Blasts Heard Round the Globe
Numbers don't lie.
Eighty-six percent of consumers respond to mobile promotions. High-quality mobile advertising and promotional blasts have a 19.3 percent click rate, unequaled by any other marketing tactic. Of 65,707 mobile messages containing URLs sent in a two-week period, the average URL was clicked within 45 seconds after being sent.
Mobile blasts are the ideal vehicle for personalized international messaging. Multilanguage personalization can be in the form of written text, subtitles, audio recordings, and text-to-speech message delivery. Once a message has been received, the recipient's response can be interactively shared through texting, form fields, dialing, and speech.
Multimedia mobile blasts can feature moving pictures and effects, audio, and video. When these mediums are united, the door is automatically open for personalization and especially for personalized use of speech technologies.
Getting Personal
Where once personalization meant inserting a name—"Dear Jane"—today the semantic Web, global data mining, and personalized mobile messaging applications create much deeper and more effective personalized communications. One example is Decooda.com, winner of Market Research's Insights Innovation Competition. Decooda processes 250 million Web text entries and documents per day in dozens of languages, applies over 1,000 algorithms to each, and then offers the results of its analysis to mobile marketers. These results include the personal wish lists of global prospects, products that the prospects researched online, emotional reactions of the prospects to existing products, and opinions the prospects may have expressed anywhere on the Web. This data is morphed into deeply personalized promotional messages on a one-to-one level that generate greater positive reactions than impersonal messaging, yielding ROIs as high as 508 percent.
Data mining results incorporate into the mobile message as text or sound and evolve on the fly to address the needs and desires of recipients. Messages are sent in a manner that defers to user preferences: as text combined with images, as subtitles on a movie, or as spoken subtitles or prompts using text-to-speech. All can be automatically or professionally translated into the language of the target, appear properly sized for the recipient's screen, and be spoken in the target's mother tongue as recorded audio or text-to-speech. Once the message has been viewed, heard, or read, the recipient can participate interactively using buttons, texting, dialing, or speech.
Advantages of Mobile Text and Voice Marketing
With mobile multimedia blasts, both the message being conveyed and the avenue for response can be totally personalized to the recipient's preferences and historic data. Many of these preferences can be garnered from the mobile device itself. Preference settings are also easy to implement via mobile technology. Subtitles and text-to-speech can be customized to the recipient with amazing precision. The versatility of personalization using speech technologies and text is much greater than with prerecorded voice prompts or fixed content. Hundreds of different industries can be addressed with the same blast because the text itself can be programmatically customized upon distribution, including text language and audio localization using text-to-speech.
From companies with products to tout to conference organizers trying to draw more international attendees to their conference trade shows to educators wanting to attract more international participants, these multimedia mobile marketing solutions, combined with the latest in multilanguage presentations and online course localization, bring personalized participation and interactivity directly to the user's device. If the product being marketed is something that can be sold and viewed on mobile, the loop from marketing to purchase and receipt can be only seconds. For physical products that ship, the loop from marketing to purchase to shipment can be completed as a smooth progression from a mobile blast.
In all cases, the advertising message for that product or service can be delivered as text, subtitles, and text-to-speech in any language. Then the orders and responses can be received as interactive text or speech.
As a marketing tool, mobile blasts and communications are new enough that they still command powerful and positive reactions. For almost anyone selling anything anywhere in the world, they are a channel worth exploring.
Sue Ellen Reager is CEO of @International Services, a language and software solutions company that performs translation, voice recording, and global system testing for speech and DTMF applications, as well as media localization.
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