B2B Mobile

Business to Mobile...to Business: The Stakes are High

It is a refrain of the great poker player and theorist David Sklansky that good players are successful because they habitually ‘push’ every edge they have on their competitors, no matter how small that edge may be. The same is, of course, true of successful businesses.

One edge that very few B2B companies are ‘pushing’ at the present time is that which is gained by deploying a mobile website - this despite the fact that it is an edge which is getting sharper, deeper and in all respects more important with each week that passes.

So what exactly is a mobile website? A mobile website is a dedicated site developed for mobile, meaning it is optimised so it can be displayed on any internet-enabled device – from the latest smartphones to tablets and low-end feature phones. And in today’s world, where mobile internet use is skyrocketing and people are increasingly turning to their phones for quick information on the go, providing this material in an easily accessible format can be the difference between a prospect browsing the site for more information, or leaving for a potential competitor’s easier-to-browse site.

The increasing importance of having a separate mobile website that is not just a carbon copy of your traditional website has come about due to the convergence of a number of trends. First amongst these trends is the rise of ‘remote working’; while the phrase is primarily used to refer to the practice of working outside of the office via a laptop rather than on a handheld mobile device, the trend has brought about a cultural shift amongst business people so that the office is no longer seen as the only place to work and/or make important decisions. Another, more obvious reason, for the increasing importance of mobile websites to B2B companies is the rapid take-up of smartphones amongst the general population and business-people in particular – rapid take-up which has partly been driven by...