Working at a Fortune 500 tech company, you may think we have our mobile and desktop layouts figured out for optimal viewing experience. Well, like many, we don’t! This has impacted the number of eyes we get on our blogs, announcements, PR, and more. Our blog is where customers can visit to become more updated with all the latest news and information about our company. So where is the problem, you may ask? Well, the blog is only viewable on a desktop, and it is not mobile-friendly at all.
Let’s back up; I work as a product marketing manager for a company acquired by a huge entity in the utility industry. As someone new working in the industry, I had a lot to learn and one of those things was that blogs and other releases are a huge focus for us. We use these blogs to push out our messaging, success, and latest announcements to customers on LinkedIn. Traditionally, companies may push our announcements on social channels, via email, or in conferences, but the utility industry is very different. We are only active on LinkedIn and rely on word of mouth from happy customers compared to being able to send out announcements, social blasts, etc.
Despite the focus on providing blog-based content, my company has been facing the problem that when the blogs are uploaded, they do not appear to be easily readable on mobile devices. We have seen a few issues, including that the text gets overlapped on each other, formats are inconsistent throughout the blog, and the zoom function is not working. Although these issues do not happen on all blogs uploaded, they are happening enough that we have gotten complaints from customers, and the blogs become unreadable, which we will know will push customers to stop reviewing our content since they will assume it does not work/can be viewed.
An additional note is that our organization has recently faced layoffs, budget constraints, and other roadblocks that have made quality assurance a bit more complicated. Despite these roadblocks, we continue to focus on blog production and making sure we are pushing the best content possible. But after the content is done and shared to a platform that does not allow users to view it properly unless, on a particular device, it almost seems to be a waste of time until this problem is resolved.
We touched on this in class but also, as a younger individual, I have the experience that proves that more people are now using their phones as a research resource rather than their traditional computers. I even researched this topic further to prove my point to my managers that we need to look into how we can begin to tackle this issue. Given our budget issues, I understand that this may be difficult, but it must be a priority if we hope to give customers a place to reference our success.
Questions & comments are welcome. I would love to hear how you would go about showing managers and VPs the importance of this topic.
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