Four Benefits of SMS Marketing

Of the dozens of mobile marketing channels to choose from, SMS might be the only absolute must. Some channels may work for some and not others depending on their mobile strategy but an SMS marketing campaign needs to be a central part of every company’s mobile strategy. SMS has been around since the early 90s, well before smartphones, mobile applications, QR codes, push notifications, and banner ads were even thought of. But even though it’s ancient compared to other channels, it’s not outdated. It’s still the most cost effective way to reach consumers through their mobile devices and there’s no reason that every brand shouldn’t be investing in SMS. Here are four reasons why.

Immediacy

Consider this incredible statistic: 90% of all text messages are read within three minutes of being sent. That can’t be said about any other marketing channel. About 80% of emails are deleted unread, and for the 20% that are opened, less than 10% of those will be opened within an hour of being received. How about a mobile channel like push notifications from a mobile app. Less than half of people will agree to receive push notifications from the app in the first place. Of those that do receive push notifications, they ignore 90% of them.

To understand the incredible open rate and average time between message sent and message read, look no further than how text messages work. Unless recipients’ phones are on silent, there will be an audible or tactile notification that’s hard to ignore. With most phones, this notification will repeat several more times until the text message is opened. There’s no better way to send time sensitive information than through SMS.

Intimacy

There’s a great deal more trust in giving out your cell phone number than your email address. Unwanted emails are easily ignored or sent in bulk to the spam folder either by the user or by spam filters. People are a lot more selective about who they give their phone number to. It’s usually reserved for friends and family and perhaps a few professional contacts. When businesses are granted permission to send texts directly to a customer’s cell phone, it’s a big deal. All of this means two things: it’s harder to gain access to customers through this channel but there’s much to gain when you are able to gain access to it.

Loyalty

SMS marketing is a very regulated channel. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) sets forth strict guidelines for businesses sending text messages to customers. While this presents mobile marketers with a challenge, it also means that the audience for this particular channel are going to be very loyal. Every time you send out a text message to your SMS subscribers, every single recipient will have given you their phone number and permission to send them texts. And every recipient will have refrained from opting out, when all it takes is replying to a text with a single word: “stop.”

Simplicity

Crafting a text message to send out via SMS is far easier than writing and shooting a TV or radio commercial. It’s easier than designing a print ad or publishing a blog article. Text messages ha ve a 160 character limit. It’s this simplicity that makes it so effective. A one- or two-sentence text concisely worded and complete with a direct call-to-action is all it takes to drive results. Getting started with SMS marketing is also a breeze.

It’s just a matter of choosing a bulk SMS provider, registering a shortcode for your business, and selecting the keyword that customers will need to text to opt-in. Finally, just advertise the keyword and shortcode in-store and across other channels to start building your SMS subscriber list.

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Source: augustafreepress.com/benefits-sms-marketing-business

Seven Elements Every Inbound Marketing Campaign Needs

In recent years, outbound marketing (when businesses tried to cold call or reach out in some other way to potential customers) has taken a back set to inbound marketing (where businesses focus on offering value and letting customers come to them). Part of it is that consumers today are savvier and inherently suspicious of people trying to sell them something. Today’s average consumer prefers to seek out the product or service they need themselves. The following seven elements are all things your business’s inbound marketing strategy will need to succeed.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Long gone are the days of flipping through phonebooks to find local businesses. Search engines are the new gatekeepers in the world of business and your success will directly correlate to how far up or down the search results page your business is. It should be every company’s goal to be at the very top of the search results page. One option is to target specific keywords and pay to make sure your website is listed in the sponsored search results at the very top. But the most important way is to have a solid understanding of how these search engines’ algorithms work to prioritize certain websites over others so that you can increase the odds of being at the top of the list.

Social Media presence

After search engines like Google, social media platforms are the next place people go to find local businesses. Social media is no longer just for friends and family to stay connected. It’s a great way for businesses to stay in the public eye and interact with customers on a daily basis. You need to make it easy for customers to find you across all of the relevant social media platforms.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

Though PPC could be considered outbound marketing since you’re paying to place ads, it has some overlap with inbound marketing since you’re usually trying to place those ads on influencer blogs where your ideal customers are already looking for info relating to your business’s industry.

Excellent landing pages

Whether they’re clicking on a link in an email or text message, clicking on a link from an affiliate site, or finding you on Google, when they click on that link to get on your website, the landing page needs to keep them from leaving. A good landing page will be rather minimalistic usually containing just one key call to action that you need to get them started on the path to eventually purchase and become a customer.

A good content strategy

A good content strategy is at the heart of an inbound marketing campaign because it’s where you’re offering value to your potential customers and asking for nothing in return. The goal of content marketing is to take the time to produce high quality, relevant, and valuable content that people will want to seek out and see more of in the future. You want people to subscribe to your blog and newsletters, and to go to you when they want an opinion from good authority about a given subject.

Email marketing

Through email marketing, businesses can compile a database of loyal customers who have given their permission to receive regular correspondence with a business. It’s a great alternative to printed mailers and newsletters and can be a great content marketing channel and coupon distribution method.

SMS (text message) marketing

Like email marketing, text message marketing (or SMS marketing) allows businesses to build up a loyal customer base. While it’s more expensive per message than email, it’s also much more effective because of the significantly higher open and click-through rates. SMS can be used to distribute mobile coupons as well as micro content, order status updates, appointment reminders, and any time sensitive information that a business might want to communicate with their most loyal customers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/09/13/six-key-elements-of-an-effective-inbound-marketing-strategy/#131bdc88326f

Eight Things Your Small Business Needs To Be Doing To Increase Content Marketing Engagement

The goal of any content marketing campaign isn’t to get readers to read any one specific article, you want to create loyal followers of your brand who will await every new article or video you publish, who will share your content with friends and family across various social media platforms. To create this kind of user engagement with the content you publish, you need to do more than just create awesome content. Here are eight other things you need to be doing.

Faster loading times for webpages

In marketing lingo, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing just one page on that site. Ideally, when someone ends up on a blog article, they read another and another. Or even better, they go to other parts of your website to learn more about your brand and maybe check out your products. The bounce rate doubles when load times increase from one second to six seconds. People don’t want to stick around if they have to wait more than a few seconds every time they try to click over to another page.

Mobile website load times

If you think load times are important, on traditional websites, it’s nothing compared to the importance of load times on mobile websites. Half of website visitors bounce after a load time exceeds three seconds. Mobile users are less patient than their desktop/laptop counterparts.

A high quality, mobile friendly website

Even if your content is attracting people to your page, they’ll have a negative opinion of your brand if the quality of your site doesn’t measure up to the quality of your content. Your site needs to be well designed, following principles of symmetry and organization but also contrast with an attractive color scheme. Your site should be easy to navigate so that the most important things are displayed prominently. You either need a completely separate mobile version of your website or at the very least, a responsive design site that will properly display your website on mobile devices. Images need to be of a high quality–no stock photos and no low resolution images that will appear blurry on larger screens.

A second set of eyeballs

Establishing trust is a huge part of content marketing. You want readers of your blog to see you as a reliable source of good information. If your content has typos or mechanical/grammatical errors, it reflects badly on your brand even if the content itself is solid. Even if you’re choosing to tackle the content marketing yourself, you should be paying someone else to proofread it before publishing.

Clear key performance indicators (KPIs)

One of the challenging things about content marketing is that it can be hard to measure the direct effects that your content marketing efforts are having on your brand. Part of the problem is that many companies start a company blog because they know it’s what they’re supposed to do but they don’t really know why and what they’re trying to accomplish. A good content marketing strategy will have well-defined key performance indicators that are monitored to track effectiveness of the content marketing. If new customers are what you’re after, then unique visitors is going to be a more important metric than total website visits. If a solid, loyal customer base is the goal, then fewer unique visitors and higher overall website visits is what you’re striving for.

Cast a wider net

Just because you’re publishing great content, it doesn’t mean your target audience is finding it. You need to make sure your content is reaching the people you’re targeting. You may need to do some influencer and affiliate marketing so that bloggers social media personalities with a more established viewership can help you get recognized.

More channels

Another way to cast a wider net is to diversify the channels you’re using to publish content. The company blog on the the company webpage is often the only form of content marketing that a company invests in when this should be seen as just one part of a wider effort. Video content can be uploaded to Youtube or directly to social media platforms. Live streams, tutorials, infographics, and even micro-content sent via SMS are all great ways to diversify your content marketing and reach a wider audience. You can even recycle some of your content to reuse it on various channels.

A “you’re-never-finished” attitude

Even when you’re pleased with the results you’re seeing from your content marketing efforts–you’re getting plenty of web traffic, customers are coming back for more, and your posts are being “liked,” commented on, and shared across social media platforms, you can’t stop improving your content marketing efforts. You should always be paying attention to metrics and fine-tuning your strategy.

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Source: inc.com/molly-reynolds/7-impactful-ways-to-increase-content-engagement.html

Five Ways To Make Your Content Marketing Stand Out from The Rest

The sheer amount of digital content that we create collectively each day is staggering. Approximately 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillions) bytes of data are created every single day. In any given day, Facebook users will share 2.2 million pieces of content, Twitter users will send more than a quarter of a million tweets, and Instagram users will upload 216,000 photos. To say that the internet is a crowded place is a huge understatement. With such a vast amount of content being created and shared online every day, how can you expect your business’s content to get noticed by the right  people? It is possible, but you’re going to have to work hard to make sure your content stands out from the rest. Here are five ways to accomplish that.

Be concise and be yourself

Much of the content that is created for the purpose of marketing sounds stilted or unnatural. Content writers mistakenly believe that they need to adopt a certain formal tone in order to sound knowledgeable and credible.

But this kind of writing is uninteresting and it blends in with everything else that’s written in the exact same way. Feel free to use humor. Break grammatical rules with the situation calls for it. Use fresh and interesting language and never include any words that don’t need to be there or your writing will be overly wordy.

Don’t neglect visual content

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is not only cliche, it’s a huge understatement. A great image can communicate emotions in a way that no amount of words can. Posts that include an image are forty times as likely to be shared on social media as posts that don’t include one. Just as you want to avoid cliche or boring writing, you want to avoid stock photos. Infographics are an underutilized visual element that you may also want to consider.

Try creating some video content

Even more underutilized than images is video content. You may feel that you don’t have the expertise to create high quality video content. You don’t need a high end video camera, lighting, and other special equipment, although that might help. The occasional live stream or even simple how-to videos or interviews with influencers is usually enough to make you stand out from the majority of your competitors.

Get your content out there

If you’re relying solely on your website’s blog or your social media pages to publish content, you’re not casting as wide a net as you could be. Make it a goal to get published outside of these places. Submit guest posts to online magazines and newspapers that your audience is likely to encounter. Build relationships with influencers who can mention your brand in their blog posts or YouTube videos.

Be willing to experiment

Finally, find ways to experiment with your content creation. Not everything will work but some of your ideas will. One trend in content marketing that you can get ahead of is micro content marketing. Think one or two sentences sent via text as opposed to a several hundred word blog article or social media post. Micro content is a great way to offer your SMS subscribers value beyond the mobile coupons they’re accustomed to getting.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: netimperative.com/2017/08/cutting-clutter-creating-engaging-social-media-content/

Three Ways To Build Your Brand With Mobile

In 2016, smartphone’s market penetration finally surpassed 80%. That means more than 80% of mobile phone users are using a smartphone as opposed to a more traditional mobile phone. Gone are the days where talking on the phone was the primary use of phones. The vast majority of time spent on smartphones is spent within applications.

In fact, Americans now spend more time using mobile apps than watching television–more than five hours a day on average. Mobile social media use, TV/entertainment, mobile gaming, and texting all surpass talking on the phone as well. Because of this trend, businesses are starting to put more and more of their marketing budget into mobile and that trend is continuing into 2017. If you’re not focusing on mobile yet, you need to be. Here are three ways you can build your brand through mobile.

Create a mobile app (maybe)

It’s already been established that mobile apps dominate mobile phone usage. Developing a mobile app can be a great way to establish your brand on mobile. But you shouldn’t do it just to do it. The majority of apps are downloaded and used once or twice, then never again. Experience has shown that the apps that stick around and that people continue to use after downloading are the ones that offer real utility. Don’t spend valuable marketing budget money developing a gimmicky app that offers no real value to your customers. So while a mobile app can be a great way to build your brand on mobile, it’s not essential and there are a number of other ways that are probably more cost effective.

Get seen in existing apps

Whether or not you want to develop your own app for your business, you can still capitalize on all the time people are spending in mobile apps. Though Facebook and Youtube aren’t exclusively mobile platforms, they are increasingly being accessed via mobile device more than desktops or laptops. Creating and maintaining an effective Facebook page and Youtube channel where you’re regularly posting and sharing content are going to help establish mobile presence since those platforms are so inseparably connected to mobile. Things like infographics, short videos, and live streaming will get you noticed.

Use SMS

Short message service (SMS), or texting as it’s more commonly known is a great introduction into the world of mobile marketing because it’s one of the least expensive forms of mobile marketing and it’s also easier than developing a mobile app or managing a Facebook page or Youtube channel. Through a bulk SMS marketing service, you can automate the process of obtaining permissions and managing a database of numbers. You can craft your message and then set a time for it to go out and then stop worrying about it. Best of all SMS, is something that works on regular cell phones in addition to smartphones.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: huffingtonpost.com/entry/3-mobile-branding-tips-for-your-business-to-consider_us_59569dc6e4b0c85b96c66174

Five Tips for Mobile Marketing Success in 2017

US consumers are relying on mobile more than ever before to go about their day-to-day lives. From laptops to tablets to smartphones to wearable tech like smartwatches, this is a mobile age and business owners who ignore or underutilize mobile channels in their marketing efforts will have a harder and harder time competing with each passing year. Here are five tips that businesses can follow to find mobile marketing success in 2017 and beyond.

Mobile friendly website

It’s absolutely essential in 2017 to have a mobile-friendly business website. With each year the percentage of people accessing the site through a mobile site increases and sites that aren’t optimized for mobile display poorly on tablets and especially smartphones. Metrics show that mobile users accessing desktop versions of websites don’t stay on them very long. They have to pinch and zoom and squint to see what’s on the page and the likelihood of filling out information to complete a purchase on a site not optimized for mobile is very slim.

Mobile coupons

Coupons are one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book but it can be adapted for the mobile age. Mobile offers like coupons that are texted to loyal customers can be a powerful marketing tool. In fact, mobile coupons are far more successful than print ones that are mailed out or placed in magazines. Mobile coupons are more than ten times as likely to be redeemed as print coupons.

Mobile payments

As mobile payment solutions become more prominent, more and more customers are getting in the habit of leaving their credit and debit cards at home instead opting to use their smartphones’ built-in pay features like Android Pay or Apple Pay. Brick and mortar locations that don’t have the capability of accepting these kinds of transactions may miss out on a sizable amount of business. Similarly, websites should accept these payments because they’re more convenient for customers who don’t want to spend time filling out card information but would prefer to just authorize a payment with stored card information and their fingerprint.

Mobile-only social network platforms

Social networking platforms like Facebook or Twitter can be powerful indeed but many businesses are starting to recognize the advantage of branching out into mobile-only social network platforms like Snapchat or Instagram, especially if your target consumer is younger. To be successful with these platforms, it’s important to understand that different rules apply to mobile-only platforms than apply to sites like Facebook.

In fact, each social network varies from every other platform so it’s important for business owners or social media marketers to know the ins and outs of a new platform before launching marketing efforts utilizing them.

SMS marketing

Finally, small businesses absolutely must adopt SMS marketing in addition to their email marketing. The open rate for email advertisements is around 20% while the open rate for business text messages is about 98%.

Today’s consumers practically live on their mobile devices and the best way to get a message to them is through those devices in the form of text messages.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/287939