One of the most important aspects of a business plan is an effective mobile marketing strategy. Anybody who has started their own business understands the problems inherent in such a major undertaking. A paucity of resources – be they personnel or economic – can hobble even the brightest start-up. On the plus side, such restrictions can promote creative thinking and lead to untapped sources of business. Compared with traditional advertising channels like television, mobile marketing campaigns needn’t be prohibitively expensive. They just need blue-skly thinking, flexibility, and a lot of hard work. If you are in the early stages of building your business, try adopting the following mobile marketing tactics…

1. Text Smart. Despite being, by nature, always on the move, the mobile audience is captive in the sense that their phone is always about their person. By offering people the opportunity to opt in to receiving messages via SMS, you can provide the distraction they need while waiting in line or sitting alone in an airport lounge. Update user on promotions, offer them coupons – anything to make them engage with your brand. But be sure to offer something worthwhile or you risk annoying them (and prompting them to opt out). Research from mShopper.com indicates that mobile subscribers respond best to time-limited offers, so try capping the availability of a promotion at 24 hours.

2. Ground-up Optimization. Successful mobile marketing campaigns are created from the ground up, rather than operating as a hastily-assembled addendum to existing desktop campaigns. Take full advantage of the medium by incorporating functions that can only be performed using smartphones: QR codes, geo-location, augmented reality, apps. They all add to the interaction experience.

3. Trend Watch. Keeping an eye on the latest trends in mobile habits is the best way to remain relevant in a constantly-changing market. In 2012, only 17.5% of internet traffic emanated came[BC1] from mobile devices. By the end of 2013, that number had grown to 28%. Such a staggering increase would have spelled disaster for any company who took their eye off the ball, so stay on top of the latest developments in the world of mobile.

4. Responsive Design. If you have been paying attention to mobile trends, you will have heard a lot of chatter about responsive design, which describes the automatic adjustment of the layout and content of a website according to what kind of device is visiting it. It’s a critical part of mobile marketing, as it allows all users to have a great experience, regardless of whether they are using a tablet, smartphone or desktop. Talk to your web designers about developing responsive design for your site – it could ultimately replace the current model of entirely separate designs being implemented on each type of device.

5. Test Smart. Successful mobile marketing campaigns will test their ideas thoroughly before submitting them to the world at large. It might mean using a different color palette for mobile displays, or modifying a headline so it reads better on a tablet. The scientific method must be rigorously followed, so isolate one variable at a time during the testing process. Even small tweaks can have a major impact.