Mobile marketing

With well in excess of 20 million active SIM cards now in Australia alone, it’s difficult to ignore the power of this technology. But how can you maximise its use and create connections with your clients anywhere, anytime?

Now many of my fellow team members will probably first jump on me regarding my title, its use of ‘sms acronyms’ and my contribution to the demise and destruction of the English language and all its beauty…but that’s a blog for another day.

Mobile marketing comes down to the same key areas that all new technology marketing focuses on:

A Quality Database

Without a decent database, you’ll never succeed in marketing in any modern technology. Collecting email addresses and mobile numbers is now not a fad…it’s an integral aspect of marketing your business.

Relevance

Relevance is key to all marketing, you need to be relevant. Marketing the wrong message to the wrong audience will only create angst and thus leads to your brand being impacted in the mind of potential consumers.

Distribution

SMS marketing hasn’t been targeted yet…but it will. Just as we have seen SPAM become a part of our everyday life in terms of email, so we will see the same thing happen in the years ahead on our phones. Having a safe and credible distribution channel will become more and more important. This was the main reason behind our Mailbox product and will at some stage become an integrated aspect of our msgbox eMinder system.

In the future we’ll see all of this extended with tests already happening in Japan and the UK on mobile based vending machines. As you approach the machine, you receive an SMS asking you if you’d like a Coke. Accept the message, the Coke drops out of the machine and the charge appears on your mobile bill!

On this basis, don’t be surprised to see companies such as Virgin integrate credit cards into their phone accounts so that you can pay for more than just a can of cool drink with your phone. It may well become your mobile wallet.

In the meantime, we can use sms campaigns to successfully communicate with clients. For example, imagine you owned a spray tan salon and you had a cancellation for tomorrow. You could have clients register for a late notification service and sms that database to alert them to the cancellation. You could even offer them a discount to ‘book now’. This then fills a void in your appointment book that you may not have been able to fill from ‘off the street’ enquiry.

There are many applications for sms technology, from reminder services, completion notifications and special offers. It’s about being innovative; your database; the relevance of your message; and your distribution system.

Want to find our more about sms systems? Click here