I should start by apologising, I was of the belief that the majority of B2B marketers were confused about how to implement a mobile strategy and what its relevance is for them.
I thought statistics like this one from Barclays’ Online Business Outlook report saying: ‘89 per cent of online businesses have not yet developed a website for mobile traffic, despite mobile revenue reaching £2.5m in 2012’ were because B2B marketers were unsure about mobile.
After attending a breakfast briefing run by agency Purestone and attended by B2B marketers working across the technology, construction and telecomms industries I discovered some B2B marketers are very sure about mobile, they are very sure it’s not right for them at the moment.
The group seemed to agree that as a minimum a responsive website was needed but for half of the group going further than that wasn’t necessary as their customer interaction via mobile didn’t warrant anything else. For the other half there was a massive internal enthusiasm for mobile and it was deemed necessary.
Despite the differing opinions both groups saw similarly high levels of mobile adoption in their C-suite; matching the Forbes statistic that ‘84 per cent of C-suite executives use multiple mobile devices in the workplace.’ Going with the theory that adoption from the top down is required for new strategies, you’d think this was good news.
When in fact on one side the C-suite was adopting mobile devices and enjoying using them but didn’t realise the company’s audience wasn’t so keen so their enthusiasm was lost on the middle management.
And the other side were preaching to the converted but failing to provide their enthusiastic and mobile-ready staff with the budget to implement mobile strategies.
This shows me more about internal communications and engaging the C-suite than it does about mobile. Both groups were confident in their opinions of mobile and had evidence to back up their thinking, fine, we might have to agree to disagree on how relevant you think mobile is for your business but at least it’s lead by statistics and not stubborn thinking. But both groups seemed to have trouble being on the same page as their C-suites. Despite advances in technology, the same marketing issues keep re-appearing.
Here’s some content we’ve produced on engaging the C-suite
