While engineers still do the majority of their heavy-lifting work on desktop computers, their mobile usage is increasing, especially for reading emails and articles, and conducting product searches. This trend has real implications for industrial marketers, who must build and maintain a persistent digital presence.
According to the “Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector” survey by Engineering360 Media Solutions, engineers are using their mobile devices more often to search products, read news article, access work-related email, view supplier websites, and read e-newsletters. Smartphones are used more often than tablets for all work-related purposes.
Here are some tips you can follow to make sure that customers interacting with you on mobile get what they’re looking for.
Use a responsive design for your website and email.
A responsive design allows a website to be more easily viewed on smartphones and other mobile devices. According to Gorilla Group, 50% of all B2B companies have implemented a responsive design for their websites. That was almost double the percentage of sites with a responsive design in 2015 (26%). That trend will likely continue in 2017.
Research from Google shows that 57 percent of people say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed site. Forty percent have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience.
If your business doesn’t have the time or resources for a website redesign, you can still make progress in the mobile arena. Seek out professionals to create campaign landing pages that are responsive in design, or choose a few key pages on your site that you can convert to responsive design. Work incrementally until it’s time for your next website overhaul.
The same holds true for making email responsive. If you are working with an email service provider, they probably offer responsive design email templates. Take advantage of them. Users are much more likely to delete an email that does not look good on their mobile device—and a lot more email is being read on mobile devices these days.
Create mobile-friendly content
Your marketing content should make an instant splash and be quickly understood by your audience. This is especially true on mobile devices where the screen real estate is so small.
Use strong headlines, scalable images and clear text. PDF content is notoriously difficult to read on mobile devices. Consider creating HTML versions of PDFs.
Videos tend to be mobile friendly and are popular with an engineering audience. Put them near the top of pages and emails so they are noticed right away on mobile devices.
Add click-to-call and click-to-chat features
What could be more user friendly than having a convenient click-to-call button on your website? It’s a great feature that allows you to take full advantage of the device in your customer’s hand at a specific moment in time. Click-to-chat is also an effective feature for mobile device users.
Take advantage of text marketing
While it’s not always easy getting customers and prospects to hand over their mobile numbers (think of using incentives and other value-added offers), marketing via text can be extremely effective.
According to SlickText, 99 percent of text messages are opened, and the average text marketing click-through rate is 36 percent, compared to 6-7 percent for email. You can do many of the same things through text as you can through email, as long as you keep your message short. Offer white papers, videos and other content that your audience is interested in.
If you want to improve your mobile marketing game, start by having a discussion with your media partners. Ask them in what ways they can help your marketing become more mobile friendly and help you take advantage of your audience’s growing use of mobile devices.
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