It can be as simple as putting your website onto the mobile, extending an application onto the handset, or increasing the reach of your proposition to the ‘Y’ generation.

Apparently the world’s 3 billion mobile phone users should all be enjoying the multi-layered benefits provided by the advanced state of today’s global infrastructure – wrong ! You only have to go onto a limited number of mobile web sites to get the real picture – bad response time, illegible graphics, little or no interactivity etc. etc. There are of course one or two exceptions to the rule but by and large there is a paucity of mobile sites offering good two way traffic. So why is all this so difficult when the technology has been available for years?

Well consider this – is size important? We all know the answer to this one – so why bother trying to get a quart into a pint pot and transferring ‘War and Peace’ onto a screen a fraction of the size of the average lap-top. If you are mobilising your brand or proposition – boil down the mobile functionality in direct proportion to the screen size. If you are running a traditional ‘brochure’ website you will need a lot less functionality on the mobile screen so think about what your mobile consumers want to consume and how they want to interact with you. Use the mobile for what it is good at – bite sized pieces of consumable and relevant information or content delivered ‘on the move’.

Mobile enablement initiatives invariably take far too long and run out of steam because the project sponsors often lose sight of the reasons why they have done it in the first place. Any supplier can put their brand on a mobile but unless you know and consider why you are ‘going mobile’ the opportunity could be wasted. Are you looking to directly increase revenues, to increase your customer base or simply to create awareness? For each scenario there is a different type of mobile offering – lose sight of this and you might lose much of the impact of your campaign.

A number of major brands are now ‘getting mobile’ and are seeing massive benefit from a structured approach. Volkswagon of America have recently conducted some very successful mobile campaigning. Their campaigns have been well planned and well executed and are delivering the appropriate results. The first month of Facebook’s mobile version saw 65 million hits in the first month and since then they have not looked back – that’s nearly 25% of their global reach. So the moral of the story here is with planning and focus – anything can be achieved.

Am I saying that a successful mobile enablement campaign is only for those brands with deep pockets – absolutely not. Mobile enablement is available to everyone but the success of your offering is all down to planning. Mobestar makes all the necessary tools available to everyone and has packaged the processes and technology into a single product suite called mLite. We know that a thousand mile journey starts with a single step and to make sure that your first step into mobile enablement is a good one we will let you try out mLite for nothing.

Money back if not delighted – oh but we are not charging anyway (doh!).

Posted by: Peter Richards on 26/10/2009