APPlying Some of Our Best Thinking

When I was a lowly college freshman sitting in my Marketing 101 class, I never thought I would find myself waxing poetic about sprinkler head differences, LED lighting or custom-blended fertilizers years later.

That being said, working in B2B marketing, and specifically green industry marketing, has been the most fun challenge I’ve ever had. In B2B marketing, you have to reach decision-makers in many ways to make the most impact. Because B2B purchasing decisions typically come down to reaching the right decision-makers with the right message at the right time, communicating using multiple channels is a must.

This is especially important because the way business people access information continues to change and evolve. Therefore, you must think smarter about how to apply traditional tactics with cutting-edge marketing communications vehicles—sometimes simultaneously.

Case in point – let me introduce you to the Horizon Distributors Landscape Maintenance Guide…

The Horizon Maintenance Guide

Horizon tasked Canyon with creating this printed piece because they needed to find a way to give their customers – Landscape Contractors – a way to quickly reference and troubleshoot a slew of issues they might find in the field while on the job. Having this quick reference guide allows their customers to solve problems quicker, which saves time and makes them more profitable while keeping their projects on-budget.

And because Horizon Distributors wanted to deliver this same information in many different ways to keep up with technological innovations, the Landscape Maintenance Guide smartphone app was born.

Canyon worked closely with Horizon to adapt this piece into one that could be viewed on a variety of mobile devices because their persona research determined their typical customers always carry one on the job site. So now, this valuable information that will allow Horizon customers and prospects to reference information and troubleshoot issues in the field, right from their smartphone!

You would think that taking a print piece and converting it to an app would be a simple process. Not so.

The App shown on iPad and iPhone

In fact, for as much time we spent creating the app, we spent equal time strategically troubleshooting the challenges that arose by taking a print piece and making it work as a smartphone application.

When working to create an app you have to:

1. Make sure it’s user-friendly;
2. Valuable to the audience; and
   
3. Accessible from a variety of different mobile devices (including iPhones, Android devices, Blackberries and various tablet formats).

In the end, the app turned out to be a homerun for our client. Their customers and prospects who download the app will now have access to specific information that will help them do their jobs better while in the field. In addition, we built in the capability to make enhancements and updates on the fly to encourage users to keep checking back for new content and access the mobile app again and again.

Have you contemplated building a smartphone app for your B2B organization? What other mobile marketing strategies have you used to get the word out about your business? Do you look at mobile as a growing part of your marketing mix?

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