BIA/Kelsey, a market researcher, conducted a survey of 300 small/medium sized businesses and found that 40% planned to increase their digital budgets in the next 12 months. Approximately 48% planned to maintain budgets while less than 4% planned to reduce their budgets. Interestingly, the digital channels in which to spend has increased to an average of almost 6 channels from three channels five years ago. The top five channels listed were Facebook, Newspapers, Community sponsorships, Email marketing, and Google places.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009437
What surprised me most about this article were the digital channels listed for the small/medium businesses spend. In class we learned how Newspaper ads and Facebook were not as optimal to advertise on/with from a revenue translation perspective. Moreover, the article mentions that mobile advertising was barely on the map for these 300 companies sampled. Almost 30% of those businesses had not heard of mobile marketing while another 31% had heard a little about it but are still not using it. Only 20% of those businesses were using mobile marketing.
I think, if this sample group of small/medium companies is a decent representation of businesses in the US, that there is significant room for mobile ad improvement and adoption in the future. Getting the information out to those companies will be interesting as the slow adoption rate and lack of knowledge may cause a continued slow pickup in mobile marketing for this target audience. It may even be too an expensive of an option to develop something given particular budgets and focus on other digital spend.
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