Mobile Marketing Innovation

At a recent event organized by a local networking group where Balihoo presented, one of the questions that came from the audience was: ‘How do you keep innovation moving forward on your product/service’.  Our response was fairly simple – we scan for innovations in the marketing industry and figure out how to how to integrate it into our platform and then simplify it for our target customer base - the local marketer.  Simple response but an interesting challenge to execute on.   Its not just a question of how we would do it, but deciding if and when to add a new tool to the local marketer’s tool belt.  Integrating a new innovative tool too soon could result in confusion, lower adoption and/or wasted development effort.  Doing it too late might have customers viewing the gap created by not having it as a detractor from your overall value proposition.

I think mobile marketing technology is a great example that illustrates this point very well.  It is one of the spaces we are watching, analyzing and exploring very carefully.  There are many different innovations in mobile marketing – all at various stages of technical maturity and  customer adoption/utility.  I recently received a new mobile marketing whitepaper from a digital marketing company called Knotice. The paper provides a great overview of the Mobile Marketing Space (Get the whitepaper here) and does an excellent job of breaking down the different types of mobile marketing options, and current audience makeup. It identified the following categories:

• SMS/MMS
• Mobile Web
• Mobile Apps
• Mobile Ads
• Other (mobile video, games, music, ringtones, wallpaper, downloads)
• Emerging (2-D codes, GPS, RFID, Bluetooth)

There is clearly no shortage of innovation in the mobile marketing sector!   That is an amazingly diverse set of options and only going to grow as the space matures.  Some of these will continue to gain adoption, others may wane, and new options will continue to be created.   This brings us back to our interesting challenge of integrating and simplify marketing innovations to bring the highest overall value to our customer base at the right time.  Which of these options will offer the highest value, at what time, and for how long?  This is part of what makes product management both great fun, and a challenging puzzle that has no known solution.  It comes down to making informed decisions with diverse data.  Talking to clients, customers and the market helps us craft a product roadmap that will deliver the highest value to our customers and ultimately to our company. 

Do we have everything figured out and aligned perfectly to attack the mobile space for our target customers?  No - unfortunately the crystal ball is not working today, however with a broad spectrum of diverse inputs, it puts us in a great place to navigate the waters in way that allows us to test, and change course rapidly.