8 Tips to Improve Your Mobile Marketing Strategy from marketers at Under Armour, RetailMeNot, & Citi Fintech

Here’s a sobering fact: marketers are spending 50% of their entire marketing budget on mobile. And yet, a full two-thirds of those marketers admitted to VentureBeat they were in too deep and had no way to manage mobile, tacking it on as an extra channel that’s not really part of their overall strategy.

If that sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place. In a panel about “Being People-Centric and Mobile Best” at Postback 17, marketers from mobile powerhouses like RetailMeNot, Under Armour, and Citi Fintech offered their best tips for how make mobile a coherent part of your marketing strategy, and create marketing that connects with consumers. Watch the 29-minute panel on YouTube, or read below for our eight favorite quotes.

8 Quotes on how to improve your mobile marketing strategy, featuring:

• Amy Loesch, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at RetailMeNot
• Sid Jatia, Vice President of Global e-Commerce at Under Armour
• Patrick McCarthy, Head of B2C Marketing at Citi Fintech
• Moderator: Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology at VentureBeat

1. Watch the trends and optimize accordingly.

“With our audience shifting over to mobile, we have to be where they are. Our marketing strategy is cross-platform. We try to optimize for mobile. So we do that in terms of design, in terms of tracking. Design, an example of that would be email. We know that 70% of our users who read our emails are on their mobile device, so we design for mobile first. And so we continue to look at the data and see where it’s going, and adapt our strategy that way.” — Amy Loesch, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at RetailMeNot

2. Elicit emotion with something new.

“To me, there are two aspects to emotion, which is relevancy and newness. I think we’re fighting the battle of relevancy without focusing on newness … Emotion is about the idea of newness. What is new to me? And what’s new to me where I’m willing to consume and be excited about, and have an emotive response about?” — Sid Jatia, Vice President of Global e-Commerce at Under Armour

3. Get customer buy-in early.

“When we launched our MVP, which was the new updates we made to our mobile app last year, [our team of research strategists] sat every week and were delivering features to customers and showing them through research what we wanted to do — what the look and feel was with the features that we were going to deploy. [We] actually talked to thousands of customers over a few-month period. When we actually deployed MVP we were pretty confident that we had gotten it right because of the fact that we had pivoted along with our customers along the way. It’s all, in essence, co-creation is what we call it. Co-creation with our customers so that when we deliver these features to our customers, we know what the uptake is going to be.” — Patrick McCarthy, Head of B2C Marketing at Citi Fintech

4. Take smart risks.

“I think the best marketing leaders are ones who are innovative and willing to take some risks. I believe in the concept of fail fast. I think mobile and digital enables you to do that. Constantly test and learn. New technologies. New vendors. New programs. And learn very quickly and decide if it’s working for you. That said, you’re always looking at your metrics and making sure that you’re performing against them. But I think you have to be innovative to deliver more creative solutions to your customers.” — Amy Loesch, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at RetailMeNot

5. Social is the perfect playground to experiment.

“Last week Facebook announced that you can now start boosting those videos while the stream is live. When we produced our segment yesterday, we saw an increase of 3X in our live views. So you have to go with it and always test new things, or you’re never going to move ahead. We’ve been really successful in actually beating our metrics because of that.” — Amy Loesch, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at RetailMeNot

6. Balance top-of-funnel and performance marketing.

“When I think about performance marketing or top-of-funnel marketing, top of funnel marketing is like putting fertilizer into your lawn, whereas performance marketing is mowing your lawn. I think you just have to balance that because if you keep mowing the lawn, mowing the lawn, not putting the fertilizer in — your short-term might be fine, but you’ll probably see that you’re not getting back the reward back in the long-term in terms of brand heat or brand intent.” — Sid Jatia, Vice President of Global e-Commerce at Under Armour

7. Align your marketing teams with product.

“The number one big change we made from a marketing perspective is we put our marketers in the scrum with the product teams. Traditionally at Citi, the product team would come with the sausage, and you’d try to go and hawk the sausage on the street. But [the marketers] need to be in there seeing the sausage made, making decisions, influencing road maps from a marketing perspective, business plans, and really getting ingrained with the product and tech in order to be really successful marketers tech-driven world.” — Patrick McCarthy, Head of B2C Marketing at Citi Fintech

8. Determine the role of all your channels.

“Mobile strategy is really an outcome of your total strategy. And when I say total strategy, I really mean the role of a channel. I think for every brand, you have to figure out what’s the role of channel from web to mobile. And within mobile, mobile web to app. And within app, to view other fragmentation subsets going on. For example, for us, we know app is a loyalist play. It’s really driven our most frequent shoppers who have a really high brand propensity. It helps you drive the right kind of marketing tactics associated with that channel. I think that’s where, a lot of times, I’ve seen brands suffer. They’re sort of using an all-arms attack toward mobile web and app in a very similar fashion … Be very clear on the role of channel. I think that’s going to help you get to your right mobile strategy.”— Sid Jatia, Vice President of Global e-Commerce at Under Armour

Next Step: Mobile Strategy Success

Which tip are you going to implement first? Tell us in the comments below. And to see the full video, make sure you press play below or watch the panel on our YouTube channel.