Most companies still don’t provide a seamless, streamlined digital experience to their customers – great mobile touchpoints – and if you’re one of them, you’re playing a losing game.

It’s an especially important matter in the age of mobile content experiences. According to Salesforce, 68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall strategies, and Forrester notes that 52% of B2B customers use smartphones and tablets to research and buy. But with the novelty of mobile applications, it’s easy for marketing teams to get overwhelmed and overlook the customer experience.

And prospects who have to shout, “Hey, what about me?” won’t become customers.

While adapting a mobile protocol, you’d better be sure to implement best practices in customer-centric marketing in order for it all to work in your brand’s favor. That means:

• Mobile touchpoints need be synchronized, yet unique and well-calculated so that they get attention and make perfect sense within the evolving brand story.
• The story itself must unfold without a hitch, within and across all platforms—mobile, Web, social, and traditional media (if that’s part of your mix).

To achieve that, you’ll need to understand customer experience at each touchpoint, moment-by-moment. Get inside their heads. Walk a mile in their shoes, tablet or smartphone in hand. Let’s look at how that works.

Data-mine with an Insatiable Hunger

It’s time to get customer-centric, and you’ll need to go on a hunt. Your prey? An intuitive grasp of your customers’ buying behaviors.

Especially when your readers are encountering your brand through smaller screens, you need to know more than just what they do, step by step, as they consider your solutions. To do it right, you want to tap into all aspects of the experience, including the practical, logistical and even the emotional. That will empower you to present your product as the right choice, more powerfully than ever before.

To get a handle on this, you can:

• Do a deep dive into your CRM to understand how past customers moved through the sales funnel at every specific point. Take note of mobile touchpoints at which customers became more engaged or interested.
• Perform a customer sentiment analysis. To understand customers’ feelings even better, use software to tease out sentiments about your brand and what your company has done to prompt major shifts, for the better or worse. Use the newfound wisdom to revisit and tighten up your content pipeline.
• Interview satisfied, loyal customers and brand advocates about the “Aha!” moment they experienced with your brand — the point at which they became sure your products were the right solution for them.

After those assessments, you’ll be more prepared to attack mobile marketing with a much better sense of how your customers will respond, not like this guy right here.

Strategize to Synchronize

 There’s a couple of important ways to think about synchronization here:

• Synchronizing both mobile and non-mobile content with well-developed touchpoints
• Synchronizing touchpoints with the overall customer experience

First, let’s talk about the content. When content pieces are integrated into rich, personalized touchpoints that present a full picture of your products’ benefits or an industry issue your product solves, you’ll excite your audience. They’ll want to convert. It’s that simple.

To make such touchpoints happen within (and outside of) your mobile presence, create timelines of distinct moments that make sense to each segment of your prospective customers. Here are just a couple of the kind of moment-by-moment scenarios you’ll want to envision:

• A prospect reads a LinkedIn blog post on her tablet, which leads to a mobile mini-site specifically constructed to segment and interest the type of reader the blog post targeted in the first place.
• A prospect watches a recorded webinar exclusive to your mobile app, after which he is presented with a short poll. Based on the results of the poll, that prospect is invited to his own “personal” webinar, in which a sales team member offers a real-time 10-minute video consultation via Skype or FaceTime.

Whatever mix of mobile and non-mobile content you have, each content-rich touchpoint should be unique enough that your audience feels it was tailor-made for them. By ensuring those personalized points of contact are seamlessly woven in and out of the mobile landscape, they’re ready to be placed within the context of a guided journey.

But a marketer’s work is never done. It’s now time to ensure the experience works as a whole.

To start, optimize your mobile presence. 96% of consumers have encountered mobile-unfriendly websites, and that number is costing businesses left and right. Don’t be one of them.

Whether you have a mobile site, an app, or both, focus on the following:

• • • Optimize page loading times. Use images of a small-enough file size. Don’t use too many fancy page elements. Do use tools like YSlow and Akamai Mobitest to make sure page loading is fast and smooth.
    • Refine the design for the mobile experience. Make it clean, with just the right amount of white space and line-spacing for text. Ensure all aesthetic elements are consistent with the promise your brand hopes to convey. All written content should be mobile-friendly, too; keep it short and concise. Your readers don’t have the time to waste.
    • Incorporate social plugins. On mobile, social matters. Sharing compelling content to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else your buyers tend to be social, should be as simple as the “tap” of a button.
    • Make sure each and every button moves customers along the journey. There should be no dead ends, no bad links, or potentially worse: buttons that lead to non-personalized landings. Every little detail must have a purpose.

Done it all so far? If so, you’re ready to deploy your strategy.

Review, for clarity, how it will look when prospects encounter you via mobile (a Tweet? A link to your smartphone app on a mobile-optimized blog post that soft-sells your brand?). Then, test out the journey to make sure it all fits seamlessly. Go over it with your marketing team, sales, and even brand advocates to make sure everyone can agree: the mobile experience works, and works well.

Watch it Unfold—Make it Even Better

Especially on mobile, you just can’t afford for your customer journey to remain linear and “boring,” a trap that many B2B marketers still fall into.

Do the groundwork to synchronize all aspects—that is, compacting content into the specific, moment-by-moment touchpoints your customers experience, and connecting the overall brand identity and promise with those rich moments. Then look for customer feedback, and when you get it, use it to make the experience even better.

Get it right, both on touchscreens and off, and your brand scores big.