Text Message Advertising: What You Need to Know About Text Message Advertising for a Small Business

You’ve probably heard of text message advertising, or SMS (short message service), but what can it do for your small business? How is it done, and how do you find a great service provider? Text message advertising to the cell phones of your customers and potential customers could be an incredible way to get high-quality repeat buying traffic for any business with a physical location. This method of marketing your business is simple. Decide your purpose or what you want to achieve, find a quality, trustworthy vendor, start building your list and start sending offers to drive traffic to your business. It sounds like a lot, but it’s easier than you think.

1. Define Your Goals/What to Expect

What would you like to achieve with your Text Messaging Service for Business advertising campaign? Is your goal to increase your leads and sales? Does your business have slow days where you need to ramp up the foot traffic? Do you need an easy way to send notifications and reminders to your customers?

How would a text message advertising campaign need to perform to be successful for your business? What are you looking for in terms of open and response rates? What other marketing are you doing that you can compare your results with?

Who will get your messages? Who is your target market? Who is your typical customer, and when are the times they normally come to your business to buy? What types of messages do you want to send out to them? How often and at what times of the day will these messages be most effective?

These are the types of questions that can really get you thinking seriously about how text message advertising can help your business, and answering them will help the rest of the process go smoothly.

2. Find a Provider

Find a text message advertising company to professionally handle your campaigns or who can provide you with a software to manage your own text message advertising campaigns.

A company that offers cutting-edge software for text message advertising will make your campaigns very simple. The software should do most of the work for you, and the learning curve will be quick.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure that the company you choose has good customer support and the software has the features you need for your business, such as mobile polls, text to screen and coupon redemption codes – whatever features are important to you.

3. Build Your Subscriber List

The company handling your text message advertising should provide you with a keyword (the word users type in to get on your list) and a short code (the number they text the keyword to). Put these together with your message, incentive or promotion to advertise to your customers. Providing an incentive such as something free or a special discount is a great way to get new users to opt in to your list.

Put up signs in your business, both on the walls and by the cash register. Hand out fliers to your customers. Another thing you can do is put your promotion with keyword and short code on your sales receipts. Have your staff tell everyone about it, and put it in all your advertising.