Budding with prosperous possibility, the world of social media is the perfect place to announce your brand in all its glory!
In fact, influencer marketing is so valuable, it would be rather strange to ignore it when the time comes to develop your next marketing campaign.
For your efforts on social media to truly shine and be effective, paying a little extra attention to what makes your brand unique is a must in today’s bustling online landscape, and SMS marketing might be what gives you the edge.
To push your brand into the limelight and hopefully tap into a portion of the 4.48 billion social media users around the globe today, here are some top SMS marketing tips you might want to consider taking a look at.
A Multichannel Approach
Social media marketing is essentially the act of telling a story to strangers everywhere in the hope that they will engage with your narrative and, of course, buy your products.
Taking a multichannel approach to your campaign is a great way to add an extra layer or two of substance to your story, to flesh it out and make it as accessible as possible to as many people as you can.
Say you decided to launch your carefully planned, beautifully designed social media campaign across Instagram, making it discoverable means directing your audience to your chosen platform in the first place.
SMS marketing can be ideal for this, as it can help you boost your visibility while giving your target audience the option to directly engage with your campaign via a separate channel.
For example, you might want to consider setting up a hyperlink in text message for your audience to interact with, as this can direct them to your brand with very little effort on their behalf, no more than a tap of the thumb.
The easier you can make it for your customers to access your brand, the better, particularly if they are having to contend with a host of other companies vying for their attention.
Better Metrics
In social media marketing, metrics can be both your best friend and your worst enemy, depending on how you decide to qualify your data. This is partly down to the wealth of information you have access to throughout your marketing campaign. One of the issues with this is finding which statistics relate to measurable progress and profit.
SMS marketing might be able to help you with this, particularly when trying to figure out which of your customers are still, in fact, paying customers.
It can be easy to look at likes and subscriber counts on your social media channels and conflate these figures with active customers or followers, but this is not always an accurate measure of your audience.
By utilizing SMS messages, especially ones that give the customer a link to interact with, a button to press, or a link to a discount code, you can reach out directly to your subscribers, customers, and fans with a simple question to ask if they are still interested.
The direct and personal nature of the SMS message may be able to ensure a greater level of feedback than an Instagram poll or a Facebook status on its own while offering a more accurate response.
Defining Your Audience
Defining the customer is the age-old dilemma of marketing teams everywhere, as doing so provides the framework on which entire campaigns are built!
SMS marketing is superb in this regard, as you can ask the individual customer exactly what they think of your brand, perhaps revealing themselves as an ambassador in the process.
Target audiences like to feel special, and unfortunately, social media can have a nasty habit of coming across as impersonal, particularly if you fail to engage with your followers or you only post to promote new products.
Thankfully, making your customer feel special and recognized as an individual can be done with the help of SMS marketing.
Encouraging a conversation over text can be a good way to build stronger bonds between you and your audience, provided you stick to your brand’s tone of voice and keep it professional, of course.
The Power of the Phone
According to Statista, there are 4.15 billion mobile social media users in the world. This is perhaps great news for anyone wishing to utilize SMS marketing to grow their presence; as simply put, your audience is likely on their phone in the first place!
This might make it the perfect tool for those wishing to increase their brand’s visibility across social media platforms, as utilizing a new channel to access your audience on their preferred devices can help a company to stand out without requiring too much additional effort from the audience.
If you include a link to your website and/or social media pages in your message, you may be able to rest easy in the knowledge that the open rate of texts is extremely high, so even if you do not hear back immediately, the likelihood is that you have still raised awareness in some capacity.
The Human Element
A missing human element is often fairly obvious for larger brands with several hundred thousand followers, which might spell disaster for customer relations.
To avoid losing the meaning, value, and point of your company’s core message among an ocean of competitors striving to stand out on social media, daring to be a little bit different can pay off.
When done right, SMS marketing can be a good way to set your brand apart, so choosing the right words is crucial. The character limit for an SMS message is 160 characters, but this should not be a problem for you if you mastered twitter in the early days. By making sure to include relatable points or straightforward messages that do not come across like jargon, you can start to build a relationship between you and the customer and not be just a faceless brand connecting with a follower out of duty.
The Effectiveness is in the Timing
While social media remains one of the best ways to reach out to a large audience at the click of a button, its immense popularity in the marketing world means that everyone strives to utilize it to the best of their ability.
In some ways, the effectiveness of your posts relies on your ability to time them correctly. It will be difficult for your audience to interact with your posts if they never get a chance to see them before they are obscured on their newsfeed.
By integrating SMS marketing with your current social media endeavors, you might be able to reduce the chance that your latest posts go unnoticed.
Say you were putting on a sale for a limited time only, even for just one day. Posting your sale to your social media accounts may inadvertently bypass much of the audience that would benefit from the sale, depending on their time zone, whether or not they happen to be at work, or if they simply have notifications turned off.
So that they do not miss out, sending an SMS message can make your audience aware of your sale, perhaps, in turn, increasing your brand’s visibility while supporting your social media efforts.
Creating a Recognizable Voice for Your Brand
If all your audience has to go on is your Instagram account, you may not be optimizing your marketing processes.
Instagram can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but perhaps the key to unlocking its true potential is by introducing other elements that synergize with it in perfect harmony.
Creating a recognizable and cohesive voice for your brand often requires you to be active on many different channels at once while making sure that you stick to your chosen register. This consistency can help your brand to fully utilize the benefits of being visible across multiple platforms.
For example, sending an SMS message with your trademark voice should reflect the style used on your social media pages, as this can help familiarize your brand in the minds of your audience. The more platforms you can do this on, the greater your brand’s likelihood will feel authentic, approachable, and recognizable.
Building a great brand voice somewhat depends on the field of work you happen to be in, so taking some time to figure out which angle you want to approach your tone from is essential in presenting your brand as professional and sincere, no matter which platform you decide to operate on.
Offering Incentives
Unfortunately, asking your audience for likes and subscriptions can come across as desperate as many YouTubers will know.
This can be a major problem, as it can damage your brand’s reputation when people perceive you to be struggling or think you have no idea what you are doing.
Likes to follow, and subscriptions can be immensely important, especially in the early days of your brand’s existence.
Offering people an incentive to interact with your content via SMS marketing can be a good workaround to this issue, so it may be worth checking out next time you feel like growing your audience without annoying your existing fanbase.
