Fundamentally speaking, marketing is one of the most important things that a business can focus on in today’s world. Companies that know how to make the best use of modern marketing strategies are the most likely to find success in their fields, no matter what they are.

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Where is Marketing Now?

Over the past few decades, the landscape of marketing has dramatically shifted in a variety of ways. Mobile devices and the massive effects of the internet have changed huge aspects of how companies interact with their communities and find new customers.

Marketers and marketing companies have needed to find new ways to reach out to their customers in ways that will actually make impacts on them where they already are.

As a result, text marketing has become one of the most powerful tools that companies have available to them today. Text marketing makes it possible for companies to remove the middle man of advertising and truly make personal connections and impacts on their target audiences and communities. But because of the relative newness of the medium of text marketing, it’s hard to determine exactly how to use text marketing to its full potential and effectiveness.

Text marketing can be the thing that takes your business to the next level, as long as you know how to use it. Here is how to understand text marketing fully, both in what it is and how to use it effectively.

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What Is Text Marketing?

At its most basic level, text marketing allows businesses and companies to reach their target market directly over text messages. While most companies used to rely on promotions, advertising, or guerrilla marketing as the primary methods of making impressions on buyers, text marketing creates more direct and effective interactions.

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Why Text Marketing Is Helpful

The foundation of good marketing is good communication, and the foundation of good communication is direct contact and relationship building.

When a company reaches out to its consumer base in a personal way, it makes a big impact on people’s impression of the company. In almost every case, text marketing can help to shape a person’s impression and lead to increased levels of trust and loyalty.

There are tons of advantages to this system of marketing. Text marketing reaches a massive number of people without needing them to go to different places on the internet or the physical world.

At this point, 98% of people in the United States have access to sending and receiving text messages, which means that companies can reach almost everyone from the devices that they carry with them in their pockets. This incredible reach allows them to interact with people on massive scales.

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The Potential of Text Message Marketing

Incorporating text into  marketing message strategy has also proven to be very effective. While email marketing and advertising have open rates that rarelybreak single digits, text marketing typically has open rates around 95%, or even more.

Conversion rates are also much higher than  other similar marketing strategies. Text marketing outpaces and excels at reaching customers, who more than ever  want to form an emotional connection with a brand message they believe in.

Even though text marketing is relatively new, it is quickly overtaking other strategies and making real impacts on specific audiences at large scales. If you are looking for new ways to boost your marketing strategy, a text marketing platform like Community may be the best move you can make.

What Is A Text Marketing Platform?

To make use of text marketing, you will need to use a text marketing platform. These are specially designed pieces of software that allow you to send massive amounts of text messages at once to a huge number of people.

While you technically are able to send texts using a normal phone and data plan, texting at scale is far simpler and more efficient with a platform like Community.

Using a quality text marketing platform also typically provides a lot of different tools that can enable your text marketing campaigns to be much more effective and successful. For example, Community’s Insights and Analytics help you see how much of an impact your texts have.

Community’s Filtering and Clustering features allow you to send messages and responses directly to the people who want them the most, ensuring that all of your texts are effective and personal.

All of these features are designed to ensure you can use text marketing as efficiently and effectively as possible. With Community, text marketing can be easy, powerful, and simple to use.

What Makes A Good Text Marketing Message?

While text marketing is inherently powerful, it’s still very important to know how to use it and the tools that go along with it. The whole process is designed to be very simple, but there are some good rules of thumb to follow when creating your own text marketing messages.

SMS Messaging Is Concise and Punchy

One of the most important things about text marketing is to take advantage of the fact that texts are generally incredibly short. Text marketing is at its best when the messages are as concise as possible but also contain a lot of valuable information in a small place.

One of the primary technologies that text marketing uses to send texts is known as SMS (short message service) messaging. That’s because SMS messages are very inexpensive to send and require very little data to transmit.

This means that SMS messages can be sent as cheaply as possible to as many people as possible. But one main limitation on SMS messages is that they are limited to 160 characters. While this may seem like a negative thing, it can be a great way to limit the sizes of the messages you send out.

People don’t usually want to read marketing messages that take more than a few seconds to read and comprehend. If you are able to send incredibly small messages that contain a lot of information, or at least link to a place to get more information, the odds are very good that you will be able to find a lot more success in your text marketing.

Always focus on being tight and concise in your messages, and make your messages as short as possible.

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You Can Send SMS Messages at the Perfect Time

There are actual legal implications for sending text messages outside of the specified curfew. These curfews change depending on where you send the texts, so it is critical to find out when you can and can’t send messages based on your recipients' locations.

But it is also important because people tend to be much more responsive to text messages if they are sent at the right times. Depending on the demographics that are receiving the messages, they may be more or less likely to respond and interact with messages if they are sent at certain times.

Finding out what times work best for your target audiences is absolutely critical to effective text marketing, and you can do so easily with Community.

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You Always Send Texts to the Right People

Learning about who your target audiences are is important. Generally, most target audiences for certain categories and verticals tend to be similar. Community allows you to group these people together and send messages that are even more personal and impactful on the people that receive them.

For example, using Community, you can send different messages to younger and older groups of people, people in specific locations, or even people with specific preferences to only one of your products. Narrowing the range of recipients makes your text marketing much more effective and powerful.

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Texts Are Unique and Attention Grabbing

Even in small text messages, try to make it so that all of your messages are unique and capable of actually grabbing someone’s attention. It sometimes takes a lot of effort and planning to create truly exciting text messages, but truly making something that grabs someone’s attention is very important in all forms of marketing, and especially text marketing.

You can do this with Community by sending photos, videos, and audio messages to your community. These are much more effective at grabbing people’s attention because they elevate your interactions with them above just being blocks of simple text.

A picture says a thousand words, which is a whole lot more than the 160 characters that SMS messages limit you to.

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Create An Easy Call To Action

The biggest way to create engagement is to call people to action and make them aware of an action step. This allows them to have direction based on your text message and be aware of steps that they can take with your company.

Calls to action inform your audience of ways that they can actually affect their own lives. Often, people want to engage with your company. Sending them a link to check out, a product to look into, or a way that they can engage with you on a personal level increases their engagement.

Finding real ways that people can engage with you is one of the best ways to market and create real results in your marketing results.

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What Are Good Marketing Message Examples?

The best way to learn how to make high-quality text marketing messages is to pay attention to how text marketing works today and add your company’s own spin or flavor to it.

Here are a few different text marketing examples:

• Black Friday is coming up soon, and we have you in mind! Get 25% off on these personalized products if you order in the next 48 hours!
• We promise, we know - running out of coffee at home can be absolutely devastating. Luckily, we’ve got you covered - stop by today for a free cup of joe on us!
• We’ve noticed that you’ve been looking for a new house! We’ve got a few top picks in your town - check them out!
• Winter weather got you feeling down? Because, same. A flash sale on hot chocolate will help lift your spirits! Check it out here.
• It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means… 99 cent tacos after 5 PM! Drop by your local shop this evening to bring some extra SPICE into your life tonight!

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All of these marketing messages are under 160 characters, which means that they fit perfectly in an SMS text. Prioritizing conciseness, clarity, and calls to action make your text marketing messages incredibly powerful and capable of truly reaching your audience in incredibly effective ways.

Check out Community today to find ways that our platform can help you to reach your subscribers and shoppers with an effective and modern SMS marketing campaign.

Sources:

Marketing Definition | Investopedia

What is Short Message Service (SMS)? | Search Mobile Computing

40 Call-to-Action Examples You Can't Help But Click | Hubspot

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash