You’ve probably heard of text message advertising, or SMS (short message service), but what can it do for your small business? How is it done, and how do you find a great service provider? Text message advertising to the cell phones of your customers and potential customers could be an incredible way to get high-quality repeat buying traffic for any business with a physical location. This method of marketing your business is simple. Decide your purpose or what you want to achieve, find a quality, trustworthy vendor, start building your list and start sending offers to drive traffic to your business. It sounds like a lot, but it’s easier than you think.
1. Define Your Goals/What to Expect
What would you like to achieve with your text message advertising campaign? Is your goal to increase your leads and sales? Does your business have slow days where you need to ramp up the foot traffic? Do you need an easy way to send notifications and reminders to your customers?
How would a text message advertising campaign need to perform to be successful for your business? What are you looking for in terms of open and response rates? What other marketing are you doing that you can compare your results with?
Who will get your messages? Who is your target market? Who is your typical customer, and when are the times they normally come to your business to buy? What types of messages do you want to send out to them? How often and at what times of the day will these messages be most effective?
These are the types of questions that can really get you thinking seriously about how text message advertising can help your business, and answering them will help the rest of the process go smoothly.
2. Find a Provider
Find a text message advertising company to professionally handle your campaigns or who can provide you with a software to manage your own text message advertising campaigns.
A company that offers cutting-edge software for text message advertising will make your campaigns very simple. The software should do most of the work for you, and the learning curve will be quick.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure that the company you choose has good customer support and the software has the features you need for your business, such as mobile polls, text to screen and coupon redemption codes – whatever features are important to you.
3. Build Your Subscriber List
The company handling your text message advertising should provide you with a keyword (the word users type in to get on your list) and a short code (the number they text the keyword to). Put these together with your message, incentive or promotion to advertise to your customers. Providing an incentive such as something free or a special discount is a great way to get new users to opt in to your list.
Put up signs in your business, both on the walls and by the cash register. Hand out fliers to your customers. Another thing you can do is put your promotion with keyword and short code on your sales receipts. Have your staff tell everyone about it, and put it in all your advertising.
4. Track Your Text Message Advertising Campaigns
After sending a few messages to your list, make sure you take a look at the reports and statistics to see how well your campaigns are doing. With a good text message advertising service, you should be able to see how many people responded to your offer or redeemed your coupon and how many people ready your messages. Keeping track will help you see which campaigns have been the most successful.
5. Tweak Your Campaigns
After reviewing your text message advertising campaign statistics, you should have a pretty good idea of what’s working and what’s not working as well. Think about changes you can make to your messages to get higher response rates. What do your customers want? It’s important to do this because it helps you give the best offers to your customers so they will continue to respond, meaning more profits for your business.
When your campaigns are well done, text message advertising can be the most effective way to offer deals to customers and generate a large amount of traffic to your business. The results are also fast. Why would you want to miss out on a marketing method that’s so powerful?
Ennis Julian is the President of Mutiny Marketing and a veteran marketer with over 20 years experience helping both large and small business reach their specific target markets and convert them into paying customers and clients. Her greatest joy lies in helping small businesses compete with larger companies by creating and leveraging a strong online presence.