For most B2B marketers, it’s getting very hard to ignore mobile as part of the overall marketing mix. The reason is simple: people carry their mobile phones around with them almost everywhere, and not having a marketing presence on mobile means that you are squandering a very big marketing opportunity.
However, putting together a mobile marketing strategy should not imply running out and buying a lot of those tiny mobile ads that show up on devices these days. Those ads are too small, nobody reads them, and they’re just plain annoying. Instead, marketers need to think smart about how to integrate mobile into the mix.
One big idea, of course, is simply to create an app that will simply re-create all of your offline marketing collateral. Anytime a prospect wants more information about your product or service, they would simply open up your app. But wait a second – that doesn’t reflect the way people really use mobile. Look at your own Android or iPhone – how many “B2B apps” do you have on the first or second pages of your device’s screen? Probably zero.
A better idea is to think about the way people are using social media on their phones and then come up with a few tactics around that. One obvious place to look is Facebook, which continues to roll out new features. One of them is Facebook Live, which offers brands the opportunity to do a live broadcast right from their mobile phone. You could do a live interview with the CEO or with a product designer. You could do a live broadcast from a corporate event or presentation. You could even make your quarterly earnings call available via Facebook Live.
Instagram is another place to look for great mobile marketing ideas. People love to open up Instagram any time they have some free time and simply scroll through the photos of their friends. A number of top B2B brands – including GE – are now very active on Instagram. If you haven’t started following them, it’s time to start – you’ll get a lot of great ideas. For example, the once concept that brands are trying to leverage now is Instagram Stories, which is basically a “day in the life” of a business. Each Story disappears within 24 hours.
There’s also a lot of creativity and innovation happening in the chatbot space, where brands are creating “bots” that can communicate with customers via platforms like Facebook Messenger.
And, of course, there’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit. That includes making sure your website is fully mobile-responsive and looks great on every digital device. It includes changing the formatting of emails so that they are optimized for mobile (i.e. no more long rambling text emails that nobody is going to read on a mobile device).
Thus, mobile marketing is really vital for all businesses, not just those businesses that are consumer-
facing or that depend on the Internet to sell products and services. These days, the mobile phone is ubiquitous. It’s the first thing people reach for in the morning and the last thing they put away before going to sleep. That should be a convincing enough argument to re-think your company’s entire mobile marketing strategy!
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.