Toronto is a city filled with mobile savvy individuals connected to each other through their mobile devices. Do you remember a time when the city was filled with people with a similar device attached to their hip that could only communicate one way? Oh yes it was the era of the mighty pager. Every business person had one because it was the cheapest and easiest way to get in touch. You could be at a social gathering and off goes a pager, beeping away, whilst everyone in the room is checking if the so important beep is resonating from their magical device. Well, we have come a long way since the beeper. Today our mobile devices can communicate in multiple ways, one of which is text messaging. The smartphone today is so versatile that peoples entire lives can be stored into that tiny little device. Although such a popular device it is still very much underused in the world of marketing. It seems that the majority of small businesses are not yet using smartphone advertising in Toronto.
Understandably so, smartphone advertising is a new concept to most small business owners, and many of them are still trying to figure out how to use their own smartphones themselves let alone use it to advertise their business. The fact of the matter is smartphone advertising in Toronto will increase as time goes by, because the rate at which mobile users are increasing is nothing short of amazing. According to Wikipedia there are over 6 billion mobile phone users in the world. That’s almost 90% of the world’s population. Think about how many people you meet today that don’t have a mobile phone. It seems that the mobile phone is become some what of an essential accessory for everyone, like an ID. Most people carry around an ID with them, although today with the technology of the smartphone you only need to take a picture of your ID and store it on your phone, essentially eliminating carrying any cards what so ever.
The mobile smartphone has created so many in roads in technology that it has helped people get rid of paper items that they used to otherwise have to carry. Now if we think about this concept for a second and apply it to smartphone advertising in Toronto for small businesses, we can see the power and potential of this electronic form of advertising coming in very handy, essentially eliminating other expensive forms of advertising such as flyers, post cards, direct mailers. It is estimated that at the cheapest an 8.5 x 11 sized paper flyer can cost as much as 3 cents a flyer to print in color single sided. Add on another average of 10 cents a flyer to be distributed. Total cost of printing and distributing is 13 cents a flyer. At the most conservative estimates if we print and distribute 5000 flyers per month we will spend $650 per month, trying to reach potential customers. Out of which if you are lucky you get a 15% response rate. Generally its much lower around 3% to 10%. Even with a 15% response rate (750 people) you may only actually sell your product to a percentage of those 750 people. If your product is a low margin product such as products sold at fast food restaurants making you a profit of $3 to $5, you would have to sell your product to at least 130 customers to break even your marketing expense of $650 for that month.
So this begs the question; why haven’t small business owners found an alternative method of marketing that costs less and gives them a much better ROI? The short answer is that they don’t know enough about it. There are so many small business owners in Toronto who don’t even have a website as yet. That is another discussion altogether. Smartphone advertising in Toronto is still in its infancy stages and with the new anti spam legislation that will be coming into enforcement this year there will be many changes to the way advertisers and companies use this powerful tool called mobile marketing. Here are some startling facts that all small business owners should know about mobile marketing:
1) SMS text messaging is still the best form of mobile messaging with more than 6.1 trillion messages sent in 2010. Despite the popularity of other tools like mobile email, IM and MMS, SMS is predicted to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.
2) According to consumer research by the MMA and Lightspeed Research (October 2010), in UK, France and Germany, 45 percent of consumers (especially younger people) noticed mobile advertising and of these, 29 percent responded to it. Of those that responded to the ads, in Germany 49 percent, UK 47 percent and in France 22 percent went on to make a
purchase.
3) The most effective form of ads was opt-in SMS in the UK (40 percent said they were more likely to respond to these) and in France (21 percent); while in Germany it was mobile Web ads (27 percent). Time sensitive special offers or discounts were most likely to lead to purchase.
4) With a staggering 98% open rate for text messages, there couldn’t be a more efficient use of your marketing dollars. And when we say dollars, we actually mean cents. It’s really that affordable.
5) Text messages are quick, only taking a few seconds to hit thousands of phones at the same time. Once it’s arrived, the average time to open is 4 minutes.
6) 82% of all Americans never leave home without their mobile phone. Half of all Americans sleep with their mobile phone.
7) 79% of smartphone users would find it useful to download money-off coupons to their phones.
You see text message marketing isn’t a fad or even something new, it is a wide spread trend that is only getting bigger. The numbers don’t lie, people are texting at record paces, and they are open to mobile marketing. Smartphone advertising in Toronto is continuously on the rise as more and more big businesses are adopting this method of advertising. However small businesses could make much better use of this technology by using it to build great customer loyalty and repeat business.