By Dominick Sirianni, VP of Operations, Primavera and VP Interactive Education, Internet Marketing Association

In 2016, mobile advertising will drive 65 billion inbound sales calls into small and medium sized businesses. By 2019, that number explode to 162 billion – a 42% compound annual growth rate[1].

As your company invests more of its budget to advertise directly on cell phones, more of the people seeing your brand will go from browsing your website to clicking to call. Inbound sales calls convert at 10 to 15 times the rate of inbound web leads[2]. Maximizing that micro-conversion is incredibly important for you as a marketing leader. Here are a few tips to making that successful:

Ensure qualified staff are available to answer inbound sales leads.

More than one in five inbound sales calls driven from a mobile marketing campaign results in a hang up[3]. Twenty percent of mobile ad spending is wasted because someone wasn’t there to answer the call when a customer reached out. Staff your call center or inside sales team with enough people to adequately handle the response from your mobile ad campaigns.

Invest in your telecommunications infrastructure.

Would you use a seven year old cell phone? Would you put your whole company infrastructure on a seven year old server? Then why are most companies using corporate phone systems that are nearly a decade old? This is arguably the most critical component of your business. Look at a modern solution that leverages the cloud to increase redundancy, reliability, flexibility and drives cost savings.

Make sure you’re telephone number is a part of your mobile ads.

With an effective mobile advertising campaign, it’s so easy to turn a casual web surfer into an engaged caller. Maximize that micro-conversion by putting your number on the ad. All the potential customer has to do is click your number and you can have a trained salesperson handle the rest.

Go back to proximately displaying your telephone number on your website.

The same logic applies to your website. Gone are the days when internet marketing replaced inbound calls. Today, they reinforce each other so get your telephone number back on the top of your website and encourage leads to call in and talk to your salespeople.

Take your customer’s journey often.

80% of company executives think they offer their customers a good experience. Eight percent of customers report good experiences. Align your assumptions with reality and simulate your end-user experience frequently. You’ll be surprised how much you learn and how easy it is for you to make adjustments to maximize your sales.

Taking these steps will give you a competitive advantage that will be hard to overcome. How many of your competitors don’t use mobile advertising to drive inbound sales calls? How many of them miss out on 20% of the inbound callers? How many have no idea what it’s like to be a customer?

Taking just a few steps to optimize your mobile marketing strategy can have a dramatic impact on your business.