NEW YORK – A Thinknear executive at the Mobile Marketing Association’s SM2 Innovation Summit 2015 explained that retailers foraying into mobile must develop clear battle plans with objectives specific for mobile, targeting aligned with strategy, valued measurements and the focus on mobile as an on-the-go channel.

During the session “The Audience Shopping Cart: Picking the Right Ingredients to Drive Holiday Sales,” an executive explained that retailers foraying into mobile need to keep a variety of things in mind to be get the most out of their mobile efforts, which all need to be aligned. Developers and retailers need to think about what the goals are, and keep in mind not to be creepy when it comes to targeting consumers.

“It is incredible with what you can do in mobile today,” said Brent Fraser, chief revenue offer at Thinknear. “There are tons of mobile strategies to take advantage of.

“There is the leverage of line segments off the shelf, you can build custom targeting and cross channel targeting,” he said. “As a marketer it is really amazing what you can do to display that marketing narrative across multiple device.

“The cross-channel audience targeting continues to be a dominant objective for brands and agencies, which is no real surprise.”

Think useful not creepy
Thinknear determined that the most common objective valued most by big brands and retailers was increasing foot traffic to their bricks-and-mortar location compared to building awareness and influencing offline purchases. Location-based advertising through mobile can be highly beneficial in this aspect, but retailers must be wary of becoming borderline creepy.

For instance, Target flirted with the brink of that line when it ousted a teenage girl’s secret pregnancy. A father marched into a Target location angry that its marketing content was targeting his teenage daughter with weekly advertising related to pregnancy and motherhood.

The following week the father called the store apologizing because, as it turned out, the daughter was indeed pregnant. She was purchasing a variety of pregnancy related items, and in turn the brand was serving her relative content based on this purchase history.

Through data and mobile technology retailers can now pinpoint where a woman is at in her pregnancy, without even knowing her personally. This is a significant shift for retailers and allows them to better target consumers individually and receive a greater return on investment.

Lasting impression
Retailers are now more likely for their content to make a lasting impression because they are smarter through data. They can look at what consumers have purchased, when and where, in turn serve them advertising content more likely to increase sales.

Thinknear noticed that retailers care significantly about audience targeting. It is also important to incorporate mobile video into a marketing strategy, as mobile video viewing is skyrocketing in consumer use.

“How do we use data to make sure that we are hitting our audience, but yet doing it in a creepy fashion,” said Brett Kohn, vice president of marketing at Thinknear. “I think that is really important.”

Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Commerce Daily