If you’ve built a mobile site and put redirects in place, your content will stand a good change of getting found via mobile search traffic — assuming, of course, that your desktop site is search optimized as well. If it is, odds are it will rank highly on mobile devices and your mobile site can simply piggyback on this search equity via the redirect.

But you can’t depend on this scenario alone. “If you build, it they will come” isn’t a guarantee in any kind of marketing, let alone mobile. More and more users are searching for and engaging with brands on their smartphones. Search engine marketing (SEM), display and other forms of mobile advertising play a big role in making this happen.

Today, lets start by taking a look at the basics of mobile SEM, the first and most essential form of mobile advertising that most of us will engage in.

Mobile SEM Fundamentals

Most mobile searches still flow through mobile browsers and native app versions of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (at least here in the U.S.A). Right now, Google dominates the US market, owning 96.9% of mobile web searches as of May 2012, according to web analytics service StatCounter, which makes the mobile search landscape familiar territory for most of us. Mobile SEM will be highly important to you if:

• You’re a brick-and-mortar business
• You drive leads, subscriptions, or direct sales that can be executed over the phone
• You are distributing native mobile apps
• Your content and offers are time sensitive
• You are doing local marketing of any kind

Essentially, if you are looking to drive certain types of conversions via mobile, SEM will be your primary, go-to solution.

But take note that these conversions don’t necessarily involve ecommerce. Ask any SEM professional who has explored mobile and they will tell you that actual online purchase on smartphones still lag behind the desktop and, especially, tablets. While tablet users are making mobile purchases in high numbers, smartphones support shopping in a different way, leading to information that supports the customer experience, helps qualify purchase decisions, and leads to in-store transactions.

That’s not say there are no purchases happening via mobile — clearly there are and smartphone transactions will continue to climb in the next year, but that’s a topic for a whole different column. You simply need to keep in mind what the current strong points of mobile SEM are, as you craft your strategy.

Mobile Search Ad Types

You can place mobile search ads through Google and Bing, but chances are you’re going to focus primarily on Google since it owns the biggest audience. The other engines do matter, of course — Bing, for example, is the default search engine on Blackberry devices, which, despite the hits the platform has taken in the press in the past year, still owns a significant audience. But Google will be your starting point given its volume.

If you’ve ever used AdWords, you’ll see that the Google mobile ad layout is quite familiar — there are slight differences, but it’s mainly the same old search ad format with special options layered in for mobile. While you can target by keyword, there are extra mobile inclusions such as device platform, operating system (OS), and wireless carrier plus old standbys such as language, day parting, and geography. There are also special mobile ad formats that you’ll want to be aware of, including:

• Click-to-call: these ads leverage the fundamental and often forgotten feature of your smartphone — the ability to actually make a call! They show a clickable phone number within the body of the ad, and, according to Google, increase CTR by 6% – 8%.

• Click-to-download: These ads have been specifically crafted to drive downloads of native mobile applications, appearing only on the devices your app is designed for — e.g., an ad for an iPhone app will only appear on iOS devices. The clickable link takes the user directly to the app’s download page in the app store (iTunes or Google Play.)

• App Extensions: this format is a twist on the previous one. Like Click-to-Download, these ads are designed to promote apps but in this case, they target users who already have your app installed, encouraging them to open the app and interact with it. Whereas the previous format drives downloads, this one drives engagement.

• Click-to-offer: This format inserts a special offer or deal into the body of the ad which the users can then redeem online, offline, or send to themselves via text message or email for future redemption. Click-to-Offer has a unique appeal since it can be used to drive online transactions as well as in-store traffic.

• Mobile site links: Like the desktop version, mobile site links are additional, clickable links in the body of your ad that increase the odds of capturing a user’s attention, creating a faster, more efficient path to conversion.

• Local and Hyperlocal extensions: Since 1 in 3 searches on high-end devices have local intent (again, according to Google, and they should know)—location is probably the most effective targeting you can do in mobile search advertising. Local and hyperlocal extensions enable users to find local locations faster and easier by including a phone number and/or a link to a maps application, usually Google Maps.

All the mobile ad formats give you a rich array of options to choose from in driving search traffic to your site (or store!). But there are a few additional things you’ll need to keep in mind in the process:

• Separate mirrored campaigns are a must: many SEMs still run hybrid mobile campaigns by simply opting in for all devices in their main desktop campaign, but that’s a missed opportunity! Separate, mirrored campaigns for smartphones and tablets enable you to take advantage of the unique, aforementioned ad formats and to craft mobile-specific calls-to-action that will be more compelling to these users. Go the extra mile and separate your campaigns out. It’s worth the effort!

• Use Google’s mobile keyword tool: Mobile keywords do differ from the desktop and Google’s free keyword toolbox has mobile options baked in that will help inform your mobile ad strategy.

• Bid to the 1^st two positions on a mobile SERP: Smartphone SERPs have only four ad positions at most —two at the top of the page, two at the bottom. It’s not unusual to see CTR drop roughly 90 percent between the first and fourth positions. Long story short—if you aren’t at the top of the page, you may as well not be there at all. Be prepared to bid aggressively at the start, and then manage your budget to maintain high visibility.

• Day-part effectively: Different mobile devices have varying spikes and ebbs in traffic. Smartphones, for example, tend to peak at lunchtime and on weekend days, while tablets rule the evenings all week long. Watching your site analytics will give you sense not only of what platforms your customers are engaging with, but when they are doing it — highly valuable information to feed into your day-parting strategy.

• Send mobile users to mobile content: this probably goes without saying, but in most cases, you will only mobile-optimize a subset of your desktop content. So revisit our first tip above about separate, mirrored campaigns. If you’re simply transferring your desktop SEM campaigns to mobile, you may be driving traffic to areas of your site that aren’t mobile-friendly — which is a waste of time for your customer and reflects poorly on you. Think carefully about the ads you create and where they will lead the user.

The idea of mobilizing your .com content is probably daunting enough and no doubt, having to consider driving traffic all over again might seem overwhelming. But the good news is that for most of us, Google is such familiar territory that it won’t be a scary leap. So, if you’ve been opting-in your desktop campaigns for mobile, stop right now and separate them out.

You can start small. I’d recommend you allocate a percentage of your overall search budget to mobile using your current mobile search traffic as a guide. If you’re seeing 10% of your overall site traffic from mobile devices, then 10% additional spend on top of your current SEM budget is a good place to start.

And remember, that these are the basics—your first starting point in driving mobile traffic. We’ll talk about most advanced options next time around…

Download numbers are the simplest aspect of the equation, piped daily into your iTunes Connect or Google Play account.

Engagement is a less straightforward metric; the number of times an app is used in a specific time period, actions performed, shares to social networks, are all great top level criteria for measuring the success of your content.

How you actually go about tracking and measuring each is somewhat more complex than simple downloads. You’ll need to do a fair amount of tagging, tracking, and analyzing to get an accurate picture — much heavier lifting than simply checking your daily downloads and app rank. But it can be done.

The Most Valuable Metric Of All

Unfortunately, there’s one thing you can’t easily decipher, and that’s where your app sits on a user’s desktop. And that might just be the most valuable metric of all.

In previous posts, we’ve discussed the concept of personal real estate – those first two or three screens of a user’s smartphone or tablet desktop.

This is where we store the apps most important to our daily lives and these are the screens we see upwards of 30 times day as we glance at our devices to check the time, view text messages, check voice mail, open apps, and surf the web.

Having your brand identity situated on one of these screens is is clearly of high value yet, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever calculated its true worth, perhaps for the simple reason that there’s no clear way to do so. No API or cookie can enable you to track where an end user chooses to relegate your app — it’s the missing metric in the app ecosystem.

Short of polling your users individually (tedious but not such a bad idea…) there’s just no way to know. So here’s where I recommend relying on the “case study of one” method. Take a step back, look at the apps that live on the first and second screens of your device, and think about why they’ve earned that spot.

Making It Onto The Home Screen

Based on personal and professional experience, I have a few ideas on how an app actually achieves this kind of premium placement. I hate to fall back on the “case study of one” approach but I do think looking at a single, highly mobile user can be a valuable thing. While I may not be Nielsen or comScore, I am willing to share my iPhone desktop and some personal details with you, so take it for what it’s worth.

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I am:

• a married mom of two pre-schoolers
• a city worker and suburban dweller
• a household decision maker
• an advertising industry executive
• an avid cook
• a book lover
• an amateur photographer
• a frequent business traveler
• a jogger and Pilates enthusiast

This is a small and fragmented portrait of who I am, but compare these high level demo, pyscho and techno-graphics I’ve shared to the items on the first few screens of my smartphone desktop.

Utility, Inspiration And Entertainment Win Out

You’ll note that the precious inches of my homescreen are relegated to apps that support the main quadrants of my life and see weekly if not daily use.

Twitter and Facebook, my main personal social networks, are opened multiple times a day — having them on anything other than the home screen would cost me precious seconds in swiping and searching that I can’t afford to lose when I’m in the mobile context.

Waterlogged and Nike Running, on the other hand, have earned their premium position not because I use them daily (I don’t) but because I’m trying to shame myself into doing so.

Citibank and BofA, my main financial institutions, stay on the home screen since I use them multiple times throughout the week to juggle household bills and expenses.

Kraft’s iFood and FreshDirect on the other hand, help support my daily duties as my family’s personal chef.

Linkedin and Evernote are there to help me manage my professional life on a regular basis — both are opened multiple times in a single day.

And Kindle and NPR are there to help me unwind and unplug on my daily commute.

As you can see, the apps that occupy my primary personal real estate are those that support my needs and personal well being as a working mom, a commuter, and a busy professional.

For your branded app to earn one of these spaces, it will need to feed into one of these aspects of my identity in a fundamental way. Moreover, it will need to do so better than one of my current apps in order to earn one of these premium spots.

Let’s take  a look at screen 2:

Once again, you’ll see that the apps here are tightly aligned with my identity as a household manager and decision maker (shopping and cooking), a professional (business travel apps) and a mom (kids apps).

A scant two apps have made it on to this second screen due solely to entertainment value — most have a very practical purpose in my life. Each of these are opened at least once a week and some many more times than that. And I usually see their logos on my second home screen on an almost daily basis, whether I open them or not.

Standing Out And Winning That Coveted Spot

The lesson here? I’m just one working mom but I think it’s safe to safe to say I’m a microcosm of what’s out there. As a professional, a parent, and a household decision maker, if you have something to sell, you’re trying to sell it to someone very much like me.

So what’s the value of having your logo on my home screen or second screen, where I’m likely to see it multiple times a day? Well, it’s difficult to give you an ROI equation for something we can’t actually track. But I think that this small example illustrates a few aspects of what it takes to get there. Namely:

• Know your audience: focus on giving them the tools and content that will support some aspect of their personal or professional life in some fundamental way. Keep the analogy of mobile-device-as-a-remote-control-for-your-life top of mind. Your app should help the user manage/achieve/enjoy in some indispensable way.
• Promote frequency of use: if I’m not using your app once a day — or at least once a week, it’s not making it onto one of my first two screens. Out of sight equals out of mind so give me content and functionality that encourages frequent use and don’t be afraid to tap me on the shoulder now and then with push alerts.
• Do it better than the other guy: the app ecosystem is ridiculously crowded. Chances are there are 1000+ other apps that do what you app does. So look at your competition and understand what the table stakes are in terms of content and features, then focus on doing a few key things just a little better than they do. Make your app a little easier to use, shoot for higher quality of content and relevance to your target demographic and, above all, make it easier to find both within the app stores and outside them.

In conclusion, there’s nothing that will guarantee you a premium spot on the user’s mobile desktop — that’s always going to be a complex balance of who that user is and his or her unique blend of needs and interests.

Nonetheless, it should be your goal for any app you create. There may not be a clear way to measure it, but focus on content relevance and usability for your target market and you’ll be more than halfway there.

Their point of view is that HTML5 can now support so many of the same functions of a native app, that you are better off building a mobile website instead.

Why Bother With The App Store?

In many cases, they are correct — building a mobile site will often be faster and more cost-effective and enable you to avoid the frustrations of dealing with app store approvals and updates.

In fact, there are only a few cases in which a native app is truly the optimal decision: mobile games, which require a high level of animation and detail, and apps that involve intense manipulation of images such as detailed product views, 360 degree spins, and the like.

Even these functions can be achieved with HTML5 — just not quite so efficiently as with the native app code.

So, from a practical perspective, yes, you can opt to build a mobile site instead of an app most of the time.

Be Where Users Are Looking

But I predict we’ll all still be building apps for some time to come for the simple reason that it is what the industry — and users — demand.

App stores, iTunes in particular, have become a critical content discovery channel and if you are a household name brand, your customers will expect to find you there.

Over time, HTML5 web applications may indeed supplant native apps altogether.

In 2-3 years, we may find that app stores have evolved to be destinations where we discover links to mobile web applications and purchase access to and subscriptions for, browser-based mobile content.

For us, the users, it doesn’t matter how the app is built — most of us don’t know or care about the difference between native code and browser code. We just want good content that’s easy to find. Which is why app stores are here to stay.

Unfortunately, this brings about a whole new set of considerations for marketers. With a mobile website, you have simply have to build a great site and direct traffic to it via SEO and SEM (ok, it’s a little harder than it sounds).

Visibility In The App Store

But, with app stores, achieving visibility is much, much more complex whether you’re marketing a native app now or an HTML5  mobile web app in the future. So today, I’ll give you the very high level basics of app store visibility and how to achieve it.

First and foremost, you have to understand that visibility in iTunes and other app stores is largely calculated based on the number of downloads you generate on a consistent daily basis compared to similar apps within the same category.

Say, for example, you are a hotel chain that has just released a booking and loyalty app. Your main goals would probably be to:

• Appear within the top 20 apps in the Travel category, and,
• To outrank your competitors for the keyword “hotel” in that same category.

Your ability to achieve the first goal will be based completely on how many downloads you generate on a daily basis vs. all the other apps in the Travel category.

You ability to achieve the second goal will be based on how many downloads you generate for the keyword “hotel” within the Travel category.

So, at least at first glance, it’s all about downloads. Apple, Google and the other major app stores have never released any kind of algorithm publicly but let’s say it looks something like this:

Paid/Bought Media Is The First Step

So, any app marketing strategy has to have a strong focus on generating downloads and that’s where media comes in. Paid or bought media, in the form of display, search marketing, and incentivized downloads and reviews are instrumental in driving the volume of downloads required to float to the top of your chosen category in any given app store.

There’s no doubt that paid/bought media works — spend enough and you’ll generate a high volume of downloads. But bought media only works as long as you pay for it. What’s more, bought media is great at driving downloads but downloads are meaningless without engagement and that’s where owned and earned media come in.

Owned And Earned Media Are Essential

Owned media comes into the equation in the form of awareness elements on your website, email marketing to your customer base and leveraging your branded social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter.

These elements get the word out about your mobile app, driving traffic to its download page in the app store/s and driving ongoing engagement post-download.

Earned media, in form of influencer outreach and other types of PR, enables you to reach a broader audience outside of your current customer base by spreading positive feedback.

Ideally, your bought, earned, and owned campaign elements start together with the launch of your app, and as your owned and earned efforts begin to drive results, the bought can be scaled down to a maintenance level or nothing at all.

You’ll find that as you track your efforts, there will be a direct corollary between your app store rank and the amount of effort you expend on each sphere.

A strong, initial push with paid media at launch can easily propel your app to the 1st page of results — a well curated program of  earned and owned media post-launch can keep it there.

Checking your rank daily, both for your chosen keywords and for your overall categorical rank, will show you when you need to step up your efforts in one of these areas and will keep you mindful of the need to keep your content up to date and competitive.

The Missing Metric

It’s a delicate, symbiotic balance, but, properly managed, it can and will generate results, getting your app onto a user’s desktop and keeping it there.

Of course, the ultimate goal is getting your app onto the 1st two screen of the user’s smartphone or tablet — the prime personal real estate we’ve discussed so often before.

That is the missing metric of mobile apps — to date, there’s no automated way to track where your app appears on a user’s device, a place where location truly is everything.

In my next post, we’ll discuss this missing metric and some potential workarounds for figuring out just how valuable and visible you are to your installed user base.

One of my favorites is, “What should I develop first — a mobile site or a mobile app?” It’s an easy question to answer, at least in most cases.

But if it is a question you are trying to answer within your organization, you need details. So let’s proceed with the long explanation.

Consider the Customer Journey

The easiest way to approach the app vs. web conundrum is to frame it within the context of the customer journey. Talk to customers of any business, in any vertical, and they will usually tell you very similar things about their habits.

As a rule, mobile users across all verticals prefer web sites during initial encounters with a brand.

As their loyalty to that brand deepens and engagement increases, their preference switches to mobile apps. Speak to your customers about their preference for one vs. the other and you’re likely to hear something like this:

• “When I hear about a new brand, I search the web via desktop or mobile to learn more.”
• “If my relationship with a brand is going to be very brief or intermittent (e.g. once every few months or so), I probably will not download an app.”
• “If my relationship with a brand is intense or long-term — e.g. I buy a product that needs upkeep, become a repeat customer or join a loyalty program, I would prefer an app to manage the relationship from there on.”
• “I prefer apps because the experience is usually more tailored to my needs — e.g. streamlined content, higher level of usability, option to save info, no need for a constant data connection, etc.”

This isn’t to say, of course, that apps have no place at the beginning of the customer journey, nor that the mobile web has no place at the end.

What Consumers Want Depends On The Current Relationship

It is clear, however, that users gravitate to a certain type of mobile experience at specific points throughout the relationship.

The mobile web is easy to access and offers a broad breadth of content that one finds useful in the earlier stages of discovery and awareness. Whereas with apps, there are the interim steps of finding the right app and downloading it.

Quite often, you need to download and install several before you find one that meets your needs, assuming you find one at all. It’s a more complex medium to engage with as a user (plus, it takes up what may be valuable device storage space), hence we tend to view apps as more of a commitment.

Once the relationship is established — when we’ve bought that car, signed up for that subscription, joined that loyalty program — then we’re much more open to the idea of granting you a permanent spot on our smartphone or tablet desktop.

And that, after all, is the goal. Or at least it should be. This medium isn’t about generating downloads, it’s about generating engagement.

Downloads Are Overrated

Downloads are no big deal if downloads are all you want — you can buy them these days, if somewhat indirectly, via media. Engagement clearly takes a lot more effort.

An app content strategy that focuses on supporting the ongoing customer relationship is a start, but it doesn’t end there. Marketers are starting to realize that apps, much like websites, need constant cultivation with content continually refined to meet the evolving needs states of the loyal consumer.

We’ll explore the role of bought, earned, and owned Media in the app marketing ecosystem in my next post but, for now, consider this: the average smartphone user looks at his or her device upwards of 30+ times day. What is a spot of on this coveted piece of personal real estate worth to your brand?

It’s a topic that could — and does — fill several books, but every marketer should be aware of the basic options for mobilization of a website and how to select the right one for his or her brand.

As we explore those options, keep in mind that in most cases a mobile web site isn’t a completely new product — it’s a re-imagination of an existing desktop site.

So it’s very rare that you’ll find yourself approaching a mobile site the way you normally would approach a desktop site — i.e. planning for a completely unique design, content, architecture, and code.

At this point in time, there are very few instances where you would develop a completely new mobile website from scratch without basing your efforts, at least in part, on something that already exists. So although that may change as mobile becomes a bigger and bigger web channel, our recommendations below are based on the premise that you will be looking to mobilize your current .com desktop site.

That said, let’s look at the options:

The Fully-Hosted Mobile Site

A fully-hosted site is one in which your content is hosted by a vendor on their own servers, separate from your .com site in every way. You provide the vendor with content and desired functionality and they develop the page layout and code and host the final mobile site on your behalf. Mobile users are redirected from your desktop .com URL to the hosted version.

Fully-hosted mobile sites were the first option on the market back in the early days of the mobile web. While their popularity is waning, they’re still popular with brands just getting started, since they offer the simplest route to mobilization.

Benefits of a fully hosted mobile site include:

• Low to moderate initial cost: a brand can have a full site up and running for a moderate upfront development fee (scaled according to complexity) plus a monthly hosting charge (scaled according to impressions).
• Low level of effort: the brand simply has to hand over content and the vendor does the rest — as a rule, no technical resources are required on the brand side whatsoever.
• Fast time to market: since the vendor isn’t touching the brand’s .com environment and most are working with a library of basic templates and code snippets that are re-purposed for multiple clients, a mobile site can be up and running in a matter of weeks.

If you’re eager to get started with mobile and if you have a site that would be difficult to mobilize in a more organic way — one built in Flash, for example — the fully-hosted mobile approach can make a lot of sense.

Or, if you’re looking to create a completely fresh, stand alone mobile site that isn’t based on a desktop site — e.g. for a mobile ad campaign — again, the fully hosted option can be ideal. But there can be drawbacks to the approach

Drawbacks to a fully hosted mobile site include:

• Poor long term ROI: when you go with a fully-hosted approach, you’re buying a service — not a site. If you decide at any point you want to take your efforts in-house or switch vendors, you’re starting from scratch with no investment to carry over.
• Design limitations: most fully-hosted vendors have a fairly templated design approach and limitations to what they can achieve in terms of functionality. You may not be able to achieve the level of user experience design you’d like to have and or include certain more advanced functionality.
• Maintenance: since your content is hosted elsewhere, any time you want to make a change to your site, you need to provide the vendor with instruction and wait for them to implement your request.

So, while you can be up and running quickly, you’re not investing in tangible assets that you can leverage long term and you may pay a price in terms of design and functionality. What’s more, your content is not in your control — changes or updates are  dependent on your vendor’s schedule, not yours.

Reverse Proxy Solution

A Reverse Proxy Solution essentially re-purposes your desktop site on the fly, taking your existing content, assembling a mobile-friendly facsimile of of it, then hosting the resulting mobile site on a separate server. It’s similar to the fully-hosted solution in that your mobile site lives completely separate from your desktop site, but the overall approach is a bit more sophisticated.

Benefits of a reverse proxy mobile site include:

• Low to moderate initial cost: pricing is similar in structure to the Fully-Hosted option but tends to be a bit higher in cost. As a rule you can expect a moderate upfront development fee (scaled according to complexity) plus a monthly hosting charge (scaled according to impressions).
• Low level of effort: since the reverse proxy simply re-purposes your existing site there’s little or no need for a brand to involve technical resources — which is magic to the average marketing manager’s ears.
• Fast time to market: since the vendor isn’t touching your .com environment and is simply reformatting your existing content on the fly, the time to market is usually very quick and sometimes quicker than the Fully-Hosted approach — often as little as 4 weeks.

There are drawbacks though — the reverse proxy approach isn’t ideal for everyone:

• Poor long term ROI: again, you are purchasing a service — not a site. If you decide to go a different route or become unhappy with a vendor, you’ve made no investment that can be taken elsewhere.
• Practical limitations: reverse proxy vendors can get fairly sophisticated with look and feel but they are limited based on the content of your site — they can’t create specific mobile functions that aren’t there on the desktop. Also, if you have content contained in Flash or exceedingly complex informational structures or elaborate imagery they may not be able to re-purpose your content successfully.
• Maintenance: ideally, your desktop site and mobile site should stay in synch but often, on the fly changes can break the mobile experience unless the vendor is given prior warning.

Think of the reverse proxy as the next step up from the fully-hosted solution. You can create a slightly more sophisticated experience that is more closely in synch with your .com and you can get to market faster, but your content is still living on someone else’s server and not entirely in your control.

Cloud Platform Mobile Site

The cloud platform approach is ideal if you have a bit more internal technical expertise. These vendors offer a suite of tools and hosted services that enable you to quickly develop a robust mobile site. You develop the site content — most commonly with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 — and incorporate additional proprietary scripts, services, markup, and device detection from the vendor. The final site is hosted within your own .com environment, enabling you to fully own your content.

Cloud platform services are relatively new and have multiple benefits:

• Cross-platform reach: the tools that cloud platforms offer enable you to render multiple iterations of  your site on the fly so that you can service a broad expanse of high- and low-end devices.
• Rich UI: Images and even video can be re-purposed in real time for diverse platforms, making it possible to create a truly rich media experience for as many users as possible.

For brands that have internal resources, cloud platforms are an excellent option but there are some potential drawbacks.

Drawbacks to a cloud platform mobile site include:

• Cost: though you are hosting your own content, you are still purchasing a service, and without it, your site won’t work. If you decide to switch vendors or go a different route altogether you may be able to re-purpose some elements of the site — but you may not. You also have to consider the cost of the service along with your internal costs of developing and hosting the site.
• Higher Strategic and Design Level of Effort: the key benefit of the cloud platform option is the ability it gives you to reach the full spectrum of mobile devices. This can be a double-edged sword since it forces you to consider designing separate user experiences and content strategies based on high- and low-end devices.
• Higher Maintenance Level Of Effort: Unlike the fully-hosted and proxy options, this approach does necessitate maintaining your own content. To do so effectively you’ll need to delegate ongoing technical support to keeping the site updated and running properly.

Cloud platforms are really ideal for brands that want to reach both high- and low-end users and provide the best possible experience for all.

It’s also an ideal solution for very sophisticated mobile user experiences which include lots of images and rich media since these assets can be rendered on the fly for every user.

Many of these vendors will also do the design and development for you and even host. The true value of cloud platforms is that you get the best of both worlds where you reach all the users you want to reach but still own your content.

CMS-Driven Mobile Site

Most popular commercial CMS solutions now have support for mobile baked in. If your .com site is CMS driven, you probably have the option of developing mobile page templates and integrating them into your CMS. You then simply need to implement some kind of device detection mechanism on the front or (preferably) back end to route mobile users to the correct content for their device.

The CMS driven approach has numerous benefits:

• Total control over URL structure and SEO: fully hosted and proxy options will usually offer you the option to alias and mask URLs (for an added fee) and in the case of Cloud Services, much of your content lives within your own server but only the CMS driven approach offers you full control over where your content resides.
• Centralized content management: since your .com and mobile sites are hosed within the same CMS, you are able to seamless update both, keeping your content in synch.
• Total control over infrastructure and deployment schedules: when you work with an outside vendor you are always dependent on their schedules in some way. The CMS driven approach allows you to exert total control over when and how your site is maintained and updated.
• Best Long Term ROI: you are utilizing the same resources — database, services, content — for multiple iterations of your site, so you’re maximizing the investment in your business over time.

Of course, not everyone can take the CMS driven approach. Your ability to do it hinges on having the right kind of CMS and the right technical resources, whether internally or with an agency partner. As with the other options, there are potential drawbacks to be aware of as well.

Drawbacks to the CMS driven approach include:

• Cost: it will almost always cost you more money upfront since you are creating tangible assets —  code and design that you own and can build on over time. You’ll spend more time creating this content and time = money.
• Time to Market: since you are designing, developing, and testing unique pages, the process will be much slower than a vendor solution where you’ll have prefab resources to rely on. In all depends on the complexity of your site but you are probably looking at months vs. weeks in time to market.
• Support for multiple form factors: One of the biggest frustrations of mobile web development is addressing the differences of device form factors. Code standards, JavaScript support, media formats and screen sizes can differ radically from device to device, making it a challenge to create a single experience that address the needs of all the users you want to reach. Multiple iterations of your mobile site may be required.

The CMS driven approach is favorable in that it offers you total ownership of your content and the best long term ROI.

However, costs and time to market can spiral out of control if you have multiple tiers of devices to support and want to create the best possible user experience for each.

If you’re catering almost exclusively to a certain subset of users — e.g. iPhone and Android — then you can probably get away with creating a single site experience. But, if you have many other device types to consider and want to serve an optimized experience to each, then you’re probably best off considering one of the aforementioned vendor solutions, at least in the near term.

Responsive Design

Last, but not least, we come to Responsive Design. The responsive approach won’t be an option for everyone since, by definition, it involves creating a whole site that flows gracefully across multiple platforms.

Most brands won’t be in a position to make a radical redesign and re-architecture of their .com site and will simply be looking for a solution to optimizing a select portion of their existing content. But, if you are at the point of developing a new site or doing a complete overhaul, the responsive approach deserves your consideration for several reasons.

Benefits of the responsive approach include:

• Economy of design: you will spend more time up front thinking about how your design progresses from device to device but in the long run, planning out your user experience with an ecosystem of multiple devices in mind will save you time and allow you to respond quickly to new form factors as they arise.
• Cost: No outside service to pay for equals savings.
• SEO: As per Cindy Krum’s recent article, having a single URL enables you to benefit from the search equity you’ve built up over time, ensuring optimal visibility across multiple platforms.

But responsive design is not a panacea for mobile — there are still drawbacks.

Drawbacks to the responsive approach include:

• Reach: not every device supports CSS queries — if you want to reach a broad number of devices, the responsive approach alone won’t suffice.
• Load times: Responsive sites load the full page and modify the layout and images according to device which can lead to extended load times on mobile.
• Design limitations: you can accomplish a lot with CSS media queries but you can’t achieve the same level of customization for mobile that you can by developing a specifically mobile site. To create truly customized mobile experiences, you’ll need to layer additional functionality on top of your “base” responsive approach to take advantage of what the mobile device has to offer.

In summary, we’ve reviewed five very different options — Fully-Hosted, Proxy, Cloud, CMS and Responsive approaches to mobile.

It will take more than a few bullets of pros and cons for each to truly determine which is the right path for your brand but understanding your options is the first step. With 120+ million mobile web users in the US, it’s a question we’ll all need to answer — and soon.

Most of these questions are topics of intense debate and few have an easy answer. When it comes to mobile, there is a lot of grey and very little black and white.

But there’s one question I get frequently that does have a clear answer, at least in my opinion, and that is, “Does a digital marketing agency really need a Mobile Lead?”

Consumers Are Mobile, We Should Be, Too

I actually enjoy this one quite a bit since it gives me the chance to explain — and justify — my job. Let me just preface this by saying that in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a “Mobile Lead” or a “Social Media Lead” for that matter. Consumer behavior is inherently mobile – and social – and so our efforts as marketers clearly should be as well.

But the reality is that with so many brands playing catch-up and the rate of innovation increasing so rapidly, having someone to shepherd your agency’s efforts in mobile is essential — which is lucky for me, since I happen to think it’s one of the most interesting positions in marketing.

For one thing, a big part of your job description is keeping up with every cool new gadget, trend, and vendor (though that is probably true for almost everyone in digital these days). What’s more rewarding is the fact that it forces you to learn a good amount about every single thing your agency does.

There’s a mobile component to everything a brand can do to connect with consumers, both online and off – from digital out of home to search marketing. So it stands to reason that there’s a digital aspect to everything your agency does as well. If your charge is to help your clients use mobile to full advantage, you need to have a solid understanding of it all.

Be Well-Versed In Development And Campaign Management

For example, you don’t need to know how to design and code a cross-platform website single-handedly, but you do need an above-average understanding of the tools and technologies involved before you can strategize what the end result should be.

Likewise, you don’t need to know how to effortlessly manage a paid media campaign, but you have to know way more than the average digital strategist to understand how a campaign should work for mobile. It’s a role that offers a level of exposure, growth, and hands-on learning like no other.

Now, I think of the Mobile Lead role as being a kind of strategist because that’s how I think of myself — as primarily a writer and a strategist. I do think that it’s probably the best term to use if you’re trying to hire a Mobile Lead — or become one. This doesn’t, however, explain what the job entails, which is really what you need to know.

Since the nature of the work crosses various disciplines and touches almost all of them, it’s highly strategic in nature. Of course, you also have to understand tactics as well — a lot of them. The best way I can think of to explain the nature of the work is to break down what I do on any given day into a few high level buckets.

Business Development

Nearly every RFP that comes along these days includes mobile in some way and many are now specifically mobile in nature. On any given day I’m working with the BD and Client Services teams to:

• Respond to RFPs.
• Write proposals.
• Refine and expand our repository of case study materials.
• Build and strengthen BD and Client Services’ understanding of mobile so that we can better work together and discover new opportunities to do great work.
• Evangelize to clients and help them better understand what their mobile opportunities are.

Strategy

Here’s where it gets really interesting. A Mobile Lead acts as a true strategist in two key ways:

• Project Strategy: This is the real hands-on strategy. If the project is fully mobile — say, development of an iPad app or a mobile web site — I’ll often find myself taking on the role of strategy lead, doing intensive, billable work from start to finish. If mobile is only a component of the overall project, the role becomes more of an executive sponsor type of responsibility, seeing to it that the project stays on track and develops according the original strategic vision.
• Corporate Strategy: This is where you act as your brand’s own strategist. A big part of the job is defining how mobile affects your business — how mobile ties into your brand story, what you do, and how you do it. This includes determining when to buy, build, or partner for mobile execution as well as how you present your POV on mobile to the outside world — i.e. customers and the industry at large.

Infrastructure

While many agencies now have a distinct mobile practice, it’s important to keep in mind that mobile touches every aspect of your business. Having mobile expertise consigned to a silo is a recipe for failure. The agencies most successful with mobile continually connect their Mobile Leads with all other teams to collaborate and share knowledge. In my own day to day work life I’m continually synching up with point people in:

• SEO: to continually refine our POV on organic search optimization for mobile platforms.
• Media: to develop best practices for mobile SEM and Display campaign content and management and to vet new mobile ad networks and mobile ad service providers.
• QA & Usability Testing: to maintain our mobile test plans and best practices and build our library of test hardware.
• Design: to explore new innovations in user experience design and discuss the impact of new devices, browsers, and technologies.
• Technology: to discuss ongoing best practices for development of mobile sites and apps and keep track of new opportunities afforded by industry innovation.
• Strategy: this is the team I spend the bulk of my time interacting with — supplying them with industry insights and keeping them up to date on new mobile tactics and opportunities.

Thought Leadership

This is the aspect of the job that I personally enjoy the most. Blogging, writing white papers, and POVs, speaking at conferences – putting original thinking and opinions out there in the marketplace has a two-fold benefit. It builds your agency’s reputation as a place that keeps pace with changes in the industry — and perhaps more important, as a place that cultivates intellectual capital.

However, you’ll also find that it’s the best possible business development you can do – every speaking engagement, however small, builds your reputation with current and potential clients in the audience and increases the likelihood of new business coming your way.

Believe it or not, there are about 100 other little things that come along in the course of a day, but these are the high-level basics. Every agency is different so this won’t be a cookie cutter example of how it all comes together but I think it’s a pretty good blueprint.

It’s a role that’s increasingly in demand as the need for mobile strategy and execution increases on the client side so hopefully this sheds light on what to look for if you’re hiring and what skillsets to build if you’re looking for a job.

It’s not a role that will last forever — as mobile becomes status quo, the need for someone to pull all the disparate threads together will dissipate, but expect to see this become a very common job description over the next few years. What it will evolve into is hard to say – these days, the only constant in our business is change.

Except for one thing. I’m also a digital marketer, so I’m on to you. I actually know you are trying to get my data — at the store when your clerk asks for my email address, when I see that banner ad for that site I visited once last week, when an ad pops up on Facebook for something I just searched for on Google.

Just knowing you are doing it makes me a bit more guarded about sharing my data and a little more critical about what you do with it. I’m a lot more likely to notice when you get it wrong and more often than not, you do.

The Myth Of The Average Consumer

So I’m actually not the average consumer. But then neither are you. No one is. The average consumer is an urban myth– which makes the traditional tactics we use to target them semi-effective, at best. They didn’t coin the phrase “banner blindness” for nothing. I block out a good 95% of the ads I see because they are meaningless to me.

The sites I visit online and the brands I purchase in stores give you a very fractured picture of who I am as a consumer and, to make matters worse, there’s a pretty radical disconnect between the real world action and digital one. There’s no easy way for Method to know I went from visiting their web site to buying their Wood for Good furniture polish at Whole Foods on a Saturday morning unless I tell them so. So what if I actually did tell them?

What Will People Tell Us?

In the last two weeks, I did the conference rounds, speaking at eMetrics in San Francisco and SXSW just this past weekend and big data was one of the biggest topics of discussion. How we can manage it, what we can do with it, what we should do with it — and, of course, what we shouldn’t. Inevitably, the conversation always turned to mobile and the implications it has for collecting data in the moment. It has tremendous promise for marketers in terms of getting targeted marketing and advertising right. But it’s not about what the data will tell us — it’s about what people will tell us.

While mobile presents numerous roadblocks to our traditional methods of tracking, it’s provided some surprise bonuses in terms of what users will willingly provide. Look at is this way. The average consumer doesn’t know she’s in a purchase funnel. She’s not aware that she’s on a customer journey. She’s trying to fulfill some very basic needs – i.e.

• To get information.
• To find a person, place or thing.
• To share information about that person, place, or thing.

There are many different permutations of this, of course, but essentially it all comes down to information gathering, way finding and connecting. And while the idea of us offering up data to advertisers to make that process more successful might seem unrealistic at first, consider Google Maps. Do you think twice before giving Google Maps the right to pinpoint your location when using your smartphone? Or when the Target mobile web site asks for your location in order to serve you offers for your local store? Probably not.

In fact, you are probably glad to do it. Just like iTunes and the App Store trained us to pay for digital content, location-based services are training us to volunteer our data and pushing us towards the precipice of a radical change in how brands market, advertise and distribute content.

Trading Data For Desire Fulfillment

This is where mobile has started to tip the scales and make things very interesting. We just want what we want when we want it — and we want it now. If giving up a small piece of data will fulfill that desire more quickly, we’re pretty open to giving that info up right away.

The shift has started, innocently enough, with location but it’s not hard to see where it might go. If anonymously offering up your gender — or ethnicity, or household income range, or hobbies — via mobile would make your search that much more efficient, result in offers and incentives, get you somewhere faster, can you say for certain that you wouldn’t do it?

The idea of preference-based advertising is nothing new, but maybe the time was never right for it in the past. Now things have changed. As consumers, we’re not as oblivious as we once were to the fact that you want our data. Even those of us who aren’t industry insiders know that when you ask for that loyalty card or email address at the register, you, the brand, is getting something very valuable out of the deal.

But we’re also more aware of the fact that there’s something in it for us and we’re more open to the possibility of getting it. Now that mobile devices have trained us to volunteer our location for contextually-relevant content or to check-in for deals, it might only be matter of time before we’re willing to give up more personal details — but only if  it will make the exchange more valuable to us in return.