5 Basic Questions to Ask Your Prospective Mobile Marketing Agency
As a traditional agency or brand marketer, you’ve no doubt been approached by numerous mobile marketing agencies pitching their services. While experience, costs, and capabilities vary greatly from firm to firm, there are a few basic questions that you can ask to help weed out the pretenders from the legitimate agencies. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a starting point.
1. Does the mobile agency own and manage its own platform?
Running mobile marketing campaigns is no trivial matter and working with an “agency” that is simply a reseller of a white label solution is an enormous risk. Should you ever wish to run engaging campaigns that fall outside the scope of the white label offering, it can prove costly, or even be impossible to execute on your vision. In addition, should there ever be a problem with your campaign, it’s comforting to know that your agency can address it immediately and not be at the mercy of their provider.
2. Does the mobile agency have its own short code?
Agencies that don’t have their own short code, most often don’t have their own platform either (see above). If your agency is sharing a short code with numerous other resellers, the number of keywords available to clients is severely limited and results in awkward calls-to-action such as “Text BRAND 1234 to Short Code”, rather than the much easier “Text BRAND to SHORT CODE”. Using a word, or words, with a space in between is confusing for consumers and is certainly not ideal.
3. Does the mobile agency send text messages via SMS or email?
It’s amazing how many companies are selling themselves as SMS marketing agencies but actually send outbound messages via email. Not only is this misleading to the client, but the messages can get caught up in carrier spam filters and they are limited to strictly outbound broadcasts with no level of interaction. Hardly an engaging marketing tool.
4. Do your users need to select their mobile carrier when participating?
This is seen when opting into a mobile campaign online and is a sure sign that your mobile provider doesn’t have its act together. Under no circumstances should the consumer be required to select their carrier, as the mobile agency can easily look that information up on the fly.
5. Does the mobile agency have software to detect mobile vs. tethered traffic when directing website visitors to the appropriately formatted website?
Your mobile agency should be able to provide you with code that when added to your website, directs visitors to the appropriately formatted content. Visitors accessing your website from a PC receive the PC experience and mobile users receive the mobile experience. There is no need to make people type in a mobile-specific url or click on a button for the mobile experience.
Again, these are just a few basics, but can save you time and energy in the long run.
Thanks for publishing these tips.
As a matter of academic debate, I agree with three of your points and disagree with the other two.
Point #1: Perhaps its my misunderstanding of the definition of “owning” the platform. At the end of the day, almost no one except SMS Aggregators will have connectivity to wireless carriers. Reasons: (1) cost of the connection to Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers is quite prohibitive, and (2) carriers are restricting who they choose to do business with.
Point #5: The hidden assumption to this recommendation (although quite valid nonetheless) is that the mobile device accessing the web site correctly declares that it is a mobile device and that it does so in a manner that your site will recognize so that it can search the appopriate content. Practice has shown that this is not always the case. There are no standards regarding mobile device browsers and they do not all declare themselves as such. It is still best to have a mobile-specific URL to allow mobile visitors directly access your mobile site.