• Your content is specifically formatted for particular devices.
• The effort is part of a campaign that is co-branded with a device or carrer.
• You believe different devices or carriers will reach the appropriate demographic or geographic group more effectively.
If you have decided that device or carrier targeting is a good idea for your initiative, it is important to determine which device or which carrier is the best to work with, so you should start with the statistics. Statistics about the iPhone and smart phones in general abound, but not a lot of statistics have been publicly made available about other specific handsets or carriers. For these statistics, it is usually best to go directly to the carriers or handset manufacturers to get information about the demographics that they reach. If you are working with a carrier, you should be able to get the demographic data directly. If you have trouble getting demographic information from the carriers, sometimes you can find media kits online, work directly with the media contact for the carrier, or gather information about the demographics through information intended for potential on-deck advertisers.
Beyond statistics that you can compile from various sources, it might be a good idea to do your own market research, either surveying your existing customer base or working with market research firms to survey potential customers. Whether you are conducting your research in person, online, or on a mobile phone, it is important to keep your questions as short and clear as possible.
You can conduct your research in many ways. In some cases, you will want to conduct simple one- or two-question surveys; in other cases, you will have a long list of questions to include. Remember that people will be more likely to take the survey if you offer some incentive, such as a coupon or a gift. The longer the survey is, the more important the incentive becomes. In some cases, you might need to hire a market research company to help with the surveying, by developing questioners and recruiting sample groups.
In addition to formal surveys, if you or your brand is active in social networks, it might be possible to do crowdsourcing to find out more about who your target market is and what they care about. Crowdsourcing simply refers to the practice of taking casual, nonscientific surveys of your customers by asking them questions on social networks. This is especially valuable if you have done a good job attracting your target market to your social profiles on venues such as Twitter and Facebook.
Figure shows a simple survey that the clothing company H&M performed on Facebook just before the Back-to-School shopping season in 2009. Within nine minutes of the question being live on Facebook, 660 people said they liked the question (and presumably responded), and 100 left comments. This type of market research is quite cheap and reaches your most active demographics.
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Crowdsourcing is simple and effective on Facebook.
