Study by Borrel Associate Shows Mobile Media as the Fastest Growing Advertising Platform

Experts are now saying the capabilities of mobile marketing are reaching consumers faster than any other medium in history, completely dwarfing the rate at which the Internet made it into our homes when it was released (and look at what happened to the bank accounts of smart guys who grabbed that wave when it mounted).

It is an advertising medium that is still in its infancy but we can already see its great potential. Radio took 30 years to evolve into a full-fledged advertising platform and then 15 years later television took the scene, and it took more than 40 more years for our advertising efforts to evolve from TV to cable to internet.

But mobile marketing seems to be in a league of its own, and one way we are seeing this manifest in is through mobile couponing. Mobile coupons are easy and cheap for companies, as simple as sending out a text message, and they are easy to use for customers as well, who don’t have to spend time hunting through coupon books, cutting them out, and saving them.

People use their text-based coupons 10X more than they use coupons they get from traditional paper based media.
A recent mobile marketing report by Borrel Associate states that while internet marketing took in over $44 billion last year and mobile just under $3 billion, the former is expected to only grow by thirteen percent per year. Mobile advertising, on the other hand, is predicted to see gains of 84% every year. That could leave the medium accounting for nearly $60 billion dollars annually 4 years from now.

The most promising aspect of mobile couponing as a powerful marketing medium is that most people already have the technological capabilities on their cell phones. In the past, when we watched the “slow” rise of the Internet (a rise that is only considered slow if compared to the shocking speed of technology development today), we see that hardly anyone had computers in their homes, and this is much of the reason it took so long for the medium to gain ground.

With mobile couponing and mobile advertising in general, the hardware has already infiltrated society in a big way. That means consumers are already waiting on the receiving end of their phones, all that needs to be done is find the best way to capitalize on this without overdoing it.

And it can be overdone. When a client or prospect allows you to reach into their world through social media and mobile technology, they don’t want to get hammered with advertisements 24/7, but no one can deny the satisfaction of taking a 5 digit code from a text message and using it to get a huge discount, even if they hadn’t been thinking of buying it in the first place. And therein lies the power of sending someone an advertisement of this sort and reaching them no matter where they are.

It doesn’t take much to see what this could do for a company’s sales. And we are seeing this growing trend of consumers who don’t mind one bit if companies have that sort of access to their daily lives and use it (within reason). Some see that as bad, but either way, it is certainly significant.

And for businesses looking for another way to get customers in the door to spend money, the next four years of growth in mobile marketing will bring some much desired revenue increases. What will the next decade bring?