• by Gay Gabrilska , September 11, 2013

The broadcast industry has long embraced the concept of dayparting. Radio and TV stations meticulously fine-tune their personalities, programming, music, and promotions to fit with a particular time slot and audience. That’s why you have morning talk radio, game and talk shows on mid-day TV, and violent crime dramas at 10 p.m.

This concept that people behave differently or have different needs, wants, desires, and constraints at different times throughout the day should be self-evident. But, too many companies are still pushing out the same mobile marketing and advertising messages all day.

By taking a page out of broadcast’s dayparting playbook, companies can see greater returns on their marketing and advertising efforts. The key is to deliver the correct message, at the correct time, to the correct audience.

The first step in this process, as it is with most campaigns, is deciding on a call to action. What do you want someone to do with your message?

This will help inform what times during the day or week you should push this message. Does the call to action take a lot of time? Do you want sometime take a test drive of your latest 2014 SUV? Do you want someone to click a link and watch a 10-minute product demo?

If the call to action is time-intensive, when can your audience accomplish it? Probably not during workday hours of 8am-5pm. Messages sent during this time will be forgotten or ignored, as your audience cannot take direct and immediate action. Think about dayparting these types of messages for nights or weekends when people have more free time to engage.

Alternatively, if you want people to quickly accomplish your call to action, it needs to be sent at the time when they are most likely to do so.

If your message is a mobile coupon for a new breakfast sandwich, sending it at 7 a.m. makes more sense than 7 p.m.

A reminder to play the lotto for the $190 million jackpot would fit well right before someone leaves work. They are about to drive past multiple lotto retailers. Once they are home for the evening, it might be too late to entice them to leave again.

One of the benefits of mobile and dayparting is that you can affordably test different messages to see where they gain the most traction. There’s no $20,000 budget to reshoot a TV spot. Simply track and analyze the data and retarget as needed.

Take coffee, for example. A company might run a single traditional media advertising campaign for its new frozen summer beverage. With the budget for a 30-second spot, they can’t produce specific ads to target different times.

However, with mobile dayparting, they are able to see when this iced beverage offer is most appealing and capitalize on the behavior patterns of their customers.

Hypothetically, they would see that in the morning, their frozen beverage offer was largely ignored. However, messages for traditional hot coffee had a robust click-through rate. The mirror-opposite was true for the afternoons. They now know how to focus not only their mobile spend, but their broadcast advertising as well.

Dayparting your mobile marketing efforts should come naturally. Place yourself in the mindset of your audience. Would you have the time, desire, or need to engage with a particular message at that particular time? If the answer is yes, you’ve found the correct daypart.

Right times, right words, right actions. The keys to mobile dayparting success.