• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, October 3, 2012

According to a Borrell Survey of over 1,300 small and medium businesses (SMBs), with additional details from Marketing Charts, to measure perceptions about mobile and social advertising, 45% of small business plan to maintain their level of spending, while 27% of medium-sized businesses plan to increase their level of spending on mobile media in the next year, compared to just 4% who expect a decrease in mobile spend.

Mobile marketing appears to becoming a mainstream activity among these SMBs: half said they were very (18%) or somewhat (31%) likely to incorporate mobile elements in their advertising and marketing efforts to reach potential customers in the next 12 months. By comparison, 37% fell somewhere on the range from “not very likely” to not buying mobile at all.

And the plan for Mobile Media expenditures in the next 12 months shows that 10% of the respondents plan on half again their mobile spend.

Details from the survey indicate that about half of the respondents don’t know which pricing models they would prefer. However, 26% overall said they would prefer to pay for sign-ups, meaning that they would pay for the email addresses and phone numbers of people interested in their business. Relatively fewer respondents said they would prefer to pay for clicks or pay for impressions, the models that currently predominate.

Additional key findings include:

• SMBs are increasing spend on mobile (72% will increase/maintain spend over next twelve months)
• 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)
• SMBs prefer paying for signups as opposed to paying for clicks or impressions  (27% as opposed to 19% for clicks and 6% for banners)

For additional information from Pontiflex about the Borrell survey, please visit here.