When considering mobile marketing for B2B companies, today's marketers are wrestling with some big questions: How can we use mobile to engage our target audience of business professionals? and Where do we even begin to integrate mobile media into our B2B marketing plans?
Far from just a consumer-oriented medium, mobile is fertile ground for marketing to business audiences.
As with all other media, your mobile strategy and set of marketing programs will be contingent on your B2B's specific goals, offerings, audiences, industry, budget, and competitors. But the best place to start is by auditing your current initiatives to identify opportunities where mobile can increase their impact.
That a great way for B2Bs to become better acquainted with incorporating mobile into their plans, but it also enables marketers to assess the return on investment of integrating these media, through pre- and post-mobile comparisons.
Let's examine six ways that B2Bs can increase their marketing impact with mobile.
1. Make your website mobile-friendly
Although not all mobile devices are Web-enabled, smartphones have already secured an avid following among business professionals. Yet most corporate websites are not optimized for mobile viewing and are either very difficult to navigate or impossible to read on smaller screens.
That means many of today's B2Bs may be inadvertently forcing their prospects to competitors' sites that are meeting prospects' needs by availing them of mobile-friendly experiences.
To ensure your B2B never misses a business opportunity, create a separate version of your site created specifically for mobile users. And use every opportunity to promote your mobile site, including a clear callout on your corporate website and through your other marketing communications, such as email newsletters, blogs, and social-media platforms.
2. "Show" the stories you already tell
To increase awareness and credibility, B2Bs create content that helps target audiences overcome their "pain points" and improve their business performance. But because of the complexity of B2B industries and offerings, the content is often lengthy and technical and thus very difficult to view on small mobile screens.
Rather than rethink their content, B2Bs need to rethink their formats... with video a ripe option for audiences accessing content from their mobile devices.
By producing quick video segments that show the tips you tell in your articles, and by creating visual case studies in addition to the longer, text formats available at your website, you're enabling business audiences to easily see and hear your messages wherever they may be working from at the moment.
3. Turn your branding campaigns into lead-generation vehicles
Branding campaigns, such as with print, outdoor, radio, and TV, have traditionally been one-way marketing vehicles. Though the inclusion of website URLs and phone numbers help to create a call to action, marketers are still uncertain how well their campaigns are faring while their bosses are left wondering whether it's a good use of the company's marketing spend.
Through mobile, all brand impressions can now be lead-generation opportunities.
By adding a keyword/short-code combination to branding campaigns—encouraging users to send a text message for more information and to receive additional content of value to them—B2Bs can turn those otherwise one-way ads into two-way vehicles to build prospect databases, begin new dialogues, and better track response rates.
4. Create a new communications channel with your content
B2Bs are highly sophisticated in the thought-leadership content that they create and the research that they track. As mentioned earlier, B2Bs can repurpose their marketing content into formats that better accommodate mobile users' needs. But that addresses only opportunities where audiences are "pulling" B2B content to their mobile devices.
Just as you create opt-in email newsletters to "push" content to your audience, opt-in short message service (SMS) alerts can open an entirely new, uniquely personal, and instantaneous communications channel with your audience.
And where B2Bs can win over their business audiences through this type of communications channel is by delivering timely, breaking information, as when alerting them to important developments and industry news.
5. Apportion part of your advertising budget to mobile
Unlike rumors to the contrary, advertising is alive, well, and on a growth tear across mobile platforms. And experimentation and results are at an all-time high, with mobile advertising performing around five times better than Internet ads.
Try some innovation of your own by allocating a portion of your advertising budget to targeting business audiences through mobile ads. Whether via an SMS campaign sponsorship, in-application (in-app) advertising, or banners on well-targeted mobile websites, mobile might just be a better use of your advertising budget.
6. Engage your audience through apps
All B2Bs want to stand apart from the competition and secure a strong position in the minds of their audience, and mobile is no different. One approach that can offer a new level of utility for your business audience—and a way to get your brand right on their mobile devices—is through the development of mobile applications.
For example, if your B2B develops enterprise software and your brand's value proposition is rooted in streamlining business tasks for professionals, your app could showcase your competencies by helping them streamline several of their mobile-centric tasks.
Or for your B2B to stand out at an industry-wide trade show teeming with top competitors, you could create an app for event attendees that helps them better navigate the various exhibits, organize the many seminars of interest, and remind them of special networking sessions.
B2Bs need to focus on the following three questions:
- What will the app uniquely do for your audience? (Provide benefits? Solve problems?)
- How will the app underscore and communicate your brand's value proposition?
- Which audience segments will the app target? You could open your app to all professionals as a way of improving brand awareness, or you could restrict portions of it to your customers as a customer relationship management tactic.
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All told, today's B2Bs are presented with a host of remarkable ways to increase their marketing impact with mobile.
But perhaps most remarkable is that amid so many approaches we are still at the beginning of the mobile revolution and thus only catching a glimpse of this medium's full marketing potential.
