Tags: apple, Digital, iphone, mobile
It’s time for a post in the occasional series of things ‘you should seriously look at’ in the marketing space. Today, one of Steve Jobs’s babies – iPhone Apps.
We said in our review of the year in December that this was the year of mobile marketing. Inclusion of mobile at the number 1 spot for growth and potential was almost totally due to Apple’s iPhone Apps. They’ve taken mobile marketing to a different league, a new ball park, a quantum leap upwards. But why? Well, for a few years now mobile marketing was locked into SMS and WAP (I’ve had comments on this blog about the potential for SMS as a marketing tool by the SMS Defence League, so I’ll undertake a review of txting + rtrn 2 tht in a ftre pst).
WAP has been a spectacular failure. Slow, difficult to access, poor on customer value. You can’t win them all, or indeed wap them all.
What makes iPhone Apps different is that they are essentially little desktops on the phone, small spaces that can behave like websites but are, er, smaller. You can send any information you want to the apps, or collect any info you like from the apps. As a business, it’s a way of reaching right into your customers lives and embedding your brand in their daily activities, the dream of any marketer. You see, apps provide our old friend VALUE. Real value, not some contrived production-centric value dreamed up by Dave in the next office, this is real value, now.
How do I make great apps, I hear you say, here’s how:
a. Think about your customer’s life. Identify as many things that they do daily, weekly and monthly, that you can think of. These are things that are not necessarily connected to your brand, just things. If you’re rubbish at this (and rubbish = less than 20) then go and find a customer and ask them, or an agency who can find customers and ask them.
b. Take the list and answer the question ‘what value do they get from this activity?’ You can have more than one value from an activity.
c. List all of the activities and values on the wall and get as many people as you can to choose their top 10 values. Criteria for choosing are ‘it is real’ and ‘it has vaguely something to do with our brand/company/products’
d. Once everyone has marked their top 10, add it all up and find out the overall top 5 values (not the top 5 activities, the top 5 values).
e. Take the overall top 5 values and either brainstorm apps that could deliver this value or find an agency to do it.
f. Decide if you want to offer the app for free or charge depending on how worried you are about your traditional business model (or maybe don’t have a traditional business model if you’re an online organisation).
g. Launch the top 1 or 2 apps once you’ve seen the creative ideas based on the values.
h. Don’t forget to keep on feeding information and data into the app or people will think it’s rubbish.
i. Post a comment to tell us all how it went, and accept the promotion when the boss realises how good you are.
