In mobile marketing, high-tech is not necessarily good: Female Friday with Helen Keegan

Welcome to the first Female Friday feature interview on GoMo News! On the last Friday of every month, we’ll be publishing an interview with one of the leading ladies of the mobile industry. Our first interview is with mobile marketing and advertising guru, Helen Keegan. Helen publishes the technokitten blog, and is founder and CEO of UK mobile marketing agency BeepMarketing. She is also heavily involved in the conference scene, regularly speaking about mobile conferences, and helping to organise several conferences in the UK.

You are heavily involved in mobile, from marketing to mobile media and what can be achieved on mobile. Have you always been so concentrated on mobile?

No, it was a complete accident! I have tech background whatsoever. I worked in fashion retail for years in the West End of London. Then Sunday trading was introduced, and working on your feet for six days a week didn’t have much appeal – so despite being a store manager, I quit. Retail was all I know, so I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

How did you get into mobile?

The same weekend I quit, I saw an ad in the local paper for a typing shorthand course. Turned out to be the best 7 pounds I ever spent! I discovered I had an aptidtude for it, and my supervisor let me play with the computers outside of course hours and learn more about them. I started doing temp work – my first job was with Kuwait Oil, who were lovely people but it was most boring job in the world!  Then I spent two years working for a VP of marketing, and that’s how I got into marketing. I loved it. But there was a glass ceiling there -  all the women there were secretaries, all the VPs were man. That’s just the way it was, which really didn’t suit me.

So I went to University of Westminster and did a part-time course in business, with a focus on marketing. During the course I spent one year heading with the PR and marketing department for a massive construction agency, who built the london eye. But then I got the travel bug and went backpacking for a year – when I came back, I just couldn’t go back to construction firm. So I finished off the degree full and graduated into managing consultancy. FirstGroup was my first client, and I did a lot of work with them, redesigning the internal managment structure for 30,000 people. That was the end of 99 – and I decided it was time to get into Dot Com.

I got a job with BuyingTeam, which was like a one-stop online shop for SMEs and large companies. I ended up being in customer service, working for Russel Buckley (now Vice President of Global Alliances for mobile advertising powerhouse AdMob). When he left BuyingTeam, he suggested I get out too. He called a few weeks from a company that sent text messages to shoppers, looking for someone retail experience! I jumped in – although at the time I could barely text! I recruited the customer service team and set up the marketing team and retail team. We signed up 85,000 customers, sending promotional and marketing information by SMS. We basically invented mobile marketing back in 2000, when only MTV and Cadburys were doing a little work there. It was the first large mobile campaign in the UK or US.

And did you then that this was where you wanted to be?

No! It was just great fun being a startup – and I knew then that it was a great privelege to be part of something at the start of it. We ran 1,500 campaigns for about 150 retailers. But it didn’t last – we were gearing up for investment rounds, and the contracts were ready to be signed… on the morning of 9/11. The investors got cold feet, and that was that. We got out. The rest is history.

You’re very heavily involved in mobile conferences, like Mobile Monday London, Heroes of the Mobile Screen and Swedish Beers at Mobile World Congress. Conferences can often be the same people saying the same things – how do you feel that can be avoided?

It’s about knowing your market and your audience. I come away from an event expecting A) to have learned something and B) met someone interesting. Those are the two criteria. So sometimes you’ve got to look outside the usual areas to get interesting people and new formats. We try to look at more esoteric things, like Green issues with mobile.

2009 was definitely a good year for mobile marketing – is there any branch of mobile advertising that you’re particularly excited about?

Email is now a growing mobile marketing channel. Around 20% of emails sent in the UK are viewed on the phone. And whenever I see any marketing on a mobile email, I find it’s not gormatted properly! The links don’t work, you can’t click through! So much effort goes into targeting email advertising, and then it doesn’t work.

Mobile advertising works best on a local level, but it needs to be instituted globally. Do you think large organisations like the MMA will be what popularises mobile, or will it be a local effort?

The MMA works on a very local level. Each local chapter has different priorities. The US chapter is about lobbying and changing legislation, the UK chapter is all about knowledge and networking. Others are about marketing. So you’ll find in mobile even global organisations have to work on a local level.

There are a huge number of people who aren’t touched by mobile marketing. The vast majority of mobile owners have very low tech phones. Is mobile marketing aiming too high? Should lower tech solutions be made more important?

Mobile agencies want the sexy thing, but unfortunately it’s the basic thing that works. There’s a lot of mileage for SMS, but unfortunately it’s largely ignored by online advertisers who are only now getting into mobile. There is a culture gap between the web community and the mobile community. It’ getting better with the iPhone, but the web community who develop Android and iPhone apps don’t understand mobile. Not enough thought goes into customer experience on the mobile – and customers largely have lower-tech device.

How can SMS be made better?

To be honest, the best channel for SMS is customer service. When someone buys something, you can say thank you by SMS. SMS marketing is not about push, it’s not about saying “my shop is brilliant, come on in”.  I would advise advertisers to use SMS as a feedback mechanism. If there are compaints, I’d rather get a 140 cahracter complaint than a 3 page essay. And SMS is an easier and quicker way for a shop keeper to respond to a complaint. Some other Ad Hoc stuff also works. You’ll see that ” TEXT TO WIN” competition still get a lot of traction.

Any advice for people getting into mobile marketing in 2010?

You should have started already! While Mobile is now a channel by itself, and there are some unique qualities to it, it’s still just a part of the overall digital experience. The technology should be invisible. It’s not about “Facebook on Mobile” or “Web Browsing on Mobile”… it’s just about Facebook and web browsing. People don’t really care about the technology, they just care that the experience is seemless.