Mobilized Marketing: How to Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices

Chapter 34

The Real Questions Marketers Should Ask

How Fast Should I Go? How Much Time and Dollars Should I Devote?

The easy, although not very helpful, answer to the question of how rapidly a marketer should move in mobile is . . . it depends.

For Steve Mura of MillerCoors, it’s the speed at which he can sell more beer through the channel. For Nataki Edwards of AARP, it’s about having a meaningful presence in the lives of her members and prospects.

“AARP’s philosophy is that we really need to be where our members are,” says Edwards, the organization’s vice president of marketing, digital strategy, and operations. “Our members are in a lot of different places. They are still consuming print publications, they are still watching TV, and those will continue to be part of our media strategy but the adoption of digital on mobile and the Web can’t be denied. We made a concerted effort to make sure we had products and services and offerings in all of those channels. Where mobile comes in, it was really the market showing us the adoption of our members and we kept seeing the numbers go up.

“Our strategy has been to meet them everywhere. We’re not just going to build apps [applications]. We’re going to make sure that for people who don’t have smartphones or who aren’t interested in downloading apps that they can still get the best AARP experience on any mobile device.”

If mobile wasn’t the first thought of AARP marketers by late 2011, at the very least it was on their minds and product ...