A Guide to Text Marketing

With an audience who are permanently switched on and ready to interact thanks to their mobile phones, it is no wonder that text marketing is becoming increasingly popular.

The exciting world of text marketing if full of fantastic opportunities for small businesses, as well as certain limitations, and it is important that you are aware of both so that you’re able to make the most of this useful marketing strategy.

When the strategy is executed well, text marketing can help to increase brand awareness, promote your business, and ultimately boost profits. So, to ensure you’re doing it right – and well – we’ve compiled a best practice guide to text marketing that includes some great marketing advice!

Make sure your website is mobile-ready

When your consumers are on the go, they’re far more likely to use the 3G on their mobiles than bother connecting their laptops to the nearest WiFi to search for anything and everything they need.

So, start by ensuring that they are able to access your website via their mobile phone, especially if when you send a marketing text, you’re planning on including a link to your website.

Keep it relevant

While the emails in your email marketing campaign can be full of lengthy and interesting content, your text messages must be short and to the point.

No one will bother to read pages and pages of information sent to them via text, but they will take an interest in a short text that gets straight to the point and promotes a great deal or manages to get them excited after reading the first few lines.

Consider the time

Just as you would carefully consider when to show promotional adverts on television, you should do the same for when you send your marketing texts.

When are your consumers more likely to have the time to read a promotional text? Texting your consumers during office hours is a waste of time, as they will be too busy to take an interest.

Think about texting them in the morning or early evening when they may be commuting to and from work. You should also consider the content of your text, and whether texting on a Saturday morning will make a difference to texting on a Monday night.

Opt-out opportunity

It is important that you always give your subscriber the opportunity to opt out of receiving texts from your company. You could face serious consequences that could be harmful to your company if you continue to send them text messages without giving them a chance to say no to receiving them.

You don’t want to be considered a nuisance, and it is likely that there might well be some people who simply don’t want to receive your texts.

Test send

Before sending out any text messages you should always send a test to your own mobile. This way, you can check whether the text comes through correctly, whether any links you have included work, and take the opportunity to check your grammar and spelling. There’s nothing worse than receiving a text message filled with mistakes, other than receiving a text with broken links…

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Ian Kirk

Founder at Opportunity Marketing

Ian is the founder of Opportunity Marketing marketing, with over 18 years of experience in successfully setting up marketing departments, creating marketing strategies and implementing these strategies across a wide number of SME companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors through a variety of channels.