Madeleine Wilson — January 17, 2020 In looking at 2020 mobile marketing trends, the phrase “mobile marketing” almost feels redundant. At this point, most – if not all – companies have embraced mobile as a focal point for their marketing strategies. Almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket the majority of the day, so mobile is the best way to gather customer data and reach them with your message.
While some industries really lead the way in this area while others are still scrambling to catch up, one thing is for certain: mobile marketing will become synonymous with marketing in 2020.
Given that, here are three major shifts in the mobile marketing space that will transform businesses, break down departmental silos, and drive growth in the coming year.
1. Customer journey mapping is more important than ever
Data and privacy were two of the hottest topics in 2019 and for good reason. We have more customer data at our disposal than ever before. With the help of automation and AI, we’re able to analyze and make sense of this data quickly. It’s easier than ever to gather feedback and truly understand your customers.
Many brands, however, are struggling to connect the dots and translate measurement into a set of actions. They just can’t crack the right person, right time, right place conundrum. This is largely because many marketing teams still view the customer journey as a linear funnel when in reality, it’s far more complex than that. Using customer data and feedback to help fill in the gaps and more accurately track the customer journey is the missing piece of the puzzle.
Here’s what the traditional customer journey looks like:
But in reality, mobile customer journeys look more like this:
Customer journey maps help drive three important marketing initiatives:
- Help you build a better product. Customer journey maps exist to explore behavior within your mobile experience, which yields learnings around how you can improve. The more you know how people actually engage, the better you can understand what pieces of your experience hit the mark or need adjusting.
- Put the customer at the heart of your business. Using customer journey mapping, you can design a marketing strategy that puts your customers first. The more you know about how customers use your mobile product, the more one-to-one your messaging with them can be. Personalized messaging is the manifestation of how we incorporate everything we know about our customers’ loves, likes, and dislikes into their mobile experience.
- Ensure your marketing team’s efforts are in the right place. Marketing’s efforts should be driven not only by the company’s product mission but also by the customer. In order to provide the best digital experience, it’s imperative to learn from your true customer journey—as complex or straightforward as it may be—in order to be sure you spend marketing dollars in the right place.
Today’s customers experience brands uniquely, skipping ahead and looping back whenever it makes sense for them personally, and using a traditional sales funnel to understand and predict their behavior just doesn’t cut it anymore. Customer journey maps, on the other hand, are based on a flexible framework that not only helps you understand how customers experience your brand, but also offers insight into who they are based on detailed behavior.
2. Prioritizing CX leads to major organizational shifts
This is the biggest change we anticipate happening in 2020, and it’s not going to be an easy one to adapt to. The worlds of marketing and product are colliding in new ways as customer experience takes center stage. We’re already seeing companies – specifically enterprises – begin switching up their organizational structure in order to prioritize CX.
For some brands, they’re moving the mobile app experience out from product and into marketing. Others are merging the two and encouraging the departments work together to share the mobile experience. Regardless of the actual logistics, this change usually stems from an organizational shift at the executive level. We’re seeing companies hire Chief Experience Officers and Chief Customer Officers to help lead innovation and strategy around the customer experience. With these new leadership roles comes a lot of organization-wide change.
Because of this shift, aligning incentives and priorities will be paramount in 2020.
- What KPIs are core to CX?
- How are employees compensated on metrics such as NPS and CSAT?
- How are retention and loyalty being measured across the organization?
- Who owns the voice of the customer? (Psst…we just did a webinar on this topic – check it out here)
- How do you translate measurement into a set of actions, and how do you turn that into ROI?
Executive leadership teams will start (if they haven’t already) asking and hopefully answering these tough questions in the coming year.
One thing is clear: the companies with clearer ownership over customer experience and voice of the customer metrics will be more effective. CX and VoC transcend any single department or employee. The brands that embrace this challenge will see the most success.
3. 5G takes center stage
Would this be a 2020 marketing trends article if we didn’t mention 5G? I don’t think it’s allowed. All joking aside, 5G is going to radically shake things up in 2020, so we’d be remiss not to mention it.
This really will be a game-changer for mobile marketers for a few key reasons. With faster load times, brands will be able to:
- Have higher-quality photos, graphics, and creative in their marketing materials
- Stream longer, cinematic-quality video
- Experiment more with complex interactive elements
5G is going to open up a world of possibilities for mobile marketers and customers alike. We look forward to seeing it continue to roll out more broadly in 2020.
Did we miss anything? What trends are you watching this year?
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