By Jim Piper

What would the perfect mobile luxury brand transaction look like?

How would you guarantee a positive mobile consumer experience from the moment a potential client enters your portal until they inevitably decide to leave?

Based on my own digital agency experience, I believe that you must first clearly build a product roadmap that improves the efficiency and impact of your mobile ad campaign. This goal is ultimately achieved when you are viewed internally and externally as a trusted advisor in the customer experience process.

Your marketing team’s brand paradigm must evolve from product flogger to consumer ally – and trust me, this is a move worth making.

It is also important to understand that appropriate tradeoffs are required in this process to balance the sometimes-conflicting goals of monetization, online targeting and brand differentiation.

Monetizing the luxury mobile audience
Based on these conflicting goals, how do you reach your target audience with the right message and media? How do you increase and nurture customer engagement when the role and influence of online communities have usurped conventional advertising?

Consumers are becoming immune to traditional ads and taking personal control of their purchasing decisions. These behavioral changes continue to solidify as market segmentation increases and customer engagement efforts become more sophisticated in the online world.

Not only has the act of discovery changed, but the way in which users engage with content has evolved.

Think mobile and social
Location tagging, mobile coupons, SMS campaigns and surveys all tap into large, passionate, pre-existing communities of interested users. Mobile advertising is also indexed for discovery, meaning it is built in such a way that specific campaigns can be targeted with precision using available data.

Effective luxury brand advertising still remains deeply rooted in the idea of differentiating your brand.

To address this market goal, successful agencies are embracing a structured analytical approach to mobile marketing that quantifies which consumer segments are converting. This data stream often includes multivariate testing of mobile elements that include timestamps, handsets, carriers, encoded publishers and channels.

Creating authentic campaigns
By challenging conventional segmentation, your mobile campaigns can engage consumers from awareness right through to transaction for a fraction of the cost of traditional programs.

Ultimately, the online mobile experience strengthens the emotional interaction, intimacy and influence of a brand over the campaign lifecycle.

I believe that luxury brands need to revisit their own mobile media campaigns with a fresh eye, aware of the potential for increased customer engagement and brand awareness while exploring how to own this rapidly expanding area of digital commerce.

The objective should no longer be limited to media saturation, but rather engaged, online interactions that enable positive consumer experiences.

Jim Piper is agency strategist at Pulse Mobile, a GlobalWide Media agency in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Reach him at [email protected].