When it comes to marketing your business, there’s no shortage of tactics and strategies you can use to reach your target audience and promote your services.
However, many businesses struggle to identify which strategy is the best fit for their business. This can be especially true for businesses that have limited budget and time to focus on marketing. The good news is, there are many ways in which you can implement SMS marketing to reach your target audience and promote your business. The question is, how will you do it? Here’s a quick guide to help you get started with implementing an enterprise SMS marketing strategy for your business.
What is Enterprise SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is the practice of sending text messages to a specific group of recipients who are either an active or prospective customer of your business. It’s a great way to reach your customers and prospects and keep them up-to-date with your new services and special deals.
However, SMS marketing is more than just sending text messages to your customers and prospects. It can also be used to engage with your employees and staff, build relationships with your business partners, and market your business in a holistic and productive way.
Different Types of Enterprise SMS Marketing Strategies
Here are some of the most popular enterprise SMS marketing strategies for businesses:
Lead Generation – Lead generation is the process of getting new, qualified leads to your business. It involves sending specially-tailored SMS texts to prospective customers that provide them with valuable information about your products and services. As these prospective customers read your SMS messages, they generate a “yes-no” response in their minds. Eventually, they will make a decision and move to the next step of the buying process.
Sales – One of the most common uses of SMS marketing is for sales. This means you can send sales-related information to your customers via their mobile phones, such as product updates, special deals, and instructions on how to make a purchase.
Customer Service – Another common use of SMS marketing is for customer service. This means you can send customer support information and respond to customer enquiries in real time via SMS.
Relationship Building – Relationship-building SMS messages are often used for long-term retention. You can create abonnement or subscription SMS campaigns that give your customers recurring incentives that encourage them to continue using your products or services.
Awareness Building – Awareness-building SMS campaigns are often used for brand promotion. You can promote your products and services through a series of short, informative, and educational SMS messages.
Define Your Audience
Once you know what types of campaigns you want to implement and the audiences you want to target, it’s time to define your audience.
First, you’ll want to understand the demographics of your existing customers and the types of customers you wish to acquire. Next, you’ll want to look at your competitors and identify the types of customers that you want to win over. From there, you can begin to build a list of key customer needs and wants that will help you identify your ideal customers.
From here, you can use this information to create more specific customer profiles. You can also use tools like Shuttle to help you manage your business account and keep track of your customers.
Plan Your Campaign
Once you have your target customer profiles, you can begin to plan the types of campaigns you want to launch.
First, it’s important to note that SMS campaigns can be used for many different purposes. In fact, it’s possible to use SMS marketing for almost any marketing campaign objective.
To help you with this, you can break down your campaigns into four categories: lead generation, sales, retention, and brand awareness.
Lead Generation – For lead generation campaigns, you’ll want to focus on acquiring new, qualified customers. It’s important to note that these campaigns aren’t meant to sell your current customers products or services. Instead, you want to give them information about your products and services and help them move to the next step of the buying process.
Sales – To create sales campaigns, you will want to use your lead-generation campaigns to help you move your customers through the sales cycle. This includes providing them with product details, price comparisons, and instructions on how to make a purchase.
Retention – To create retention campaigns, you’ll want to focus on keeping your customers happy and engaged with your products and services. You can do this by sending them ongoing content, such as product updates, deals, and reviews.
Brand Awareness – To create brand-awareness campaigns, you’ll want to highlight the benefits of your products and services by highlighting their positive attributes and solving your customers’ problems. You can do this through educational SMS messages that provide insight into your products and services.
Utilize the Right Technology
Once you know what types of campaigns you want to launch, you can begin to plan your campaigns.
To ensure your campaigns are effective, it’s important to choose the right technology.
First, you’ll want to determine what technology your business uses for SMS marketing, if any. Next, you’ll want to evaluate your current technology and determine which features are important to your business. After this, you’ll want to choose the right SMS marketing technology for your needs.
There are many different types of SMS marketing technology. From cloud-based platforms to self-hosted software, there’s a tool to meet your needs.
To help you find the right technology for your needs, here are some questions you can ask when evaluating your technology needs:
- What features and functions are important to your business?
- What are the key challenges your team faces when it comes time to plan and launch campaigns?
- What are the business costs associated with each option?
- What are the pros and cons of each option?
- What are the key risks associated with each option?
Conclusion
SMS marketing is incredibly effective at reaching your target audience, providing you with the ability to reach them and respond to their needs.
The key to effective SMS campaigns is to create campaigns that meet your business’ needs, solving your customer’s problems and meeting their key needs and wants. This will help you create effective SMS marketing campaigns.
