Mobile News

The complexity of mobile campaigns is influenced by three factors–the number of integration points required for the campaign, the nature of the dialogue used and size and duration of the reach.

As with the deployment of any systems involved with communications technology, mobile marketing systems require, in most cases, some form of integration. The integration effort is reflected by the number of different communication touch points. For example, a campaign that requires the support of SMS communication needs a special facility to handle the SMS traffic. In addition, the campaign might require the support of call centre agents to take registrations over the phone. This creates the need for another integration point.

The dialogue itself refers to the application implementing the flow of interaction. Initially, mobile marketing companies relied on custom software development (developed internally or outsourced) to implement the different applications that are found today in most campaigns, such as votes and quizzes. The effort required depends on the nature of the dialogue required for the optimal user experience in a given campaign. It can be anything from merely customising the automatic reply sent by the application to the subscriber-which takes only a few minutes–to writing a new application from scratch, which can take several weeks assuming the skills and the tools to develop mobile interactive applications are available.

The desired reach gives, indirectly, an indication of the load that can be expected to hit a dialogue application. In the mobile marketing continuum, the reach indicates the media channels used to expose individuals to advertising content. This exposure is only an invitation to participate and is subject to a variable response factor. If the medium chosen is prime-time television, even a low response rate leads to a large number of participants and a corresponding level of hits on the application. This number directly affects the performance of the application that will have to process incoming messages.