More than 60 percent of Americans own a smartphone, according to The NPD Group, while global tablet penetration is growing twice as fast as smartphones did during their first few years.
Those are two trends to keep in mind when creating and publishing B2B content because if you don’t understand, accommodate and leverage the differences between PCs and mobile devices, your messages lose their reach and effectiveness.
Here are four tips to tap into mobile potential:
- Don’t gate your content. In a recent post, Scott Samele explained why the traditional practice of putting white papers and other collateral behind a sign-up form squanders their effectiveness. That advice still applies when recipients use mobile devices, but with an additional reason: Even with a tablet, phablet or one of the few remaining smartphones with a physical keyboard, it’s no fun pecking out all of your contact info. Ditto for trying to select organization types and job-title categories from drop-down menus, a feature that often doesn’t work well on smartphones and tablets. All of that frustration, or even just the prospect of it, can be enough to prompt some people to skip the whole thing.
- Leverage mobile-friendly platforms. Scott’s post also explains how to use Twitter to draw more eyeballs to your content. This strategy can be even more effective with users who spend a lot of their online time on a mobile device because Twitter has done an excellent job of making its service easy to use on a smartphone or tablet. That user-friendliness encourages people to check their feed constantly, so tweeting highlights from your content increases the chances that they’ll see it and click on the link. That brings us to the next point.
- Make your website mobile-friendly. Whether they’re coming to your website from a link in a tweet or a link in an email, people don’t want to arrive at a site that’s a chore to navigate on a small screen. And that’s assuming they see it at all: Many mobile devices don’t support Flash well or at all, so it’s game over if that’s what they get after clicking through. If it’s too difficult, expensive or time-consuming to revamp your website so it places nicely with mobile devices, consider creating a site just for mobile users.
- Make subject lines concise and orderly. Tablet and smartphone screens are much smaller than those on laptops and desktops, which means email subject lines get truncated. So try to put the attention-grabbing words toward the beginning of the subject line, even if it means your company’s name goes to the end. For example, “WebRTC for contact centers now available from Great Vendor” will get the most important words out of truncation range, unlike “Great Vendor’s new Miracle Solution makes WebRTC practical for contact centers.” Like it or not, the names of your company and product might not draw as much customer attention as the technology you use or problem you’re solving, so use that reality as a guide for determining what absolutely has to get through even on the smallest screen.