Small and medium sized businesses today still rely heavily on the reviews and social media comments that they accrue from past customers to market their business. Word-of-mouth has always seemed like the best way to keep a smaller business rolling, and it’s been working well for some time now. However, with things like that constantly changing in this world, there will come a time when word-of-mouth just will not be enough to keep up good business. Many SMBs are on top of their marketing and advertising needs, and have pretty successful advertising campaigns running already. A survey performed by Borell Survey, sponsored by mobile advertising blog company Pontiflex, shows how SMBs feel about mobile advertising in particular, and just what their plans and expectations are for the future in regards to it.
In their posting of the results, they go over the main points from the survey of 1,300 small and medium businesses. The first is:
SMBs are increasing spend on mobile (72% will increase/maintain spend over next twelve months)
To be more precise, 27% of the SMBs plan on increasing their mobile ad spends over the next year, while 45% are planning to maintain the amount they are already spending. This tells us that nearly half of the surveyed small and medium businesses are already advertising on mobile, and are happy with what they are spending. In fact, a chart in their reporting shows that in the next year, 49% of the surveyed SMBs are at least somewhat likely to incorporate mobile ads into their advertising and marketing efforts versus the 32% who are not very likely or not at all likely.
Another of the most important points of the survey was,
 However, SMBs are not satisfied with ROI on mobile advertising, and would increase spend even more if they got ROI. (49% of SMBs that have done mobile advertising say that higher ROI will make them increase even further).
One of the main reasons that some SMBs have not embraced mobile advertising may be because of the ROIs that others have been seeing with their mobile campaigns. Pretty much half of the SMB advertisers that do have mobile campaigns would only start spending more if the ROIs increased, which makes perfect sense. It isn’t only SMBs that are often seeing low ROIs on their mobile campaigns, but these returns will continue to increase in the near future, as mobile media use continues to grow.
The final point was this;
SMBs prefer paying for signups as opposed to paying for clicks or impressions  (27% as opposed to 19% for clicks and 6% for banners).
Signups are much more effective for SMBs, therefore it is easy to see why they would prefer that payment method over clicks and impressions. SMBs were possibly the slowest to get to mobile marketing, and now that they have, their views on it are clear. All they want is to be able to spend more, to see a better return on what they are spending, and to be able to pay the way that makes most sense for SMBs.
