Texting is a part of everyday life for many of us. Whether it’s a good-morning and goodnight text from your partner, or a thread with a group of besties from college, or just your weekly trivia group – everyone texts someone. This was realized by marketing professionals which led to the birth of SMS marketing. SMS marketing makes use of text message technology in order to connect with consumers through the one thing that we all have on us at almost all-times almost everyday; our smartphones.
Because we are so attached to our smartphones, text messaging is actually one of the most relied upon forms of communication that exists today. This is partially because of how intimate and personal text messaging feels between two people. It’s become a very private thing. These are the same reasons that mass text marketing is so effective with modern consumers. Between offering businesses a direct line of communication with consumers and the intimate nature of texting in general, SMS and mass text marketing are great ways for brands to engage consumers. These strategies are especially effective when deployed as specially targeted offers.
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What Is a Target Audience?
To design a mass text marketing campaign that includes targeted-offerings, the marketing professionals designing the campaign first need to build and develop a target-audience. In today’s day of technology, this is much simpler than it ever used to be. There are a variety of softwares out there designed to help marketing professionals create and tailor target audiences for their campaigns, in order to bolster the overall efficacy of the campaign.
Put simply, a target audience is a group of consumers who share a predefined grouping of variables and demographics that make them the ideal consumers for a specific brand, product, or service.
By developing a strong identity for the target audience before launching an SMS campaign, marketing, advertising, and sales professionals can move forward with confidence that their campaign will find some level of moderate success as it should specifically resonate with the intended recipients.
Designing Targeted SMS Messages
After defining the target audience, it’s time to consider the design of the targeted offering itself. Targeted offers that come to consumers through an SMS marketing campaign need to be relevant, valuable, and should heir on the side of short-and-sweet. This way, when the consumer receives and reads the incoming offer, they aren’t put-off or confused, and don’t feel intruded on either. Making sure that you’ve only included the target recipients in a targeted SMS marketing campaign is vital. You don’t want to accidentally send an irrelevant message to a large group of your consumers, as it could damage your reputation and lead to consumer overturn.
Be Unique, Creative, and Interesting
When approaching a mass text marketing campaign, it’s important to take the overall virtual landscape into consideration. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with media from just about every angle. From social media, to email, to streaming services, and everything in between. With all of these different brands, production companies, and platforms vying for consumer attention, it can be difficult to stand out in the crowd.
This is where it pays off to get creative, unique, and even a little bit weird with your marketing campaigns. By providing the consumer with something different and unique, your brand has a better chance at leaving a lasting impression on the consumer and creating an additional lead.
Don’t Over Text
One caveat that comes with SMS marketing campaigns is that it can be easy to turn customers off from your brand entirely. This will especially be the case if you start to over-text. Because texting is such a personal and rather intimate form of communication for consumers to participate in with brands, there is a certain amount of trust that is being lent to the brand.
If that trust is subsequently abused or even slightly misused, it could lead to a negative falling-out with the consumers involved.
Delivering Value Through SMS
When it comes down to it, the biggest and most important factor in creating and executing an effective SMS marketing strategy is delivering value. Whether this is done through a mobile-SMS-exclusive sales-offer, or the announcement of an upcoming product launch, the content of the SMS itself has to deliver some type of value to the intended recipient. If it doesn’t, it just becomes more noise that the consumer has to ignore during their day.
In developing an SMS marketing strategy, you don’t want to become a nuisance to the consumers with which you’re communicating.
A Few Final Words on Engaging Consumers Through SMS
Text messaging is not going anywhere as a mainstream form of communication between consumers. Understanding the role of a mass text in a comprehensive marketing strategy can help brands engage, connect, and develop rapport with consumers.