I am the Senior Manager of Social Media for a B2B marketing agency. The oil in the B2B marketing engine is content marketing. An overwhelming majority of B2B companies market with whitepapers, webinars, and other thought leadership content to drive leads and they do so with gated landing pages.
When it comes to social media, the common form of content marketing can make my job a little tougher. Typically, the user lands on a landing page with a form to complete - if they're keeping up with best practices it only has three or four fields. The user fills out their information, hits submit and the asset (content piece) either starts downloading automatically or is a PDF accessible by a download link.
That's where it gets tricky.
41 percent of emails are read on mobile devices and 20 percent of web traffic is generated by mobile. And according to Hubspot, 15 percent of U.S. mobile internet time is spent on social networking sites.
So, as a B2B marketer, you're likely using email and social media marketing to promote assets on gated landed pages that users can't download to mobile devices - at least 41 percent of which are likely falling on users frustrated with your mobile experience.
There's been long-standing buzz about mobile-first web and landing page design in B2B marketing. Most emails can be optimized for mobile within our mail clients or marketing automation suites these days. But we forgot that the call-to-action (CTA) isn't often mobile-friendly and we botch the whole experience when an engaged user can't access the content they want.
But enough complaining about what could be better. We want solutions, right?
Here are four tips to improve your mobile content marketing strategy for B2B:
Make sure your blog, marketing emails, and landing pages are all optimized for mobile. Build your digital marketing assets to be responsive and/or mobile-first and you'll be one step closer to a good mobile user experience, even if your downloadable asset still isn't ready for mobile.
Add an "Email this asset to me" button on your thank you page. Add a button or text link that allows the user to email themselves the asset as an attachment or an ungated link instead of asking them to complete the form again.
If you're running mobile-specific ads: Your mobile experience will be held up to higher scrutiny if you're running mobile-specific campaigns - make sure you're sending them to videos on YouTube, blog posts, or other mobile-friendly mediums.
If your marketing assets are not optimized for mobile, consider opting out of delivering mobile impressions on your paid ad campaigns. Why waste valuable mobile impressions when your content is not ready for showtime?
Whether you have your mobile strategy figured out or not, it's time to start thinking about the entire social user experience. Ask yourself what you want your audience to do with the content you share on social media, and whether or not they equipped to do that from their mobile devices.