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?

Comments Off   |   Comments Off

There is a reason the term app has become a popular term; in January 2011, app was named “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society. In the 20th Century the World Wide Web was a marketing professional’s BFF, and now here in the 21st Century, the app could  become our new-BFF.

But why? Apps have become so easily accessible and allows millions of customers instantaneous and easy access to information, entertainment, work, networking and almost anything else you can think of, all via a mobile device.

In the B2B world, smarketers (smart marketers) have taken advantage of this new web craze. Marketers in the B2B space are now using apps as a vehicle to not only communicate market, advertise and influence customers, but enable customers to better market their services/products to the end user.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about – at Canyon Communications we have just developed an app as a marketing tool for our clients’ customers and the end user.

Enablement programs are exactly what they sound like – they enable the client/customer to better market their products/services to the end user by providing a strategic combination of training, certification, demand generation, access education materials, etc. Our team creatively came up with a strategically sound enablement program, which included the development of an app to further enhance the marketability and success of the program for their customers.

The app piece we developed for our program became a very strong marketing tool for our clients’ customers to connect with the end user, offering access to on-demand educational materials at any point during the sales cycle while also offering direct access to support when they needed it.

We created the app to be utilized in pre-sales engagement, sales engagement (presentations), post-sales engagement and closing deals, but as an added bonus, after successfully completing the enablement program, graduates of the program were given an Apple® iPad® 2, which would give them direct access to the app developed for this program. Not only did our clients’ customers have access to this powerful marketing tool, but they had an iPad they could easily carry with them for sales meetings to access this app on-demand.

So here’s the bottom line – the app icon on your mobile device might only be 57 x 57 pixels in size, but inside this app are endless possibilities that exsist to make one mighty marketing tool for your B2B marketing initiatives!

Contact Canyon for more information on how we can incorporate an app into your next marketing/enablement program!

Comments Off   |   Comments Off