Future-Proof Mobile Strategies

Are you leveraging technology to multiply your efforts, your talents, your reach, or your impact? If not, you're ripe for disruption. In this last #GrowthHacking is Dead, Long Live #GrowthMarketing podcast episode, I interviewed John Koetsier, mobile economist at Tune and self-described futurist, and asked him to describe technologies marketers should invest in today, so they can understand and master them by the time they become mainstream.



"I'd definitely be investing in artificial intelligence. I believe that if you do not understand your customer journey, you will fail in your attempts to meet your customer where he or she wants to be met. You will fail in your attempts to understand who your customer is, what your solution provides for them, and when they want to hear from you, and I don't believe that you can understand the customer journey without artificial intelligence.

I've talked to one company, and they had mapped out between 500 and 800 different steps and stages in the customer journey, for their particular product in their industry. It's complex."

"Almost any company that's doing something interesting in martech is doing something in AI technologies, whether it's machine learning, deep learning, different varieties and forms of it."

Koetsier reinforces the role of SEO, SMO, and ASO: "Anywhere where there's large confluences of people, questions, intentions, or activity, marketers need to find analytics to understand them, to penetrate those networks, kinda hack those networks, right? Understand what works, what goes viral, what gets attention, what doesn't get attention. What is successful and what's unsuccessful? And then co-opt those for your purposes.

Obviously in appropriate ways, obviously not in a spammy way, obviously in a way that respects people and respects the platform in terms of what works there and what doesn't work there. The old saying is, rather than trying to make your own crowd, find a crowd, and get in front of it."

We are bullish about the commercial applications of AR.

Koetsier gushes about its potential in home renovation: "You're using your mobile phone to measure the size of your kitchen, for instance—you know how hard it is! What would fit—does this fridge fit in my kitchen? Will this stove fit, or something like that?" and we laughed about the new Donkey Kong AR game being a fun way to exercise, even though you might "look like an utterly insane person to anybody around."

However, AR introduces new security risks, along with benefits, because it puts AR signals on top of real signals. As you use your app, say, to buy clothing, or even as navigation, there could be pretty awful consequences there.

I asked Koetsier, who looked into mobile ad fraud quite extensively this year, how marketers investing in new technologies can avoid becoming the case study for what not to do.

"If you look at what kind of fraud could happen in an augmented reality world, there are a couple of things. First of all, would be spam. It's not a challenge right now, because there are no clear platform winners. Once there's a platform that has significant penetration, then it will be a target for spammers and scammers.

Then, all the sudden, things pop up, and spam comes into filters, and buy this, come here! You know, walk this way! Pay for this! Whatever the case might be.

We're not there yet. As we get there, we have to have some level of trust that the platform owners are going to do some due diligence to create what they're creating in such a way to avoid those problems, we're also gonna know that bad things are gonna happen. It's a reality of new technology, and we're just gonna have to proceed as carefully as we can, with the knowledge that we're gonna make some mistakes."

Enjoyed this article? Please share, comment, and discover more future-proof strategies in The Mobile Native's Guide to Marketing.

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Aurelie is the founder and CEO of Akila One, a growth-focused consultancy helping CEOs of digital companies like IAC Applications, Deloitte, Rakuten Viber, Cheetah Mobile, and many others scale their businesses from 50 to 500.

Earlier in her career, Aurelie ran Cheetah Mobile's global B2B marketing and business development organizations, was instrumental in building QuinStreet toward its IPO and brought SendMe to $120M annual mobile revenues. McKinsey-trained, she holds an MBA and an MSc in Engineering Chemistry.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.