Best Uses of SMS Marketing

Utilizing text messages to market to your customers directly via their smartphones-the one device that is almost always with them-can be a very effective approach for small businesses. Knowing how and when to do this, however, is critical in order to ensure the full success of such a campaign.

Knowing your audience goes back to marketing basics. The end goal is to know your target audience better than they know themselves. Provide what they needed to have before they had thought of in. It is important to put different SMS mobile marketing strategies into a larger and more meaningful context. Following are some of the best ways in which to utilize the power and benefits of text message marketing to your small business customers:

• At Events
  Depending upon the nature of your event, you have multiple options for how to incorporate SMS marketing. If you are giving a presentation and want to be able to share the file with attendees, simply have them text a code to you and they will receive a reply text with a link to obtain the slides.
  
  You could also send out texts with promotions that are valid only during the event to spur immediate action. If you wish to engage your audience to be more interactive, use text messaging to poll people about different topics-all relevant to the event, of course.


• In Store
  The best time to get people to buy your products is while they are already in your store. Take advantage of text messaging to alert customers about specials that they can enjoy while shopping at that very time. You could even suggest related or accompanying products to encourage the upsell process.


• Anytime Touchpoints
  While certainly the end goal of any overall marketing program is to sell, sometimes there are individual campaigns that are designed to create goodwill or customer loyalty. Text messaging can be leveraged to do this by sending special messages to customers on their birthdays or near select holidays. Including some marketing efforts that are not directly aimed at selling is a smart way to stay in touch with customers without making them feel pestered by you or pressured to buy at every moment.

Texting is easy and extremely inexpensive. This makes testing a campaign with SMS marketing well worth your time. We also believe it will be more than worth your investment and pay many times over for itself when implemented properly.

Edward Kundahl is president and owner of Allentown-based BusinessCreator, Inc., an Internet marketing agency and Web development company that offers clients total search marketing and interactive media solutions. His roots are in small-business search engine optimization and marketing and making sites user friendly and accessible to search engines. He can be reached at ed@businesscreatorplus.com.

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