How Mobile Marketing Help SMEs Grow Marketers who are yet to develop their mobile marketing strategies should understand the many advantages and discover how those benefits can translate into real profits

Gone are the days of leaflets, postcards, repeat emails and messaging services to get more customers?

Well, truth be told, the marketing industry or the small and medium enterprises business (SMEs) isn't the same as it used to be before. Innovation in direct to customer marketing has evolved along with the SME sectors in the past few decades. The focused approach has helped the sectors in optimizing the marketing budgets while attracting the relevant target audience. Taking this evolution into consideration, the marketers are taking help of AI and ML for better targeting of the audience. It is obvious that the audience is more glued to their hand-phones ever than before.

Today's marketing initiative goes far beyond the mainstream print ad, newspaper ad, and hoardings. Much of the evolution in the marketing world can be credited to the rise of mobile phones in this era. Businesses with great products, having a lower than expected sales volume may indicate a lack of right marketing mix. With a few tips and tricks, you can solve this problem and use mobile marketing to your advantage and kick-start your business.

People spend 59 per cent of their time on their mobile phones according to research by app geeks, yet somehow businesses spend 15 per cent of their budget on mobile marketing and 85 per cent on desktop marketing. This gap is where the main problem arises. Businesses need to start concentrating on mobile marketing along with desktop marketing. The overwhelming adoption of mobiles, technologies give marketers another window to reach out to prospective customers and provide those buyers with irresistible incentives.

Listed below are a few popular methods of mobile marketing for SME businesses:

– App Based Marketing

– Email Marketing

– In – game Marketing

– QR Code Marketing

– Location Based Services

Marketers who are yet to develop their mobile marketing strategies should understand the many advantages and discover how those benefits can translate into real profits for their businesses. The three aspects of mobile marketing should be considered are as follows.

Some of the major benefits of Mobile Marketing are:

1. User-Friendly: Mobile marketing with the help of campaigns through SMSs or MMSs have an objective and precise messaging towards its target audience. The messaging should be crisp and attractive to gain and hold the attention of the end receiver. Strong pull factor increases the chances of conversion (End purchase by the user)

2. Time Efficient: The fastest way companies opt for communicating with their prospects is Mobile Marketing. Mobile Marketing also helps companies make their approach personal, as in today's hyper tech-savvy age every single individual's day starts and ends on their mobile phones. Higher the amount of personal attention, higher are the chances to get it converted into the purchase of the seller's product

3. Measuring the Outcome: Managing a campaign is easy but analysing the outcome of one is difficult – ROI. Companies on a larger scale have started opting for mobile marketing to ensure timely reach, low investment, faster turnaround time and also the measurable impact. Information and details are provided through website links on messages and users either read it or not by clicking on the same. This data is highly valuable to analyse the success of the campaign. The campaign results can be tracked by the quantifying the downloads, page visits, customer opt-ins, etc.

4. Technological Aids: The availability of technological inventions like GPS and Bluetooth, companies are selling their products by sending location-specific messages to their targeted customers

5. Cross-platform Targeting: Mobile marketing techniques are varied and can be chosen according to the requirement and target audience of a company. The best platforms in today's age are Social Media, Apps, Websites designed for particular business goals etc.

6. Brand Awareness: Mobile Marketing helps raise brand awareness and encourages customer loyalty and growth in sales

7. Mobile Payments: Another great tool at the customer's disposal is the mobile payment. The facility is absolutely convenient and user-friendly and involves lesser risks

8.Offer Deals and Loyalty Points: Offering deals is just a way to attract customers and making them feel they're paying less for more. Apart from that loyalty points and membership cards go a long way. Sending offer codes via SMS or push notifications helps bring back existing customers too. With SMS coupons, customers are less likely to lose it and more likely to use it.

Disadvantages of Mobile Marketing

1.Diversification: Marketing on different operating systems and browsers and get extremely difficult. Also mobiles and available in a different size, screen and quality as compared to that of PCs and Laptops

2. Security Thefts and Privacy Issues: Mobile marketing on a large scale should be monitored accordingly to avoid consumer security thefts and privacy issues. Also, not every consumer is open for third parties to have access to their private space

3. Mobile-Integrated Artificial Intelligence: The new age smartphones use cloud-based software to generate programs and the enormous amount of information that these programs processes are in seconds. Companies try to lure consumers by sending out notifications of something attractive and then connect it with some time-sensitive offer. Not always though the result is action anticipated from the customers. It is still said that Artificial Intelligence is the future of Mobile Marketing.

Considering these facts, small business owners are increasingly switching to cost-effective and high-impact mobile marketing tools to generate desired revenue through their campaigns.

Mobile is only going to get bigger in the coming years and the only way to stay ahead of this game is to keep up with the trend or start a new trend.