By way of explaining what the The Mobile Experience Company does, Andy Bruce likes to quote marketing pioneer John Wanamaker: “Half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. We just don’t know which half.” Except that Bruce and his partner, Peter Pinfold, can tell you which half, along with when and where it happened.
The team at MobileXCo has developed software that helps agencies and brands more accurately close the gap between delivering marketing and advertising activities and understanding how they are actually contributing to sales at retail, particularly in the CPG segment. Their medium of choice is mobile messaging, but their service goes beyond delivery. As a data-driven marketing company, MobileXCo works with agencies to streamline the delivery process and analyze data in real time, giving them the ability to tweak campaigns while they’re still active.
The company was founded in 2012 with the goal of developing a more precise understanding of the connection between a marketing activity and the results of that activity, based on the insight that smartphone technology was going to make that more possible. Mobile messaging is widely considered the future of marketing. With response rates from SMS 209% higher than from phone calls, Facebook or email, there is no better way to help clients build personal relationships with their customers.
Because two-thirds of marketers expect ROI data from their agencies, MobileXCo provides a custom dashboard and admin tools for every experience. Campaigns can be tracked in real time.
Let’s take couponing. MobileXCo can also determine where a customer got his coupon, where he redeemed it, how much he spent and when he redeemed it, including time of day and day of week. From this data, a client can accurately determine that an ad buy of, say, $50,000 drove $150,000 worth of sales – or didn’t.
Any nugget of information can be useful, says MobileXCo co-founder Peter Pinfold, who was looking at the data gathered on behalf of a beverage company client and noticed that a large part of its target audience was purchasing the product at around 3:15 each day, which happened to be right after school. “So what they learned was that their media plan was not in line with their consumers’ behavior,” he says. “Being able to tweak that meant a difference in sales of tens of thousands of dollars for them.”
They provided a similar service to Per Se Brand Experience. “The MobileXCo team are marketing tech partners that enable a better understanding of where our plans are working and driving results,” says company president Baron Manett. “Sharing this information across our partners just makes sense for how we are developing ideas and solutions for our client partners.”
MobileXCo takes messaging to the next level with its ability to track performance in real time. “The post-campaign report should be a thing of past,” says Bruce. “After a campaign is over, it’s too late to make the changes necessary to have it work more effectively or to save you money; it’s taking a rear-view-mirror perspective.” Although it is useful to inform decisions on the next campaign, that requires launching exactly the same campaign, which may not have been part of the plan. Better to track results from day one, when the campaign launches, allowing clients to see spikes or dips in activity while a campaign is in progress. If they’re not getting the response rate they’re looking for, they can make changes and see results immediately.
The service doesn’t end with delivery. There are many companies that do pieces of what MobileXCo does, including text message marketing companies, CRM companies, and content marketing companies. On any given campaign, the average brand agency might be dealing with dozens of different software applications or service-providing agencies to pull the overall effort together, whereas what they get with us MobileXCo is an integrated approach – everything from measure the effectiveness of different media all the way through to creating and supporting a contest experience by collecting the data.
MobileXCo allows clients to run purchase-based promotions without apps, special codes, or complex point-of-sale integrations, tapping into the fact that 89% of consumers would like to use messaging to communicate with businesses.
“We’ll wrap the entire thing up into a bundle for you so you have the proverbial one throat to choke,” says Bruce. “It’s faster, more cost effective and more reliable. You don’t need to worry about managing five or six different agency partners or 10 different software solutions.”
It’s also repeatable. MobileXCo software makes it possible for clients to launch activities in a scalable way. Instead of building a new campaign from scratch every time, clients can plug a new one into a format already created for them by simply modifying it slightly and relaunching it in the future. In the U.S., $40-billion a year is spent on marketing delivery through agencies, and Bruce feels a significant portion of that is wasted because the actual delivery process is very inefficient. “You don’t need to pay $150,000 to do something from scratch every time,” he says.
MobileXCo has also worked with Conagra Canada, and Aaron Minocha senior brand manager, Snacks and Pantry, says MobileXCo helped them connect with their consumers where and when they are looking to connect. “Working with MobileXCo enables greater visibility and understanding as to how our marketing activities are contributing to our objectives in real time,” he says. “This affords us more opportunities to understand and adapt our ideas and opportunities. ”Future projects for MobileXCo include the integration of other messaging channels such as Facebook messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp and others, along with the capability of automating many of the conversations using AI technologies. “Our goal is to automate things for our clients as much as possible,” says Bruce.
