Mobile's adoption rates (in the billions!) are astronomical. User-engagement levels (when was the last time you saw a business professional without a mobile phone?) are unprecedented. Far from being only a B2C marketing approach, mobile provides B2Bs with extraordinary opportunities.
But when it comes to mobile, B2B marketers find themselves more confused than confident.
Our previous 10-Step Guide focused on social media. This companion piece focuses on integrating mobile into the B2B marketing mix. Follow these 10 steps to ensure you start smart, launch strong, and produce mobile programs that deliver high return on investment (ROI).
1. Audit your Web content
Embarking on any new initiative starts with goal-setting. But there's the rule, and mobile proves the exception.
Why? Because of mobile's explosive growth and adoption rates, your business audiences are already trying to access your websites from their Web-enabled mobile devices. The problem? Your corporate website was created for desktop monitors, not for mobile environments with tiny screens.
So the first step for integrating mobile is to conduct an audit of your current Web content to optimize your users' experience across the mobile devices. That will require creating an additional, much smaller mobile website—usually located at a "companyname.mobi" or an "m.companyname.com" Web address—to be accessed from mobile devices.
Remember, mobile demands the basics: a streamlined environment for users to get the information they need and to navigate through your site easily and effortlessly.
2. Determine your mobile goals
Now that you've audited your content, it's time to set the goals that you seek to accomplish through mobile.
Will you integrate mobile to generate new leads? Implement mobile programs to ensure the relevancy of your company in this new space? Leverage mobile approaches to initiate new customer relationship management tactics... or to achieve other goals?
Keep in mind, you'll be investing time, budget, and resources into your mobile-marketing programs, so you'll first want to determine exactly what you're seeking to achieve in return.
3. Pinpoint your (mobile) value proposition
No matter the medium, the draw for your audiences will always be the value you provide them in return for their time, attention, and loyalty. But, unlike B2C marketers who can wield novel approaches in their marketing, B2B audiences are driven by efficiency over entertainment.
For this step, ask and answer: "How can we make the work-related activities of our business markets better, faster, and easier through mobile?"
Focus on creating mobile programs that provide business professionals high value by saving them time, increasing their know-how, streamlining their tasks, solving their business challenges, and improving their experiences.
For several examples, see "Better, Faster, Easier: Mobile's Marching Orders for B2B Marketers."
4. Profile the mobile moves of your competitors
You don't want your mobile programs to mimic your competition's. What you want is to leverage mobile in ways that make your B2B stand out, raise the bar, and rise above the competitive clutter.
Along with focusing on your audience's needs in the previous step, in this step you'll need to profile your competitors to understand which mobile programs and approaches they are, and are not, employing.
As a bonus, you might just find that mobile gives your marketing a competitive advantage, as many B2B companies will be slower to integrate those new technologies in their plans and promotions.
5. Increase the impact of your current programs
Before you solidify your mobile strategy, it's important to conduct a review of your current and planned marketing programs to assess how you can increase their effectiveness by adding mobile components.
For example, at industry events, develop an "in-venue app" for your audience that improves their experience and makes your brand more memorable. Or, as part of your branding campaigns, integrate mobile keywords/short codes to transform awareness programs into lead-generating vehicles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code
Several more ways for you to use mobile to increase the impact of your programs are featured in "Six Ways B2Bs Can Increase Their Marketing Impact With Mobile."
6. Set your B2B mobile strategy
You've now completed the requisite analysis and you're ready to set your mobile strategy! Tactics (tools) come next, in the strategic phase you're still operating from a high level and need to solidify the necessary steps and actions to achieve your goals.
For example, to attract and engage your audience, will your mobile strategy...
- Inform them of breaking information and industry developments?
- Interact with them in new ways and through new solutions that solve business problems and produce benefits?
- Improve their efficiency and productivity through new tools and applications?
- Initiate dialogues through a new communications channel?
- Provide incentive to your audience to download a new trial or special promotion?
7. Identify your mobile toolset
Whether you use a widget, app, mobile website, location-enabled service, short-message service (SMS) campaign, or other mobile approach, you're afforded various ways to carry out your strategy and initiate communications with your target audience.
It is important to note, however, that when identifying mobile tools you should be aware of several design and delivery considerations.
For example, if your toolset includes developing a mobile app, you'll need to pay close attention to the various operating systems of the different mobile devices (e.g., iPhone and Droid) used by your audience.
Mobile manufacturers have different operating systems; different versions of your app will need to accommodate them to reach your target audience.
8. Learn mobile's best-practices
Along with a new set of media comes a new set of best-practices. Practices range from optimizing content for mobile environments and steering clear of certain technologies that cannot be viewed on many mobile devices (such as Flash) to providing users with a double-opt-in verification for SMS campaigns to ensure high levels of privacy and control.
See the Mobile Marketing Association's best-practices (pdf).
9. Launch... and promote!
Once you've created your mobile-marketing programs, you will also need to create a plan for promoting them. Remember, "build it and they will come" is not a successful plan... it's a surefire plan to fail.
Promote your mobile presence and marketing programs via both your collateral as and your marketing activities, such as your website, e-newsletters, advertising campaigns, and social-media channels where you maintain a presence (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs). And wherever you include your website URL, also consider promoting your mobile website and SMS short code.
10. Track Your Mobile ROI
As they do with Web-based initiatives, marketers can quantify their mobile-marketing ROI in several ways. Although the metrics that each B2B will track will be contingent on its specific goals, programs, and tools, metrics can include the number of mobile website visits, conversion rates, application downloads, and SMS subscribers, among others.
But the real ROI of mobile pertains to your B2B's overall business performance and is evidenced through the "proof points" of increased leads, sales, awareness, relevancy, and retention. And in tracking your results, you're able to establish not only your ROI but also areas in need of optimization.
(In case you missed it, here's the previous 10-Step Social Media Guide for B2B Marketers.)
