Kitcatt Nohr's Mo Morgan on Where Clients Should Put Their Money

There’s no shortage of analysis and survey results to show that marketing budgets are being shunted around. In the main, the money is being moved away from traditional channels and towards digital. But digital is a big thing, encompassing many subdivisions. So as a brand’s digital spend goes up, how should it be divided between online ads, data, social, web, mobile…? How can brands know where to invest, and how can their agencies predict what best to advise?

Here’s a fictitious but typical example. Both client and agency have observed that a rapidly-increasing proportion of traffic to the client’s website is coming from mobile devices. Given this upswing, the agency is recommending investing in improving the site’s usability on phones, tablets, etc. However, the client has also noticed that 80% of online purchases are made from desktops. So, the client would rather spend 80% of their budget on optimising the desktop experience, to drive further revenue.

This exemplifies an interesting and common challenge. While clients and agencies share a strong desire to embrace technological advances and trends in consumer behaviour, budgets are finite. Some such advances are unproven in value, and trends can be fickle. So what should agencies advise our clients to do? Put simply, how should they split their chips between conservative measures to protect today’s revenue, versus more risky pursuits that could lay the foundations of future prosperity?

Anyone who’s ever invested in anything will know the quandary of balancing low risk, low reward versus high risk, high reward. So what proportion of risk is appropriate? There’s no hard-and-fast rule. The word “risk” is itself a fickle term: it can at times refer to something you can measure; while at other times mean something immeasurable.

An adversity to risk is generally no bad thing. Aversion to innovation, meanwhile, somehow seems less palatable. It suggests a fear of the new. The expression “innovate or die” is common shorthand when noting the fate of organisations caught on the hop by new competitors embracing technological and/or consumer trends. Kodak and Blockbuster exemplify this.

But what is innovation if not risk? Innovating requires failing, usually frequently. So, to innovate is to embrace the risk of failure. It is a misconception that innovation takes nothing more than coming up with bold new ideas. In our industry we have a lot of ideas, so if this alone were innovating we’d all have retired to our tropical islands by now. No, innovation takes more than just ideas: innovation is about actually doing it. To innovate, one must embrace the possibility that the idea may not work, and do it anyway.

Back to our hypothetical scenario, and how our clients might use their budget to best effect. While the use of the web on mobile devices is on the rise, many sectors have found the proportion of all-important purchases have not followed suit. Even I, a stereotypical early adopter, still find myself hesitating to buy high-value items on my phone.

Why is this? There are a few pertinent factors. Firstly, for the many, the experience of the online purchase funnel is at best clumsy, and at worst insufferable. Inputting of data such as addresses and credit-card numbers on a mobile device is cumbersome. The second factor is trust: in the same way it took consumers time to warm to e-commerce, there’s a similar ramp-up in enthusiasm about m-commerce. The third, which we did not experience when the web was in its infancy, is that a few giants have been quick to apply their experience to grab market share. As I think about my own purchasing habits, it’s notable that the biggest purchases I make on mobile are with well-established e-commerce outfits like Amazon and eBay. This is a combination of their refined experiences, the trust they have established and, well, because they’re there.

Looking at purchase behaviour alone, “mobile” (if viewed as a channel) can have a low ROI compared with other channels. But treating mobile as a channel is a dangerously limited perspective. An alternative view is to consider mobile to be a state of user behaviour. In plain English: “everything that happens in my life while I’m not at my desk”. From here, I realise that most of my purchase decisions happen away from my desk, and are influenced by all sorts of things: online/offline/mobile advertising, CRM, in-store activity, social activity and good old human interaction to name only a few.

As we spend a decreasing proportion of our lives at our desktop computers, it’s a reasonable assumption that the majority of our purchase considerations and decisions take place elsewhere too. To that end, the role of mobile marketing isn’t necessarily about counting how many iPhone users clicked “buy now”, but rather how we can play a part in those considerations and purchases taking place out in the world. Put simply: mobile marketing is just marketing.

Brands using multi-attribution models in their conversion measurements are probably already aware of the significant role mobile technologies can play. Clients that have made the effort to optimise their direct communications for smaller screens will no-doubt have felt the benefit, as the use of email on mobile devices continues to soar relative to other means. For some, it was a gamble, but the right sort of gamble. Innovation needn’t be groundbreaking. Incremental improvements can be innovative (providing, of course, they actually happen).

So, to the conservative, I say this: mobile isn’t a thing. It’s a behaviour. It’s a clumsy term to describe when, where and how people might view and use products and services (and therefore marketing). We don’t get to choose when, where or how people consider and/or purchase things. What we do get to do is make those considerations and purchases as compelling and straightforward as possible.

To invest in mobile is to invest in every single one of your customers. Don’t build a mobile shopping basket: put the money into studying, testing and improving (in a constant, incremental cycle) the purchase experience you already have, so that it is as painless as possible for everyone who uses it, regardless of how they choose to do so.

Viewed this way, each shift in user behaviour needn’t be a frontier, and innovation needn’t be uncomfortably risky. Invest the right amount to get from where you are to a solid foundation that allows continuous innovation thereafter. That way, you’re ready for mobile, social, and also the Next Big Thing. It’s money well spent.