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Mobile Marketing. It’s ubiquitous; yet few businesses truly understand what it means. Let’s break it down to the basics and see if we can’t get you pushing brain power to smart devices to better understand what this means for you.

Smart Devices Are Prolific

When you’re waiting in line at the retail center this holiday season (it’s what I did this weekend), look at the moms with strollers and shopping carts. What are the kids holding to occupy them whilst mom shops? Tablets! There were more children on tablets strolling through the store than I’d ever seen (and each kid had one so they wouldn’t fight).

When you’re sitting in the movie theater waiting for the junk and previews to stop (what, like 20 minutes?) count how many peeps are surfing or reading on tablets, smartphones or e-Readers. Bet you can’t count that high, can you? Uh-huh.

Now, step up your thinking a notch and imagine the shoppers doing cost comparisons online as they stand in front of a store display. Do you know what’s happening? Retailers are offering a 10 percent cut from online prices.

That’s how I just bought my new Babolat racquets; strolled into Tennis Zone and asked how much (after months of demoing each one), and the clerk looked up the online price and cut it. Pretty soon the smart retailers will have Wifi-ready touch screens installed throughout the store for folks to comparison shop right there and see that the deal in the brick and mortar is better than the online price (it’s a no-brainer because of shipping and other service fees, right?).

Let’s think about one b-to-b example here…I do a ton of online research because I’m a professional blogger. I have to back up my content with a few proof points when I’m really trying to be smarter than the average bear. Research takes time, and I appreciate those 20 minutes in the movie theater to scroll through websites for the best downloadable content I can read later. That content looks primarily like a stale PDF; what’s your take on that?

Navigate Backward From the Mobile End User

To fully understand, because we can list about 50 examples like the ones above in a nanosecond, let’s do a backward navigation from the movie-theater surfers and the comparison shoppers’ end-user experiences.
What do they need on those smart devices to 1) Keep them clicking 2) Earn their loyalty and 3) Earn a high net promoter score? (You know what NPS is, right? Those who love it promote it; those who hate it detract with negative posts and shares.)

A Mobile, Responsive Website. We’ve been speaking about this for more than a year now. Every website built must be designed two ways – for desktop and laptop computers AND for smart, mobile devices. For the latter, it takes some design strategy to determine how to present the website onto the small, vertical (iPhone) screens. The design needs to scale to each screen regardless of size; the site needs to “respond” to the device’s parameters. If your company isn’t mobile ready in early 2014, you will play serious catch up (kinda like the social media train? It left the station two years ago?).

Interactive Content. Consider switching your content format from the dead PDF to an interactive magazine, whitepaper, newsletter and infographic. For anyone using the iPad or other tablets, this format is necessary and required. Because smart devices (phones and tablets) will be the most popular gift this holiday season, according to Gartner, tablet shipments will increase 53.4% to reach 184 million units by the end of 2013, you need to take a hard look at how you’re presenting content.

Long-Form Content & Video. If you’re a professional blogger or a budding blogger writing for a company blog, you need to look at lengthier content, about 1000 words on average, with links, imagery, tips and teachings. It’s never a dull moment in Google land, and SEO continues to shift seismically (hmm, didn’t know that was a word!). Video has always been important to a website and blog because of the marriage between Google and YouTube, for one; not to mention the 80 gazillion users and videos viewed, shared, posted, and embedded on YouTube daily and globally.

Engage on All Screens. https://blog.readz.com/driving-conversions-sales-mobile-inbound-marketing/ Remember, your television is a screen. People don’t always watch their favorite shows on TV; they turn to a tablet, notebook, laptop, or desktop. Think about how you can cross-pollinate each screen available to the end user with some activity that makes them engage. According to Google’s Mobile Playbook 2013, 84% of multiscreen shopping experiences include mobile devices.

NBC The Voice

Let me provide my favorite example…do you watch The Voice on NBC? It’s coming to a head where America will choose the winner in the next 10 days or so. To select the contestants who get to stay in the competition, America votes by text via sponsor Sprint, via Facebook, by downloading single songs on iTunes, and via The Voice website. This year, a brilliant strategy was introduced – the Twitter instant save. As the bottom three contestants were standing there to see who was saved, America got five minutes to tweet the name of the singer they most wanted to save along with a hashtag. The Voice engaged America as they tweeted their favorite choice to save, and in five minutes the votes were tallied, and the singer with the highest number of tweets and retweets was saved. This is ingenious, and a perfect example of how The Voice team engages viewers on all screens.

Google published The New Multiscreen World report detailed in this blog post here by Readz, the company creating “amazing mobile experiences” online by bringing dead whitepapers, PDFs, newsletters, and more alive with interactive links, images, and user-engaged elements.

Get the Website Mobile Ready First

It’s daunting, isn’t it, when you see all of the above above? It’s hard to know which step to take first, and that’s why you start at the beginning with your website. If your site is not mobile ready, I’m going to suggest to you a complete review and likely overhaul of your site.

You need to get a new mobile responsive template and design and develop the site for a variety of screens (see above) that scale. Get it working on the largest iMac screen, and then get it going for the smart devices. Find a developer who really knows what she/he is doing; it’s critical. All the rest will follow in good fashion.

Engage in Message Mapping, Too

I’m also going to suggest you launch a Message Mapping exercise with me to ensure you get your content strategy for external audiences solid. You might like this e-book I wrote (sadly, it’s in a dead PDF…hmm, maybe I need to engage with Readz?), Message Mapping: How to Deliver External Communication with a #RockHot Tool for Leaders.

By the way, what’s a long-form blog post without some required self-promotion? Got any questions? You know where to find me!

{Disclaimer: Sponsored Post}

When you say and see content marketing touted all over the Interwebz, it’s more about blogging, right? But what about the other pieces of content so critical to attaining goals and objectives? The white paper is one of the most important documents a business can include in its content marketing strategy; yet, few engage with white papers?

Why?

The first reason there are fewer white papers is obvious – they are more challenging to write, right?

Secondly, if a business does not have a solid inbound marketing strategy to use white papers as a lead generator for sales, then companies merely rely on blogging.

Revisiting Inbound Marketing

As a digital marketer, the goal for inbound marketing is to feature content as the lure, if you will, to generate leads from external audiences which turn into conversions.
Think of a funnel when considering what inbound marketing looks like. At the top of the wide open funnel is a wide berth of content ideas e.g. 10 reasons why you need a certified plumber; 25 social media tips from an SEO consultant; 7 critical mobile apps to fuel your mobile marketing strategy in 2014, and more.

These pieces of content can be blog posts, lists, tip sheets and even broader white papers on related topics to these respective themes. They are offered to interested prospects via a call to action in a sidebar of a website on a website page and even more pertinent – on a specialized landing page.
Once the individual indicates they want to download the content, they are asked for their email via a form and the free content is made available.

Publishing Formats for Content

Because a white paper is lengthier than a page; they’re often about 2000 words, give or take 800, the immediate format consideration is a PDF. Think about PDFs a moment. This file format is ubiquitous, and everyone relies on it. However, is it the best file format for your content marketing strategy?

No, and here’s why…PDFs are one dimensional without hyperlinks and without the ability to convert leads, without SEO, and basically, they are DEAD!

Now think a moment about your company newsletter (yes, there are still b-to-b companies publishing newsletters). Typically, it’s posted in a news center as a PDF or sent as a PDF in an email marketing campaign, right?

New Mobile Ways To Publish Pieces of Content

The proliferation of mobile marketing is the biggest trend since sliced bread. I’m not kidding. There are data galore shoving businesses to responsive mobile marketing, and your company needs to get there, too.

The first step is to make your website mobile responsive. You want the pages and elements of your site to scale to any portable and mobile device. Just last weekend, I sat in the movie theater during the pre-movie junk surfing sites on my iPhone, posting to Twitter and resharing content plus commenting on blogs. Look around the movie theater next time and see if others are doing the same? Then, think about your company’s website and worry that it’s responsive for this mobile audience.

Secondly, explore mobile publishing platforms. I recently explored a web app that makes publishing live content, such as white papers, magazines and newsletters, a breeze. Check out this demo of Readz right here. What you’ll see is the ability to scroll pages, click on hyperlinks, enlarge images, and simulate reading a document page by page – from left to right (unlike a PDF that is up to down in a vertical orientation).

You may use the cool iPad apps like Flipboard or daily newspapers and magazines? These apps make the user experience way more intensely entertaining. It’s time for you to do the same with your mobile- and-inbound marketing strategy. Eliminate the dead PDF file format from your content marketing and put in a live publishing platform for all your documents; your audience will thank you.