The Fu­ture Of Mar­ket­ing Is In SMS

Kick start your mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tive with mass text marketing

In a world where more peo­ple have cell phones than run­ning wa­ter, it pays to un­der­take SMS marketing.

Po­ten­tial clients of all ages use their cell phones daily to com­mu­ni­cate, ac­cess the in­ter­net and play games. Sta­tis­tics don’t lie. There’s a huge un­tapped mar­ket wait­ing for your busi­ness to unlock.

Look­ing at the Numbers

Ac­cord­ing to CTIA–The Wire­less As­so­ci­a­tion, “The U.S. wire­less in­dus­try is val­ued at $195.5 bil­lion, which is larger than pub­lish­ing, agri­cul­ture, ho­tels and lodg­ing, air trans­porta­tion, mo­tion pic­ture and record­ing and mo­tor ve­hi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­try seg­ments. It ri­vals the com­puter sys­tem de­sign ser­vice and oil and gas ex­trac­tion industries.”

In the United States there are more cell phones in use than there are peo­ple. What are the busi­ness im­pli­ca­tions of this data? There are many, but per­haps the most im­por­tant con­clu­sion you can draw is that if you can reach these users, your busi­ness can reap the re­wards of con­nect­ing with an enor­mous and largely un­der­uti­lized market.

CTIA says as of June 2012, U.S. wire­less con­sumers sent and re­ceived at least 6 bil­lion text mes­sages each day. That’s nearly 70,000 text mes­sages each sec­ond! And Cis­co’s Vi­sual Net­work­ing In­dex projects wire­less data traf­fic vol­umes for North Amer­ica in 2016 will be more than 100 times that of 2009 volumes.

Mar­ket out­reach has never be­fore been so in-depth or com­plete. Every cell phone provider of­fers data, talk and text plans that can be scaled up or back to meet client’s bud­getary re­stric­tions. How­ever, even the least ex­pen­sive plans in­clude tex­ting op­tions due to high de­mand. Even free cell phones given to the un­der­priv­i­leged can re­ceive texts. This means your busi­ness is ca­pa­ble of reach­ing mas­sive au­di­ences that are nearly un­reach­able via any other mar­ket­ing scheme.

How Your Busi­ness Can Use SMS Marketing

Many com­pa­nies or or­ga­ni­za­tions use these ser­vices to of­fer ex­clu­sive deals to fol­low­ers, or alert con­sumers of up­com­ing sales. Po­lit­i­cal can­di­dates, like Pres­i­dent Obama, used SMS mar­ket­ing to re­mind vot­ers to vote, while non-prof­its can or­ga­nize events on the fly. Other busi­nesses sim­ply use SMS to wish fol­low­ers well on their birth­day, cre­at­ing a pos­i­tive brand image. 

Un­like email, tele­vi­sion, ra­dio, tele­mar­ket­ing or so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing, SMS mar­ket­ing pro­vides the high­est pos­si­ble out­reach. Cell phones are de­vices that all de­mo­graphic groups pos­sess and use. Those who are un­reach­able by phone, voice mes­sage, email or other mar­ket­ing means are avail­able through text. Mes­sages re­main in the phone’s in­box un­til they are read and/or discarded.

De­mo­graphic groups who are in­creas­ingly dri­ving our econ­omy are young, tech savvy and smart. If you want to con­nect with them, you have to keep your mes­sage short, di­rect, and catchy. Giv­ing in­cen­tives can boost user par­tic­i­pa­tion, such as a spe­cial of­fer in ex­change for fill­ing out a brief sur­vey. This can in­crease busi­ness while help­ing you bet­ter un­der­stand your customers.

If you have been think­ing about text mes­sage mar­ket­ing for your busi­ness, you’re not alone. Mo­bile in­ter­net ad­ver­tis­ing al­most dou­bled be­tween 2011 and 2012, mean­ing large cor­po­ra­tions are find­ing busi­ness in SMS mar­ket­ing, and you can, too!