SMS marketing is one of the most powerful ways to build a lasting – and prosperous – bond with your target audience of consumers. Unfortunately, far too many brands let the full potential of their SMS campaigns slip through the cracks, all because they weren’t willing to tether this outreach to other major marketing channels. If you’d rather avoid joining this less than illustrious company and instead extract the maximum amount of value from your text-based promotions, take a moment to look over these tips and tactics for integrating your SMS marketing operations into every facet of your consumer outreach strategy.
Showcasing SMS via Your Brand’s Website
First up on the list is showcasing your SMS program on your branded website. Embracing this tactic allows you to “double dip” with your search engine optimization (SEO) operations and funnel search-based leads to both your eCommerce portal and your SMS contact list.According to Brit Tammeorg of Business 2 Community, winning on this front requires including explicit instructions for both new and returning users alike regarding how to opt-in to your SMS campaign. Digging a little deeper, landing pages, “Contact Us” sections, and even timed pop-up reminders are all viable ways to enact this strategy and harvest text-oriented contact info.
Leveraging Your Email Contact List
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you know how valuable a healthy and vibrant email contact list is to sustaining a business in the digital world. From this perspective, it makes plenty of sense to keep this connection with your inbox following going strong by adding a mobile element to this relationship.One of the best ways to go about this process is by including signup material in your upcoming newsletters. Whether you run a feature within this offering that emphasizes the exclusive deals and discounts provided to SMS list members, or you take a more subtle angle and incorporate simple instructions as part of an inset or blurb, the overarching theme here is that you’ll be hard pressed to find a better avenue for generating visibility for your SMS promotions.
Connecting with Social Media
Outside of tethering your SMS operations to the inbox, the other “must include” on this list are the various social media channels that resonate with your target audience. As Small Business Trend’s Megan Totka points out, tapping into Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the top platforms serves as the perfect conduit for spreading the word about your latest SMS campaign.Facebook in particular makes this strategy exceptionally easy to implement. All you need to do to start bolstering your text-based following via this social channel is add a “Mobile Number” field to the brand info portion of your company page. From here, you can turn this entry into an “opt-in” button that allows users to sign up for your SMS content directly from their mobile Facebook apps.
Direct Mail Content
Yes, direct mail content isn’t exactly the most effective tool for raising brand awareness in today’s digital-first world, but it’s still important to include this channel within the SMS integration discussion. Fortunately, creating a bond between these two outreach approaches is probably the easiest tactic to deploy of all of the inclusions on this list. All your brand has to do is make sure it includes some clean and concise coverage of the benefits of joining its SMS contact list – as well as printed instructions for opting-in to this program – on all of its physical “snail mail” content moving forward.
In-Store Promotions
Last – but certainly not least – on the list is promoting your SMS campaigns via in-store operations. While there’s no singular right way to go about this process, two of the most effective strategies for blending these channels together revolve around physical displays and employee training.On the display side of things, these promotional assets disperse information and instructions (usually via handouts or pamphlets) to on location audience members. As for employee training, this tactic can range from something as simple as floor associates providing reminders regarding the benefits of joining your brand’s SMS program to browsing customers, to more complex concepts like fully fleshed-out promotional scripts that can be utilized by cashiers to harvest contact info during checkout.At this point, there’s no denying that you’ve covered a ton of ground and learned how to integrate your SMS strategy into several other unique channels. All that’s left to do now is translate this newfound knowledge into action and start spreading the word about the value of your text-based initiatives to countless new audience members who might never have learned about this opportunity otherwise.
