The Power of Mobile Marketing in Business

In 2012, the Telecom Agency, a small offshoot of the United Nations, released a study that suggests that there are an estimated 6 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide. To put that number into perspective, that is 1.5 billion more than the number of people that own a functioning toilet. Attempt to wrap your head around that statistic for a moment. Only a year prior, the same agency released information stating that only 2.3 billion people had access to the internet via a computer. The statistics clearly show that the possibility of a company generating revenue via mobile marketing is a very viable option. With the ability to reach a broader audience than ever thought possible, utilizing mobile phones to create business opportunities is certainly going to become the future mainstream for marketing.

Though internet marketing is still as profitable as ever; the popularity of mobile marketing is expected to grow exponentially. In 2013 alone, mobile ad revenue is expected to reach an astounding $16.65 billion dollars worldwide which only accounts for 14.2% of all digital media spending (up from 8.5% only a year ago). This shows that not only is mobile media incredibly profitable, but it is also extremely underutilized as well, allowing for less competition and a lot of room for growth. Marketers are quickly beginning to see the potential opportunities that mobile marketing offers as Gartner Inc. a prolific technology research advisory company, suggests that the potential for profit has taken hold of many marketers as they have begun switching to mobile marketing over the traditional methods. Gartner predicts that the revenue derived from mobile marketing will literally double by the year 2016.

Why is mobile marketing working so well?

How could it possibly beat the consumer shopping experience of surfing the internet from a computer? Clearly, the audience is much broader which allows companies to reach more potential customers through the use of mobile phones, but that alone doesn't prove that people are willing to purchase goods from their phone. Another digital analytic company by the name of Comscore actually produced a study that concluded that 4 out of every 5 people that own some sort of smartphone, do in fact, use it for shopping purposes, and sales of smartphones are expected to reach over 1 billion by the end of this year. This shows that people ARE willing to make purchases from their phone, and the number of people that own these phones is growing rapidly every single day.

The key to a successful business is to predict consumer trends in the coming future. There is no more obvious increasing trend within the consumer world than the use of mobile devices. It has been shown that the vast majority of people that own these phones are going to do so with the intent to purchase goods online. There is no bigger opportunity than that of mobile marketing. For any business owner or marketer, the potential for untold success is right in front of them, all they have to do is reach out and grab it!