Digital Marketing

Market your startup directly to your audience with marketing automation software

You’re probably toying around with different marketing tactics.

As you grow, you’re likely to hire some external professionals to manage your marketing strategy. For now, while your business is still in its infancy, it’s all on you. Because digital marketing is such a buzzword in all industries at the moment, you’re probably considering how to run a simple yet effective digital marketing strategy for your startup. And good thinking. You should look into that but also don’t forget that the “offline” community is just as important. We’ve put “offline” in quotation marks because we’re referring to all things that aren’t necessarily preceded by a “www” or a “http”. Making use of SMS as an alternative to email marketing and in conjunction with marketing automation software is the ideal setup for your small business.

The offline and online communities are waiting to be engaged.

In order to get your name out there you need to engage in some direct marketing. This may sound scary but direct marketing can be very effective. The most successful type of direct marketing in the offline world is SMS marketing which is one of the better alternatives to email marketing and integrates well with marketing automation software. 

Marketing automation software is (usually) highly customizable and, when used together with SMS you’re able to communicate very effectively with both staff and clients. Just take a look at the likes of Zapier. Zapier automates everything. Check out how to amplify your customer support with personalized SMS automation and how to easily automate SMS messaging for your e-commerce site.

Every industry from banking, insurance, healthcare and even e-commerce can benefit from making use of marketing automation software together with SMS marketing.

Via SMS you’ll be able to send vital information to staff members working offsite or alert customers to any delay or pertinent information about specific projects. You can also inform customers of special offers and remind your staff of the upcoming changes in procedure. And you can send out information regarding each of your clients’ accounts. Ultimately, it helps to lighten the manual load for your staff and SMS helps to personalize your relationships with your clients. And, you can win new clients.

Sending out automated SMS messages to your client base or database of prospective clientele can win them over.

Why? Because SMS is an intentional, deliberate, brief but personal message. The customer feels they’ve been chosen and included in the audience of people you want to message. If you use their first name in the text message, you’re going even further to show them you want to specifically connect with them. And, every single customer or client out there enjoys being valued by their service providers. What’s more, Mashable shared this infographic by Mogreet, showing that according to their research people are expected to check their phones 150 times a day at the very least. This is the reason why you can rest assured that up to 98 percent of text messages are opened.

Nowadays everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.

This year Forbes reported that Facebook are making an attempt at including an SMS service with their Messenger. There are now apps that you can download to schedule personal SMS messages to your friends and family in a similar fashion to scheduling social media posts for your business on apps like Hootsuite. In April it was announced that Adobe has created a remarketing tool that’ll generate automatic SMSes that highlight great features, discounts or special offers likely to be of interest to the user. This is based on the user’s behaviour and the tracking of websites they have visited.

So, you want to implement an SMS marketing strategy?

That’s great. It’ll help you build your business but you must ensure that your customers will consider this SMS communication to be a value-add and not a distraction. Once you’ve ascertained what your audience is after, you can implement the marketing automation software to send them what they want.

Be sure to get to know and understand the rules of SMS marketing and make sure you abide by them at all times. Start off with these 5 Insights to help you run a successful SMS marketing campaign. Our Mobile Marketing Guide is also a great place to learn more about how to smartly integrate mobile marketing into your overall communication plan.

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