategy can be scalable and should fit into our over arching marketing plan and we are ready to move onto choosing a mobile partner.

Start by doing your research and shortlisting mobile partners based on their capabalities and sector expertise. Consider if they provide a holistic approach or specialise in specific types of technologies or solutions. Your chosen partner should work with you and your business to understand the companies objectives and advise appropriate solutions.

The next question to ask is how will they do this beyond the initial sales staff? Are they really consultative with well defined processes to engage and understand?

Do these processes actually engage the right part of your business ensuring a well balanced understanding?

Next you need to know what they offer in both knowledge and product functionality across the key elements of the customer lifecycle.  How can they help you at each stage from targeting and acquiring new customers through to growth and retention strategies.

Next you need to know that they offer a full suite of mobile marketing solutions, these may be sector specific solutions or in some cases the partner in question may just offer technology and expect you to have a certain amount of infrastructure to go around it.

An effective end to end solution provider will cover all aspects of mobile marketing including database management, customer acquisition, loyalty and mobile commerce. They will have a deep understanding on how to apply this thinking to individual business sectors and will be able to illustrate their recommendations using previous examples which they have implemented.

If a specific type of technology is employed to create, for example, a retail voucher redemption solution, then how does this integrate with your EPOS, database and possibly loyalty card vendors, can is support high volume redemption and customer interaction, will it offer service availability levels conducive to my business demands?

A professional mobile marketing solutions business will be able to evidence a clearly defined consultancy process. A good mobile partner will have a suite of professional mobile marketing solutions and services and I will talk through this in more detail in the next post in this series.

thanks

themobileexpert