As one of the most prominent communication channels of our time, mobile creates huge opportunities for marketers. Being tasked with delivering innovative and profitable campaigns, marketing agencies are always looking for better ways to reach their target audiences. In 2016 Marketing Tech reported that by this year it was predicted that by this year there would be 4.77 billion mobile phone owners in the world, more than two thirds of the population. In the same article they discuss how Coca-Cola reportedly invested 70% of its mobile budget on SMS marketing. These figures show that SMS marketing has a vital part to play in the marketing industry and they way businesses promote themselves. Marketers need to build relationships with text suppliers now to ensure that they can service clients when they decide to include text within the marketing mix.
How texting can be used in client campaigns…
SMS marketing is not only appealing because of the high levels of reach it can ascertain, but also the relationship we have with text messages. On the whole we don’t tend to give companies or people our mobile numbers unless we actually want to hear from them. So if your client has permission to use mobile numbers for marketing purposes then they should reach out with it and see how much of a difference it can make! Companies do still need to be very careful when it comes to data. As discussed in our e-book about staying compliant, even if you have obtained your “opt in” data legally, you need to ensure that your message doesn’t read like spam. There are a number of ways to avoid this including avoiding “text speak” and providing a purpose with the messages, for example sending customers information they have shown interest in before or a details of a marketing campaign that offers them something of value like a gift or discount.
Our bulk SMS tool, TextCampaign enables you to send personalised bulk text messages quickly, helping to start conversations and bring some personality to marketing. This links perfectly with other campaigns that marketing agencies may be producing for clients. For example if a direct mail piece has been sent to a client’s database, personalised text messaging can be used to follow this up. Whilst personalising direct mail is possible, it can be quite a costly exercise if posting large volumes. By using personalised text messages, a marketing agency can send a direct mail piece with the same copy to everyone but then follow it up with text messages along the lines of “Hi Amy – did you receive our letter the other day?” the customer is still receiving something personal but it has been controlled and made cost effective thanks to TextCampaign. If the text contained a further call to action, for example a short-code link to an online form or a simple multi question survey using our TextSurvey service, the SMS campaign can be used to sort and segment a client’s data based on their reactions to the text. Many marketing agencies follow up campaigns for clients and this allows you to prioritise calling the people that you know for a fact have interacted with the campaign. Direct mail doesn’t allow you to this and we know that 98% of texts get read as opposed to just 22% of emails. Text campaigns give you more opportunities to use your data.
To fully integrate your campaign, we would recommend tracking your short-code or survey links using Google Analytics. As discussed in our blog post last year, linking your campaigns to this software gives you the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of a campaign and conduct full marketing analysis. This is particularly effective when the call to action within a marketing page is to get people to click on a particular page of the website for example a landing page with more information or a product page.
How SMS Marketing can fit in with your social media campaigns…
SMS marketing can be used alongside a social media campaign. One of the best ways to integrate the two together is to run a Text-to-Win Contest. With this type of contest you will put a shortcode keyword and a number directly onto your Facebook, Twitter page or any other social media platform in which your competition is running. When users see the competition they will text in the keyword to enter and also provide their mobile number for future marketing, making it a valuable tool for promotion and data acquisition. This then gives you an instant lead with little effort required from you or your customer
You can also integrate this when utilising Facebook live, Live Stream recently reported that 80% of brand audiences would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, highlighting how important this service is becoming for marketers. Text messaging can be used to push traffic towards this content and increase audience figures and ultimately brand awareness.
Making SMS Part of Your Agency!
Particularly in a digital age, many marketing agencies have various CRM, email and even media bidding systems. With our API our service can be integrated in your software, making text marketing become aligned with other marketing channels and campaigns deliver messages dependant on the interaction with other media, for example sending a follow up text to someone who opened an email. Furthermore, as our SMS services can be white labelled via our partner program, you can run your own text-messaging business, offering all our end-user applications as your own.
It isn’t time your agency got started and dived straight into the world of mobile marketing? Mobile is here to stay and your clients and their customers are using it every day. For more information on our agency white label and reseller programmes, contact the TextAnywhere team on 08451 221 302 or [email protected].