6 Reasons Why SMS Marketing Should Be Part of Your Wider Strategy

How do you make sure your marketing strategy has got all of its bases covered? With this or any other plan you need to ask yourself the six key questions – who, what, where, when, why and how – and make sure you’ve addressed them all.

SMS message marketing can be a vital part of delivering a strategy that meets your objectives.

Here’s how it can help a business to address those six questions…

Who

Who are you aiming at? All marketing strategies need to be clear about who they are talking to and how they are able to do it. SMS messages allow brands to contact customers (and target customers) directly and ensure they are having a conversation with the very people they need to reach most.

What

What should your message be? SMS campaigns force brands to hone their message. With a text you don’t have the time to waffle on. You need to be clear and persuasive over a small number of words. It often helps brands to be able to narrow down their message ‘in a nutshell’ – this does just that.

Where

Where can you reach your customers? Increasingly the best answer to this question is ‘on their mobile phone’. Collectively, UK customers look at their smartphones more than a billion times a day. You cannot afford to ignore the power of mobile and it’s important to find a way that allows you to attract a slice of that screen time.

When

Timing is everything, especially in marketing. You want to catch your target customer just at the right moment – the time when they are most likely to respond to your output. A large chunk of SMS messages can be sent out with the press of a button and the vast majority of texts are read within seconds of being received. This, then, offers businesses an instant method of communication with a large audience.

Why

It’s always important to stop and ask ‘why?’ before a campaign or you could lose track of your end goal. An SMS message must have a purpose – promoting a product/service, spreading news of an offer, asking for feedback – and so stops you from losing sight of what you’re trying to achieve.

How

How will you get people to respond to you? How do you track your success? SMS messages address these two points well. The vast majority of text messages are opened by the recipient and more people respond to SMS marketing messages than, say, emails. It’s also possible to see how well your messages have performed – with most platforms delivering a raft of data that you can pore through.

When it comes to the classic six questions, SMS messages hold answers that can directly or indirectly improve your marketing output. Making them an important part of your strategy can allow you to tap into the ever-increasing power of mobile platforms and deliver a strategy that is successful.