Mobile marketing is one of the quickest and most powerful ways to get your message out to your customers.

If you are a pizza shop, for example, and you are having a slow Saturday, by sending out a mobile message to your subscribers saying, ’50% off on large Hawaiian pizzas for the next two hours,’ you can turn around your sales for the afternoon in a matter of minutes instead of weeks. Did you know that 50% of all new internet connections in 2010 came from mobile phones? More and more people worldwide are accessing the web with their mobile phones, making mobile an important platform for marketers to reach their audience. Here is a great article from the Miami Herald.

via miamiherald.com

Is mobile marketing right for your small business?

Today’s mobile phones offer a smart way for small business owners to engage their customers through mobile marketing.

By Tasha Cunningham

With millions of mobile phones in use around the world, the potential to communicate with current and future clients is limitless. Small business owners can use both SMS (short text messaging) and MMS (multi-media text messaging), which can add video and audio files to messages sent to clients.

But what is mobile marketing exactly? According to the Mobile Marketing Association, it’s “a set of practices that enables organizations and businesses to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.”

To find out more, BizBytes enlisted the expertise of Marcos J. Menendez, co-founder and CEO of Momares, a Miami-based mobile marketing company, to answer our questions.

Q: How can a small business owner benefit from adding mobile to their marketing mix?

Mobile text message marketing offers small business owners the ability to deliver exclusive offers, coupons and invites directly to their customers’ mobile phone in seconds. There are no spam filters, ignored messages or automatically trashed messages. Once a customer subscribes to your text message program, practically 100 percent of your messages are delivered straight to their mobile phone. As compared to e-mail and paper coupons, text coupons enjoy a redemption rate of 10 percent to 30 percent because the coupon is always available to the customer on their mobile phone and that equals increased traffic and sales.

Q: What are the best mobile marketing tools available today for small business owners?

There are two tools we recommend small business owners to use. First, create a mobile browser-enabled version of a website, also known as a mobile site, because 20 percent of mobile phone users have a smart phone that can access your website. Second, start a text message marketing program immediately. 93 percent of the U.S. population has a mobile phone that can receive text messages. Unlike apps that only work in smartphones, text messaging works with every phone. It’s a direct, personal and cost-effective channel to communicate and increase sales.

Q: Is mobile marketing expensive?

Mobile text message marketing should not be expensive at all for a small business owner. There are text message marketing plans that start at $10 per month, which is a price point any small business owner can afford.

Q: What are the pros and cons of mobile marketing? Are there any downsides for small business owners who decide to use it?

Text message marketing provides small business owners with unfiltered direct access to the one device we can’t ignore — our mobile phone, one of the most powerful marketing tools we’ve got. But as a small business owner, you’ve got the responsibility of respecting the customer’s privacy. Messages that provide little value to the customer will affect your brand in a negative way. No one wants advertising on their phone but they do want timely, relevant and value-driven offers.

Think of an exclusive invitation to an owner’s wine tasting event versus an empty ad saying happy hour starts at 5 p.m. Value drives mobile marketing success. After all, if the customer does not like what you are saying, as easily as they subscribed to your program they can reply to your text message with the word STOP and they’ll be automatically unsubscribed. The customer is in control of the communication and just like e-mail there is no place for spam messages.

Q: What is the future of mobile marketing? What trends are you seeing in the industry?

There is no doubt that text message marketing is the future of small business marketing. There are 173 billion texts sent per month in the U.S. It is the most cost-effective and simple to use tool since e-mail.

If you can type, you can be a mobile marketer today. Businesses will distribute 70 million mobile coupons by 2013, according to the Yankee Group, a technology research firm based in Boston. The time to start texting your customers the offers they want is now!

Mobile creates the opportunity to individually engage with more people than any other medium. Mobile phones today have more ways of connecting people to each other than almost any other channel. People can call, text, MMS, email, IM, post updates to social networking sites, update blogs, post videos online and much, much more. There are many opportunities to get your message out to customers and clients quickly and cost effectively. Social Media Pathways is here to help.