Last updated on November 11th, 2015 at 04:13 pm
All the signs point to business-to-business mobile commerce having a strong showing this year.
A forecast released by Forrester Research shows that B2B e-commerce in the US could reach $780 billion in 2015. As promising as those figures are, the future may be even brighter, with B2B e-commerce surpassing $1 trillion by the end of the decade. From these statistics, it’s clear that businesses had better start paying attention to B2B on mobile and all the related areas it encompasses.
More numbers indicate how influential B2B has become within the mobile space. Mobile has become an increasingly crucial aspect for B2B buyers and sellers in terms of how they do business. A State of B2B Marketing Report shows that for nearly one-fourth of businesses (21 percent), mobile is the primary driver of revenue. This fact has had an impact on how B2B companies have approached mobile marketing, with a whopping 97 percent of them intent on increasing or maintaining how much they spend on it.
Mobile marketers for these companies will likely embrace this new attitude similar to their use of cloud computing.
A recent survey from Duke University shows that the vast majority of mobile marketers believe their companies’ mobile marketing programs have plenty of room to improve. The businesses aren’t fully to blame since mobile marketing is still such a maturing area.
“This is a relatively new channel for many companies,” said Christine Moorman, the director of the study and professor of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. “They’re still getting their feet wet for how to use mobile effectively.” The more experience these businesses get, the more B2B on mobile will find traction in the future.
B2B on mobile is also having an effect on the buyer’s journey. Some 56 percent of B2B buyers frequently use mobile phones to access B2B sites. That makes optimizing the mobile experience a priority for B2B sellers.
Such a trend comes into stark focus when considering younger buyers (Millennials in particular) are much more likely to use mobile devices for researching their purchases when compared to people over age 45 (55 percent to 36 percent respectively).
“Today’s buyers control their journey through the buying cycle much more than today’s vendors control the selling cycle,” says Lori Wizdo of Forrester. The sooner B2B companies understand this, the more they will tailor the mobile experience to facilitate the buyer’s journey.
B2B organizations stand to gain much from the mobile space. As Marcel Boucher of the Adobe Marketing Cloud Lighthouse Team writes, “The businesses that take advantage of the benefits that correlate with implementing a mobile platform for their current B2B strategy will be the businesses that take the lead in the coming years.”
With the growing influence of Millennials, a new dedication to mobile marketing, and increasing revenue through the mobile space, the B2B space will likely see a new surge on mobile.
