European companies are adjusting their marketing budgets to meet the explosion of text message and multimedia messaging (MMS) campaigns, according to a survey.
In a survey commissioned by Airwide Solutions Inc. of companies with European headquarters, 89% of companies plan to use text and MMS to reach their audience, and nearly a third plan to spend more than 10% of their marketing budgets on the medium by 2008.
“Companies are pretty far down the path into looking into the medium and many of the major brands are spending large amount of marketing dollars,” said Jay Seaton, CMO in the Burlington, MA, office of Airwide, a provider of mobile infrastructure software. “Even when they are spending 5% to 10%, that’s a significant amount of money for these large companies.”
Because the marketing platform is relatively new, companies that plan to incorporate the marketing tool into larger strategies have concerns. Companies surveyed were leery that the mobile marketing industry does not have adequate measurement systems in place to track how consumers responded to marketing messages, or track messages received by the mobile device, according to the survey.
More than 55% of respondents were also unsure how to reach specific target audiences via mobile campaigns, 58% were unsure about how to implement and measure an SMS campaign, and 61% were unsure about how to implement and measure a MMS campaign.
But with snags still to be ironed out and recognizing the prevalence of mobile text messaging, 40% of brands have already deployed text messaging campaigns, and 18% have deployed MMS campaigns, the survey said.
Airwide Solutions surveyed 50 brands in January.
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