With constant growth of mobile phone ownership and usage, neary everyone has one mobile phone today. That’s why mobile marketing is gaining momentum day by day,

Due to the popularity of iPhone and android smart phone, many business are thinking of developing their own apps as their mobile marketing strategy. Does it really help their business to develop their own mobile apps? Let’s do some cost analysis of mobile apps strategy:

Good mobile app are not easy to develop, due to the small screen and different verity of the mobile phone model, iphone, Android or windows phone, developing a good mobile apps can cost tens of thousand.

Mobile app normally has the apps to be installed on users’ mobile phone, and server code to be hosted at a remote server. There will be constant update on the user app, and server code to meet the changing need and bug fixing. The cost to maintain the whole mobile app system can be from a few hundred to few thousand a month.

There are just too many mobile apps out there, and why people download and install your mobile app? They may not even know your mobile app. To get the mobile app download and install to users mobile phone is really a big challenge, and very costly. That’s why there are lot of mobile apps become a white elephant, only to show off that their business has a mobile marketing strategy.

Another approach to the mobile marketing is the SMS marketing. Compare to mobile apps marketing, SMS marketing has the following features:

Firstly, SMS technology is available everywhere country, and it is the inter nation standard. It does not depends on specific vendor or specific service provider or even 3G/4G network. It can work on smart phone as well as basic function mobile phone. Every mobile phone support SMS.

Secondly, SMS marketing is cost effective. Business invest on a SMS marketing system, like Grep Tech’s GT Notify system, an automated SMS marketing system, they are already able to make use of all their existing mobile contact to start the mobile marketing. And the business can reap the benefit immediately. There is no need to worry about their users’s phone and how to convince their user to download and install their mobile apps.

Thirdly, The maintenance cost of SMS marketing system is much low, there is nearly no maintenance cost, and most of the time, the system is running by itself. And ready for start the marketing campaign at any time. And business do not need to special skill to maintenance the system, that will save the cost on the labor part.

From the above the analysis, we can clearly see that SMS marketing is a more viable option of the mobile marketing, compare to mobile apps, especially for the small and medium enterprise (SME).