Mobile's role in agency digital transformation
It’s been a banner decade for mobile:
- In 2012, smartphones outsold PCs for the first time ever.
- In 2015, Google spawned “Mobilegeddon” when it created a ranking algorithm to give mobile-friendly webpages a boost in search.
- In 2016, mobile and tablet internet usage surpassed desktop usage for the first time.
People (and Google) love their mobile devices, and it’s not hard to see why. A digital universe unbound by Wi-Fi’s confines fits in your pocket.
But does it fit in your agency? Or perhaps the better question is, how does mobile, in all of its shapes and sizes fit into your agency?
Cloud’s closest companion
You can’t have a discussion about mobile without bringing the cloud into it. Think about where the data for your customer-facing mobile applications lives – certainly not on their smartphones exclusively.
Take Spotify as an example. Customers can listen to any song they want, regardless of where they are, through the mobile app only because the company utilizes cloud-based storage and a robust content delivery network through Amazon Web Services.
Granted, your agency might not be endeavoring to create the next big music streaming service. It might just be orchestrating an ad campaign focused on increasing mobile engagement with a certain brand – even less reason to invest massive amounts of capital into IT infrastructure that supports mobility. If it’s a temporary campaign, why make such a permanent investment?
So sure, it’s possible to keep all of that mobile-accessible data in an on-premises data center, but it isn’t practical given the excessive amount of overhead needed to manage the physical infrastructure and the virtual resources, as well as continuously monitor network traffic for potential foul play. Creating and managing the underpinning of your mobile applications and sites from scratch is extraordinarily expensive without tapping into the cloud as a resource.
Top-tier vendors such as AWS, on the other hand, make it easy to quickly launch mobile applications and websites without having to spend an arm and a leg building the necessary IT infrastructure from the ground up.
Long story short: You can certainly have mobile without a cloud footprint, much in the same way you can have a jelly sandwich with no peanut butter. But why would you want to?
Mobile is a gold mine … if you play your cards right
Through the cloud, creative agencies get all the benefits that come with mobile enablement. Namely, they get a high-performance, low-latency website or application that works on multiple platforms. What better way to extend the reach of your digital ad campaign or new customer engagement app?
But before these benefits can be realized, agencies must ensure that they’re effectively leveraging the right data collection and analysis tools.
Let’s consider the example of an ad campaign targeting mobile visitors. You’ll need the ability to capture real-time ad impression data: Micro-interactions, such as how long it took a use to scroll over your ad, the number of clicks, bounce rates, etc. The more data you can collect, the deeper your insights into campaign performance. With this information, you can be nimble in how you adjust your strategy. For example, you can pull the poorest performing content and pivot to more pointedly promoting mobile content that shows promise.
None of this is wishful thinking. It’s all very possible with cloud-based analytics resources such a Amazon Kinesis, and some of the biggest names in digital marketing (e.g., Yieldmo) have already reaped the benefits.
And Kinesis is only one tool in a full arsenal of digital advertising and marketing resources that help agencies optimize mobile content performance in AWS (Amazon Quicksight, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Redshift, just to name a few).
Use them to gather and analyze data as a means to revitalizing and fine-tuning your digital engagement efforts.
Do this, and mobile will have an invaluable role to play in the modernization of your agency.
