holmesreport.com
Fifteen years ago, at the close
of what many consider the first generation of the Web, a few souls were looking
beyond the PC to what the handheld world might entail. But those were the
days of Motorola Flip Phones and the Nokia Candybars. You could access a
very nascent mobile web experience on them, but those early phones weren’t
exactly brimming with rich content, engaging environments, virtual reality
applications or dynamic messaging platforms. In fact, as a marketer you
might be forgiven for thinking about cell phones as not much of a marketing
platform at all.
But all that began to change very quickly. While many
credit the 2008 iPhone as the dawn of truly engaging mobile experience, I would
argue that phones on the Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and PocketPC operating
systems brought significant advances to the party before 2008 – adding email,
color web browsing, music players, cameras, video and gaming to the handset,
albeit in very rudimentary forms compared to today’s devices.
Fast forward a decade and a half and we’re on the precipice of
another major shift in mobility. The mobile consumer is walling off his own
world in a variety of ways. The mobile app – the primary engagement
construct for the mobile universe is in rapid decline. While apps now
take up more than half of the time we spend on mobile devices – 52 percent,
according to comScore – the app landscape is changing dramatically. Again,
according to comScore, most people don’t download new apps – at all.
Roughly 65 percent of US smartphone users download zero mobile apps on a
monthly basis.
Brands love apps – apps enable marketers to create an immersive
experience on the phone that puts the consumer-brand relationship at the center
of the smartphone. But what happens when smartphone users completely
bypass the app world?
Seeing
in the Dark
One category of apps continues to skyrocket –messaging. In
fact, according to a recent MarketProfs post, “at least half of the top 10 most
downloaded apps within any given month are messaging apps.” (http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2016/30511/shedding-light-on-the-age-of-dark-messaging-apps).
The problem is that these messaging apps are usually platforms for one-to-one
conversations. Sure, there is a lot of sharing going on – photos, links
and videos – at the very least. But, these are exchanges between
individuals and brands are usually left out. These apps are often
referred to as “Dark Apps” and that same MarketingProfs post speculates that 91
percent of Americans are communicating via Dark Apps.
But before you throw in the towel and refocus your marketing
resources on television advertising and direct mail pieces, consider the
evolution of “messaging” itself. Messaging now includes some pretty rich
content – emojis, GIFs, directions, geotags, coupons, videos, music sharing,
document sharing, payments, and rating and recommendation systems. Some
of these elements already reside within messaging apps, others will undoubtedly
debut within the next year. These added dynamics offer brands the
opportunity to enrich the messaging experience on dark apps without interfering
with the primary purpose of them – conversation.
The catch? Where brands once approached mobile marketing
with a focus on building their own apps, participating in Dark Apps will be a
little trickier. It is probably wisest to tap into an existing audience
rather than trying to build momentum for a new one. Facebook, WeChat,
SnapChat and Weibo are some of the most prolific of the “Dark Apps” on the
market today. Building on top of those existing platforms is probably
better – when it’s possible – than starting from scratch.
Bot-y
Training
Another emerging mobile marketing platform is the Chatbot, or
bot for short. Bots are virtual robots that can autonomously chat on a
variety of messaging platforms. Bots offer an easy way to do a lot of
things – simply send a message to a bot and you can do anything from order
flowers to reach customer service for your CRM tool. This spring,
Facebook opened its Messenger platform to bot developers and brands like
Zendesk and Salesforce are looking to link bot functionality to their existing
backend marketing infrastructure.
From my perspective, bots are an interesting and sort of unexpected
expression of the melding of mobile and cloud technologies. While we’re
used to thinking about mobility and the cloud coming together in apps like
Dropbox or Spotify, this inserts Cloud Intelligence into the equation and gives
us something that almost has a personality. Christina Warren explains this well
in her recent post on Mashable, “like an app, a bot has backend services that
call certain functions and can lead to other calls….the logic is running
remotely on the cloud and not locally on a phone.” (http://mashable.com/2016/04/12/facebook-bots-analysis/#ylkueUtxbEq5 ).
The bot approach works well for an asynchronous generation of
millennials who prefer to chat rather than talk on phones or visit brick and
mortar locations in person. It lowers the barrier to entry and eliminates
the process of discovery and downloading. Indeed, it offers brands a
great way to engage with customers and prospects on their own turf. But,
bots have a long way to go before they’re mature. For one thing, bots
rely on the consumer as a catalyst – you need someone to order flowers before
1800Flowers can reach out to that individual. This makes it a little
harder for brands to be proactive. But, that will likely evolve as the
technology improves on different messaging platforms. The real risk is in
ensuring bots don’t become overly ambitious and go off the rails. A great
example of bots-gone-bad is Microsoft’s Tay – the bot that went from the voice
of a teenager to spouting off KKK rhetoric over the weekend.
And these auto respondents don’t really change the app-level
requirements from the brand’s perspective – you still have to develop the back
end of a bot the same way you would have to develop an app. So, if you
aren’t creating an engaging, proactive and reliable marketing platform, you
really have to ask yourself if it is right for your brand. I am willing
to bet that bots will become an increasingly important part of customer
service, transactional exchanges and concierge-like tasks. But as a
flagship for your mobile marketing strategy, they might not be the right fit.
Get
ready for the App-On-Demand Economy?
The real challenge with apps today isn’t that people don’t want the
functionality or experience of an app – it’s that they don’t want the process
involved of getting to that app. A recent post in The Verge said it
perfectly “The Play and App Store are the last remaining blockades on the road
to building successful, mobile-only businesses.” (http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/05/the-world-isnt-ready-for-googles-instant-apps/)
In a major push to bring down those barriers both Android and
Apple are introducing their own versions of on-demand mobile apps.
Android is calling them Instant Apps and Apple has hinted at something called
“app thinning” in iOS 9. In both cases, users will be able to just click
on a link to experience a rich app environment without actually downloading the
app. This works by making only fractions of the native app available to
the user based on how they’re engaging.
For brands, this offers a win-win situation. It removes
the mundane and time-consuming drudgery of the app store while maintaining the
integrity and dynamic experience of a full on app. What remains to be
seen is how well this works for the numbers guys in the marketing
department. If this easy mobile participation ramps up and takes away traditional
web eyeballs, cookies disappear and marketers could potentially stand to lose a
lot of data. Depending on how savvy and confident your marketing team is,
Instant Apps may offer you the best platform for expanding your mobile
marketing strategy.
The
Post-App World is Still a Ways Off
At the end of the day, are we going to see Apple and Android
fold their app stores any time soon? My bet is no way. Recode’s Jan
Dawson recently wrote that he suspects “we are entering a period of maturity
for app stores, in which the vast majority of users have downloaded the most
popular apps already and, as growth slows, there will a shift to the long tail
of apps among existing users, while a smaller number of new users download the
Top 100.”
What this means for marketers is that you will likely always
have some sort of presence in the app stores. But you will need to think
outside the app for ways to attract and engage consumers. Bots, Instant
Apps and Messenger Add Ons offer a couple of solutions. But, I’m sure
there are many more out there.
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