It’s the natural time of year to talk about how to spend marketing dollars.  As we make our plans for next year, it’s common to look for new concepts, new trends and directions, and to pay attention to what others are doing for clues about what’s working and what’s not.  That’s really the big challenge – marketing is so in-flux today, that the list of programs that always work is rapidly evolving and quite frankly different from company to company.  So we’re all paying close attention to what we can learn from others’ experiences and how to apply that to our own spending decisions.

It’s coming – social and mobile. No, wait, it’s already here. Mobile’s long been a play for consumer marketing, but now it’s relevant for B-to-B as well. In fact, our own B-to-B client base saw the portion of tablet and smartphone traffic to their sites just about double in the past 12 months, going from 5.2% in July 2012 to 9.2% one year later. At our agency, every new site today features “responsive design,” so the site automatically re-sizes whether it’s being viewed on a PC, table or phone. And, we’re experimenting with new CRM and lead tracking programs optimized for smartphones that are showing higher participation rates from salespeople, simply because it’s mobile and so much faster and easier to use.

Does it matter if someone on a mobile phone can navigate through a B-to-B company’s website? For the last few years, the answer to that question has been “No,” based on the web traffic stats coming to our clients’ websites. Certainly, consumer companies want to make it easy to buy that new pair of boots online, to take advantage of the “impulse buy” nature of their businesses. But for engineers who use websites for researching products and reviewing spec sheets, the mobile side of online life didn’t seem to have much of a play. And the traffic stats seemed to support that.

Until now. The explosive growth in the use of tablets for BUSINESS in the past 18 months has changed the equation for mobile marketing in B-to-B. And as PC sales continue to decline, it’s clear that responsive design and other mobile-friendly web strategies have finally arrived for B-to-B. In fact, just among a few of our clients, the share of mobile traffic (tablets PLUS smartphones) coming to our sites has just about doubled in the past 12 months: 9.3% in July 2013 compared to 5.2% in July 2012. Although it did decrease for one client (what was THAT?), it grew for all the others we investigated:

Curious about how the growth in mobile traffic might affect your website? We’d be glad to do a free web audit to investigate mobile demand in your space. As part of the audit process, we’ll also share a variety of other web metrics to benchmark your site’s performance.