Small businesses usually don’t have a lot of extra cash to spend but still need to market to their customers. Still, it is important for every business. Mobile marketing is the best option for small businesses because it is much less expensive than other forms of marketing and it is the best way to contact customers on a regular basis. As mobile marketing is constantly changing, your business needs to stay on top of the trends and focus on the most important aspects. Here are the top mobile marketing trends small businesses should stay on top of.

Social media marketing

While you can pay to promote ads, you can actually run an entire social media campaign without spending any money. Customers already expect you to have a social media presence, so starting by just making sure your business can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Pinterest is a good start. After all the accounts have been set up, start posting to try and get followers. People on social media like to talk about themselves, so business.com suggests starting meaningful conversations to get customers involved. Another really great way to increase your number of followers is to partner with another small business to do a giveaway where people can enter by tagging a friend in the post and liking both business’ pages. It will automatically promote your post on those customers’ pages and their friends will see and enter if they are also interested in winning some free stuff.

Text marketing

Over three quarters of the world’s smartphones are SMS-enabled, and that number is much higher in America where almost everyone owns a smartphone with texting capabilities. On top of that, customers are more likely to open a text than an email, and texts are often read within a few minutes. By texting your audience, you are able to get a hold of them quickly and easily.

One of the great parts of texting campaigns is that current technology now allows for two-way texting and AI chatbots to respond and answer questions automatically. It is something the consumer wants because they would prefer to get an answer immediately instead of having to wait for a customer service rep to get to them, and it is something your business wants because it saves a lot of time for employees if they don’t have to answer repetitive questions.

To get more customer signed up with text marketing, you should run campaigns to offer a discount upon signing up for text alerts or allow them to get rewards through texts. Also, most customers are happy to sign up when they realize they will be able to text in their questions instead of having to call customer service.

A mobile app

One thing that is becoming fairly popular for small businesses is to create an app. It is important that you figure out whether or not your business needs a mobile app before launching one. If it is unnecessary and wasteful, your customers will be annoyed that they downloaded the app and may be annoyed with your business for making them do something wasteful. However, an app that lets customers order food online, track their spending, remembers favorite orders, or even tracks orders may be useful enough to a customer that they want to download it.