How Does Text Marketing Actually Work

If you want to share the message of your business, there are few techniques that have earned quite as much buzz as text marketing. This format allows you to deliver messages directly into the hands of your customers, and you don’t have to rely on gatekeepers like TV studios or radio stations to provide you with ad-buy.

But text marketing isn’t necessarily as simple as it might sound on the surface, and jumping in without a full understanding could lead to some problems further down the road. Here’s how text marketing works and how it can improve the visibility and reputation of your brand.

Who You Can Market Towards

For the sake of consumer protections, the FCC has put in place restrictions on who a company can reach out to for SMS marketing. More specifically, you can only add users to your list who have voluntarily opted in to text messaging.

As a result of that, building a database is one of the most important parts of launching a text marketing campaign. You can help accomplish this by providing active encouragement to your prospective audience at the most critical points of engagement. But that need for an active opt-in means that SMS marketing will work best when used in conjunction with other marketing channels.

Using Short Codes

Shortcodes have quickly proven to be one of the most effective tools in text marketing. Each shortcode consists of five digits and is matched to a keyword that’s unique to your business. By texting the keyword to that five-digit number, users can opt into the program. When tied into promotions and freebies, this type of opt-in program can go viral quickly.

There’s also the option for using toll-free phone numbers. In either case, you’ll probably want to devote at least one number exclusively to your marketing plan. That will allow you to scale your outreach up without clogging up the existing networks that you already have in place for your business.

Automating the Redundant Stuff

Good SMS marketing comes down to good timing. Target the right customers at a time when they’re best inclined to buy your product or service. Quality marketing campaigns draw from actionable customer data to create segments. Those segments can then be provided content that’s targeted specifically to their needs.

That can get incredibly complicated once you start splintering your demographics off more complexly. Automation can help with that in a huge way. Plenty of marketing tools can help you sift through the data you already have and use that data to schedule messages. While the initial instinct might be to assume that automating the process makes it more impersonal, it actually allows you to create content that’s more likely to draw the attention of an individual customer.

Results That are Hard to Argue

You may first find yourself interested in text marketing because it seems like one of the cheaper and easier approaches to marketing out there. But you might be surprised to discover just how effective it can be. For most people, a cell phone is a constant presence – and that provides you with a captive audience when reaching out through a text messaging campaign.

Just make sure that you understand how to use the methods most effectively. You’ll get the best results from text marketing if you can find an app platform that’s well-suited to your business. And working with a text marketing specialist may cost you more upfront, but it can also help you leverage your marketing resources to their maximum potential. Your customers are waiting.