Want to get into mobile marketing? Know your customer

Mobile marketing strategies mean nothing if the company executing them knows nothing about how their customers use their phones in the first place. This excerpt from the book, "The Third Screen: The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing," by Chuck Martin highlights key questions companies need to answer about their customers' mobile behaviors. Martin is an author, speaker, industry watcher and columnist who writes about mobile initatives and other marketing issues across the digital landscape. In this excerpt, he examines when creating Mobile apps can be appropriate for companies and how to demonstrate value to the customer when communicating in a mobile setting.

The marketing strategy for interacting with the mobile consumer should align with the goals of the business, and should take advantage of the new opportunities presented by mobile capabilities. The first step in this process is to evaluate the current and future mobile use of current and future customers.

Different demographic groups can be associated with specific mobile phones or platforms, so the first step is to determine what your customers use, that is, the phones they own and the mobile platforms they use, such as Apple, Android, or BlackBerry. One way to determine customer use patterns is to conduct a survey that simply asks customers what kinds of phones they use and whether they have smartphones. Another approach is to launch a mobile website and track the difference in traffic compared with the regular website. It is likely that a percentage of any given audience will have smartphones; the question is whether that percentage represents a small or large slice of your particular customer group.

It is also possible that the best customers of your business use one dominant category of phone, such as a smartphone. You should then research what your customers are actually doing with their mobile phones. Are they texting, emailing, comparison shopping, buying, or watching video? The types of actions they perform can provide an indication of the manner in which they might be most comfortable interacting.