It’s no secret that more engineers are searching for product and engineering information on smartphones. Here at ENGINEERING.com we’ve seen a 9X rise in mobile device usage over the past 3 years to the point where mobile is now over 15% of all visits.
What happens when an engineer visits your site on a smartphone?
What sort of experience will they have? Will they be able to request a quote or read your content without having to “pinch and zoom”? This switch to mobile behavior has happened fast, so it’s no wonder that a lot of our industrial marketing clients find themselves behind the curve in terms of creating an excellent mobile user experience.
Here are 5 projects to put in your 2015 plans to help those mobile engineers connect with your marketing funnel:
- Responsive design for your web site:
Web sites that are designed responsively detect the screen size that your visitor is using, and then change the presentation to match. So, for example, when a visitor looks at your site on a smart phone, the navigation is typically reduced to a small icon in the upper right corner, and certain elements of your web site are hidden altogether. 
This is not a trivial project, so lots of companies have yet to get it done. 2015 is the year to make it happen.
- Adapting your landing pages so that forms can be completed on smart phones
Have you tried completing one of your landing page forms on a smart phone? In many cases, it’s pretty hard to do. Your fingers are just too big to accurately select and type into those small data fields. If you are using a marketing automation platform like Marketo or Hubspot, those systems take care of the responsive design for you.
The same problem arises when users try to make other selections on your landing pages, such as your social media sharing buttons. If you built those pages for the higher accuracy of a mouse control, you may need to swap them out for bigger icons that can be selected by fingers.
Finally, once users complete your form, can they access your download on a smartphone? Some of the marketing assets you are currently using may not display properly on a mobile device.
- More content marketing
By now most of us are using content marketing in one way or another. Here at ENGINEERING.com, for example, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of customers who are buying sponsored posts and amplifying them to our audience.
Telling stories as a marketing technique works exceptionally well for mobile users because they see the stories in their regular content stream. It’s a natural fit. Just make sure that if there is a call to action in the story, the user can take that action on a mobile device.
- Mobile sized banners
If you are already creating box ads in the 300 x 250 size, these typically present well on most smart phones. In 2015, we expect to see a significant increase in the number of marketers who are using the 300 x 50 smartphone banner size and the 320 x 50 smartphone wide banner.
- Email templates that work on every size device
If you use an outsourced email service such as those in the popular marketing automation systems or stand-alone services like MailChimp, you are likely all clear. But for those of you who are still relying on home-grown email systems (you know who you are), 2015 should be the year that you switch.
Not only will your response rates improve, but you will also be able to access superior analytics in terms of user behavior. Those analytics can really help you nurture your leads towards being sales-ready.
Those are my top 5 mobile tactics for 2015. Let me know if you are planning these, or have some others in mind.
Thanks for reading,
John
