Why a Mobile Marketing Strategy Needs to be on the B2B Marketer’s Mind
In my most recent Search Engine Land column, I wrote about important search engine marketing resolutions for 2012. While the majority of these resolutions might seem commonplace to many of our current clients (sorry for the constant repetition), the last resolution is something the data from web traffic reports has led our organization to embrace with even greater urgency: starting to take mobile seriously.
Here is the growth in mobile device usage across a select group of client sites, comparing the two most recent six month periods (December 2010 through May 2011 and June 2011 through November 2011):
With the exception of the one industrial client, all of the sites have or are experiencing gains in mobile device usage when accessing their websites.
While a 7% impact rate might not seem significant in comparison to all site traffic, keep in mind two additional considerations:
- The actual growth in mobile browser usage was over 80% period to period.
- That growth represented well into six digit total visitor volumes.
A few more interesting data points:
During the latter six month period, nearly half of KoMarketing clients were receiving over 5% of their website traffic through mobile browsers.
The majority of our clients do not have specific mobile initiatives; at least in final production. Those that do, did not stand out (in an extreme sense) in terms of mobile adoption percentages reported.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that of the handful of clients we work with that maintain a B2C focus, all of them were receiving over 10% of their traffic via mobile devices.
What does this mean for B2B marketers?
We have been hinting at the importance of mobile adoption for quite some time. While it would be easy to dismiss mobile again in 2012, the growing number of users accessing client sites via mobile devices is really getting hard to ignore.
Does that mean you should simply rush into the first available mobile site platform? Definitely not.
Planning, requirements, and business strategy need to be considered. That said, we anticipate the overall volume and percentages of mobile browser behavior to continue to increase in 2012. We’re tracking that as the months roll on and hope to share insights, success stories, and lessons learned.
B2B marketers want to see numbers when justifying new marketing initiatives. Hopefully this information provides a pretty good start.
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