The good news about B2B mobile marketing is that more CMOs than ever before are allocating resources to mobile marketing. According to one recent survey of global product and supply companies, 65 percent said their now company offered a mobile optimized website and the same percentage said their company also offered B2B mobile apps. So a clear majority of B2B marketers are at least aware of the potential for mobile marketing.
However, the bad news is that most B2B marketers have only very hazy ideas about what to do with mobile. Let’s face it, making your website optimized for mobile is a pretty low bar to clear. Two-thirds of marketers say that mobile is used to help drive brand awareness and customer engagement. Fair enough. But only one-third of B2B marketers say that mobile is all about driving sales.
Think about that for a moment – marketers are spending thousands of dollars on mobile apps and mobile experiences and mobile websites, but only one in three think there’s a sale at the end of the road. No wonder so many marketers think they’re throwing away money on mobile.
That’s why you need to make mobile part of the B2B buyer’s journey. Recognize that mobile is one way to move prospects along that journey from initial lead to final sale. People carry their mobile phones with them everywhere these days, so you have the built-in advantage of being able to reach these prospects literally 24/7. (Not that you want to be harassing them with text messages late at night, but it’s always good to know that the potential exists!)
By thinking in terms of the buyer’s journey, you have a very easy way of thinking how and why you need to integrate mobile into the overall marketing mix. For example, think about the classic B2B whitepaper. How are you going to deliver that via mobile?
One French company – Zyyne – is already working on that problem. What they offer is an easy and convenient way to broadcast PDF documents on mobile devices. Sending a mobile-optimized whitepaper to a potential customer is much faster than sending via mail, and much cheaper than printed catalogs or brochures. And since it’s interactive, it’s much better than a typical PDF.
So don’t think that you simply need to replicate the desktop experience on the mobile device. If you think about the types of apps that are really taking off on mobile – like Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp – they’re offering completely new types of experiences for users and they’re not even made with the desktop in mind. Have you ever experienced how frustrating it is to use Instagram on a laptop?
Ultimately, you want to avoid being the B2B marketer who just plunked down a small fortune on a new mobile marketing campaign, only to wonder how the money is actually being used to drive sales. After all, in the latest “CMO Survey” from Deloitte, Duke B-School and the American Marketing Association, fully 40 percent of all marketers said that mobile had “no impact at all” on their marketing goals.
Wow.
That should really create the incentive to think more clearly in terms of the B2B buyer’s journey. How can you use all the mobile tools available to you to push that prospect along to the next step? When you start thinking in those terms, you can be part of the other 60 percent of marketers who are seeing positive results from their mobile marketing spend.
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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.