The tips are inspired by conversation with Blyk. Blyk has less than 100k subscribers right now but its usage data points to proof-of-concept that it is pushing: the concept of using mobile networks as a new media for advertisers. Blyk has facilitated response rate of 29% compared to industry average of 5%.
So the tips ….
• Use mobile media rather than PC or landline. There will be around 5 billion mobile phone devices by 2015. This is potentially a huge advertiser media that has remained unexplored
• The concept of conversations-beginning-with-ad has been tried before. It failed. We wish the concept good luck but believe that ads pushed via SMS will have better acceptance
• Don’t offer all minutes free. Carry out research for typical Minutes-of-Use per month in your target audience and typical number of SMS they send each month. Then offer that for free in return for users agreeing to receive certain number of ad SMS
• Be creative around your ads. Although some of this creativity will come from the advertisers themselves, creativity means engaging audience in an interactive way.
• Send right ads to the right people. That means a lot of hard work on the profiling of your users. This will drive both response rate as well as cost per response. Try to get info on which brands they like in various market segments. And try to have your audience update their profiles once every six months or so.
• Build a community (a kind of social network) of users that like similar brands or are interested in similar ad campaigns, or are interested in seeking peer-to-peer technical support of some sort.
• Examine the advertiser budgets and find out which target audience they use varied media for. The more varied the media, the more willing the advertiser is to experiment new ways of advertising to the target.
• Outsource what network infrastructure is required. If you feel tempted to build the whole thing, use open source platform such as Asterisk. Best to concentrate on the Blackbox that does the trick and hosts your customer data etc.
• Use IP backbone or WiFi access to cut down on the transportation of your calls and SMS.
• And lastly, if you extend the concept of online advertising over to mobile media, you could be developing an inflexible framework of advertising concept. Let go of the web and think of the mobile device ergonomics.