Mobile vs. Desktop: Which Screens Reach B2B Customers?

by MGB2B

When considering your B2B digital marketing strategy for 2016, it’s important to think about which screens reach your customers and when. The hot topic this year was Mobile vs. Desktop, the debate centering around the incredible growth of mobile, and rightly so with usage finally surpassing desktop and the unfurling of Google’s Mobilegeddon. But it is important to understand the usage habits of your specific B2B audience in order to make the right choices in your marketing program.

There is often a noticeable difference between the behaviors of B2B and B2C audiences. For example, when you look at email open shares across industries, content for Consumer Products and Services are opened almost equally as frequently on desktop as on mobile (43% and 44% respectively). However, when you look at Business Products and Services, 73% of emails are opened on desktop.

The same study also showed that across the board of B2B and B2C industries, the majority of clicks still come from desktop. But where the average was 62% for all industries, B2B specific products and services are reporting that 81% of clicks in emails are attributed to desktop.

Common sense tells us that PC usage peaks during the workday, and research tells us that both desktop search and traffic exceeds mobile Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. While an obvious point, it is critical that as a B2B marketer, you know where your audience is spending their time at the moments when your products are most relevant to them.

Job function is also an important factor to take into account. Is your audience spending their day sitting in a lab? At a desk, on their computer? On the job site, where they’re accessing most content from their mobile device?

And when it comes to B2B magazine publishers who are pushing their content more and more online, it’s hard to give a definitive answer about traffic source, because they keep it very close to the vest. In my experience, most magazines that I work with, while undoubtedly seeing growth in their mobile and tablet visitors, find readers spend the majority of their time on the desktop. This is important to know when selecting tactics and media executions. Don’t be afraid to ask for this information when negotiating a media buy.

Finally, even if the desktop is where your target audience is spending most of their work day and consuming most content, having a mobile-friendly site is an absolute must. Not only do you run the risk of turning off customers if your website is difficult to access on their phones, penalties from Google can kill your search rankings. Will this push to mobile have a significant impact on how your audience interacts with content in 2016? Drop us a line and prepare for this mobile shift now.

Tags: B2B digital marketing strategy for 2016, B2B email marketing, b2b publishers, desktop, mobile, mobile-friendly web design, trade pubs

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