Most companies don’t use mobile marketing effectively – but can they afford not to?

With mobile data traffic increasing 400-million-fold over the last 15 years, even small businesses can no longer afford to ignore mobile marketing

Does your business have a mobile marketing strategy? It should – but if it doesn’t, you’re not alone. Although mobile marketing is becoming more and more important, the vast majority of marketers aren’t strategically integrating it into their marketing plan.

Connected mobile devices are no longer “status” items – most of your customers are carrying around phones with more computing power than it took to get Apollo 11 to the moon and back. But – although Forbes named mobile marketing one of the most important marketing priorities of 2015 – just 13% of marketers are systematically integrating mobile, according to a MediaPost report.

The report, citing a study by Forrester, said that the haphazard integration of mobile marketing into overall marketing plans meant that even many who did have some mobile component in their marketing couldn’t adequately measure its impact.
Just 27% of those surveyed by Forrester said the return on investment of their mobile marketing campaigns was profitable – while 67% said they simply had no way of measuring its effect.

The fact is, even professional marketers are still trying to get a feel of how mobile marketing tactics work and how to implement them, MediaPost reported. And only 20% of those Forrester surveyed said their organizations had an adequate budget for mobile initiatives, while just 10% even considered their companies to be mobile-savvy organizations.

But even small business owners can’t afford to ignore mobile marketing for much longer. According to MarketingDive, global mobile data traffic grew 74% in 2015 alone. In the last decade, it’s grown 4,000-fold. And in the last 15 years, it’s grown almost 400-million-fold.

“Mobile is critical — Google has finally noted that more than half of searches are conducted on mobile, and this will only go up as computing becomes even more ubiquitous,” Noah Jessop, head of data for marketing firm Liquid PCH, told MarketingDive. “The shift to mobile is only going to increase — and unprepared marketers will be left trying to catch up.”