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Kahuna stresses personalization for optimal mobile strategies

NEW YORK ? A Kahuna executive at the Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2014 stressed the need for personalization and consumer-first strategies to drive massive revenue opportunities for brands.

Kahuna, an Enterprise Software company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, enables mobile marketers to develop mobile strategies that cater directly to the consumer. Key strategies discussed include establishing simple approaches, streamlining small amounts of messages and focusing on timing of marketing efforts.

?You can make mobile a significant portion of your business,? said Adam Marchick, CEO and co-founder of Kahuna. ?This is where consumers are going, and it?s time to engage with them here.?

Mobile Marketer organized the Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2014.

Understanding consumers
Mobile traffic does not necessarily translate to equal purchasing, and users are not as valuable without an engagement strategy. The more that brands make purchasing and registering easier, the better their velocity will be.

Kahuna pinpointed Facebook in its early years as an example of a great engagement strategy. If a user added ten friends, posted four status updates, and did three shares to get affinity value into Facebook, their expected time on the site went from three weeks to two years.

The company also stressed understanding the consumer: who they are and what their likes are. It revealed that Google recently did a study on their massive data system, which enables them to pull detailed information about targeted users rather than rely on broad segments.

 Understanding consumers also lends itself to increasing user identification. Citing another example, Yahoo! Sports uses interactive push messages. It sends readers notifications after they have read a significant amount of articles about a specific team or topic, and then prompts the reader to add that topic to their favorites list- but the user must register with the site.

 ?Industry standard messaging is not personalized and optimized, but personalization testing and optimization will yield much greater results,? said Mr. Marchick. ?Mobile is a brand new ecosystem.?

?Ideally, every message is a snowflake and feels personal.?

Timing is key
It is crucial to ensure that every message counts. Each message is a window to prove the brand?s existence to the consumer, as users spend the first three messages deciding whether a brand cares about them or not.

Engaging consumers via their most frequented channels is also imperative. Kahuna claimed that 56 percent of customers spent time on mobile apps over mobile sites and social networks, but 58 percent purchased through mobile sites as opposed to 42 percent of purchases through mobile apps.

Cohesive cross-channel strategies include in-app messages, push notifications, Facebook advertisements, and mobile Web messages. This adds affinity to mobile messaging and marketing.

?Once you know where they are, engage them where they are, not where you wish they were,? said Mr. Marchick. ?It?s not when you hit send, it?s when they want to engage.?

Brands and marketers should aim to identify the most optimal times for reaching their targeted users, and talk with consumers about their favorite products. When people feel that they received a message constructed just for them, they are much more likely to re-engage and purchase.

?Customer delight is paramount,? Mr. Marchick said. ?We approach mobile marketing from that perspective: taking care of the customer.?

Final Take
Adam Marchick is CEO and co-founder of Kahuna, Palo Alto