If the marketing plan for your small business doesn't make full use of mobile technology, you're missing out big time.
Dave Roos, contributing writer for How Stuff Works, cites "poor marketing strategy" as one of the 10 Common Problems for New Businesses. He points out that a good marketing strategy is essential in informing people about your products and determining critical areas of your bumobile-marketing-imagesiness, such as budgeting and planning. He cites that rushing into costly traditional advertising platforms without proper budgeting and planning usually means you are not getting the most "bang for the buck."
As for what platform does this best, LocalVox co-founder Trevor Sumner believes that half of your local marketing should be focused on mobile. He goes on to cite statistics showing that while people spend 20% of media consumption time in the US on mobile, only 4% of advertising spending goes to this platform. You can compare this, for example, with print media, which only gets 5% of US media consumption time but gets a disproportionate 19% of ad spending. Together, mobile and internet ads could have at least $30 billion in additional ad spending without exceeding their respective total consumption times.
Experts are invariably predicting that the future is in mobile marketing, especially for local businesses. Borrell and Associated projects that "by 2016, 88% of all local online advertising would be delivered to a mobile device, amounting to more than $24 billion." This year alone, they expect local mobile to double from $1 billion to $2 billion.
Google's Our Mobile Planet project came up with other interesting statistics on mobile. Fifty-six percent of people in the US use a smartphone, and this number can only go up. A whopping 92% of smartphone users go online daily, which is 3% higher than with regular computers, and 98% do so weekly. Sixty-eight percent used a search engine for product search, 58% searched for restaurants or bars, 42% purchased a product or service, and 40% used online/mobile coupons for shopping. For local businesses specifically, 55% of smartphone users perform a local search on their phone at least once a week; 25% of them are doing it daily.
Convinced yet?
WooRank.com's Boris Demaria enumerates five mobile marketing options to get you going:
1. SMS Marketing – Simple but effective, precisely because of their bite-sized pieces. Keep it short but complete, and include a call to action.
2. Email – Demaria cites statistics that email is the most popular activity on smartphones. Make good use of it.
3. Facebook App – Again, Demaria cites statistics showing that 40% of Facebook's revenue comes from mobile. He also goes over how to make the most out of Facebook's mobile layout in his blog post.
4. Foursquare and/or Yelp Apps – Make sure you create or claim you business's listing on such apps, and consider getting paid ads on these. They are highly localized and focused on local small businesses. He goes as far as to say that "These… can make or break the success of small local businesses like yours."
5. Mobile Search Engine Optimization – This makes your site more likely to show up on mobile searches, and therefore, easier to find. This is done primarily by optimizing your site to be mobile-friendly, such as by following these guidelines from Google.
How do you feel about mobile marketing? Feel free to comment or give suggestions below.
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