The art of mobile brief

Some people have the notion that modern advertisement is rapidly evolving into a fully technical and data driven profession. This is completely wrong and this article is here to help marketers from both worlds - clients and agencies, understand the basics and take the ball back to the strategic and communication regime.

The brief from the client side

1. More than your brand background!

First mistake: most of client briefs I am exposed to have a short description on their brand.

You should be as specific as you can! Feed your agency with all necessary information and all data related to the specific campaign you hired them to create and they need to know. They need to know about your sales, yourconsumers’ data and not just the background of your brand. They don’ t need to know who you are, they need to know what exactly you want them to communicate and why!

2. Give objectives, not the message!

In terms of why, your agency needs to know your objectives, your exact goal. In simple words why are you doing so? Are your sales falling? Do you want to build up customer loyalty? They need to know exactly where your brand and consequently they are aiming at. They need to have a focus and this has to be clear. Nowadays this is something really easy to do, given everything is measurable and KPI’s can help your brand clearly define strategic goals. Providing your agency with the right KPIs means providing them with a good understanding of what is important to your brand.

You hired an agency to deliver the message, so giving hints from competition, like ads you liked, may lead to disorientation! May set their minds in a direction – the direction you indicated – and come up with a message simply because they were following a lead and not your brand’s goal.

3. Target Personas, not audiences!

Today you have the opportunity to target consumer personas and not audiences. Targeting audiences is yesterday’s news! Contemporary advertisement demands behavioral targeting. Giving a mobile brief for retail needs to specify whether why are interested for in-app purchasers or value shoppers and not simply for an audiences defined by its sex and age.

4. Give insights, not past experience!

One last but not least thing you should keep in mind is not to provide past experience, what you did last year and what you are accustomed to do. Give sales and market research insights so that your agency can translate them into concrete business ideas therefore profitable growth.

The brief from the agency side

Competition is fierce and only the best campaigns do bring repeat business. So let’s lay the foundation for a successful campaign! Warply shares its secrets – well, at least a couple of them - and guides you through all steps for a successful mobile brief.

1. First comes Research

From the agency part, what always comes first when taking a brief is research. No matter whether you do it through surveys or focus groups. Research, research and research! Qualitative research is the tool to answer all “questions” need to be answered so as to have a brief fully covered, completely focused on your clients objectives, which eventually delivers the message! Explore your brief! Explore personas, quota, insights, just explore.

2. Meet clients Needs

Define what your client and its brand need. In terms of mobile marketing this means whether you ‘ll do it with an app or through a mobile web site. Let’s say for example your brief comes from travel sector and your objective is to sell tickets. What do you do? You definitely go with a mobile app! This way you sell directly through your consumers’ most personal device, in which they spend increasingly most of their time.

3. Find your Utility

When it comes to an app the next step is to find its utility. Meaning whether it would be a “transaction-first” application, built so as consumers complete a transaction directly from their device (as in the above mentioned example) or an “engagement-first” application, built to encourage and maintain consumer/user adoption. Utility has to do with everything, from content to audiences and personas, while defining its features. For example your brief comes from FMCG, what’s your app’s key element would be? Food for thought…

4. The right Media Plan

Next step would be to define the best plan to communicate your campaign. Your media plan comes of course absolutely intertwined with the objective you are aiming at. Α standard media plan involves four stages: setting media objectives, evaluating media, selecting and implementing choices, and determining the budget. In mobile marketing terms your objective would be either to drive traffic to your clients mobile web site or/and to achieve the maximum downloads of your app. Depending on the case, after the appropriate eavaluation, you define the right channels to reach the right target groups your research indicated.

When choosing which media/ channel to use, you not only need to know which media outlets exist, but also which ones suit your product, as advertising media selection is the process of choosing the most cost-effective media for advertising to achieve the required coverage and number of exposures in the target audience. A key point as far as your choice is concerned is that there are definite inherent strengths and weaknesses associated with each medium, therefore relies heavily on the research findings on each medium, your own experience and inevitably on your subjective appraisal.

Equally crucial is also the stage of selecting and implementing choices, where the media planner must make media mix decisions and timing directions, both of which are restricted by the available budget. The media mix decision involves putting media together in the most effective manner - a difficult task which necessitates quantitatively and qualitatively evaluating each medium and combination thereof.

Keep in mind that the mobile acquisition game is very expensive, therefore optimize and don’t forget to start from organic downloads exploiting your entire owned media landscape. Is a rather common mistake to pay for downloads you would get for free due to aggressive campaign launch ;-)

Moreover nowadays media planners - as far-fetched as it may appear that to the Greek agencies, must calculate into their budgets a placement in programmatic. Programmatic offers the opportunity for a better and more effective targeting as it involves real time bidding for advertising space. However, for this to work properly, we need to have the appropriate data of consumers' profiles.

5. Retain your consumers

A successful brief is all about retain! Consumer retention is more than giving them what they expect. It’s about exceeding their expectations and turning them into loyal advocates for your brand, plus as we said in a previous article into your best marketeers. And here is where you have to be creative! Combined to the delivery of a consistently high standard of service, as loyalty puts consumer value rather than maximizing profits at the center of business strategy. To do so, deliver personalized content that provides value to your end consumer.

For example let’s take the case of exclusive brands. After having done your homework/research, insights have shown you that exclusive brands' audiences all they care about is exclusivity in general! Exclusive offers, something to make them feel unique, thus remain loyal.

At this point at Warply we go creative, exploring cool stuff and ideas with high esthetics - as "the selfie project" below, and achieve retention goal of happy consumers! 

6. Monetize your brief!

Congrats! You reached the final step of a successful campaign. Time to monetize your efforts and your brief! Be sure you create a direct and clear path to purchase by reducing friction and clicks/steps for the path to purchase. Integrate a payment gateway, implement credit card tokenization for one-click-buy and deliver push messages with direct action that leads directly to the checkout page.

Just insert actionable push notifications, let your consumers simply tap & pick one of the top-rated restaurants you pre-selected and recommend for them in a minimum best-of choices list and guide them to "the exit" with their card-token already inserted.

Explore more news, facts and hidden truths in Warply's blog, check-out our case studies here and discover compelling ways to attract and engage your audience, and monetize through mobile.