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Interested in SMS Marketing? Here’s What to do Before You Get Started

September 18, 2015 5:46 pm by

Your text message marketing strategy is only as strong as the foundation upon which you build it. As with any marketing campaign, careful planning and execution can help boost your chances of success. Therefore, it’s important to take some key steps before you send that first text.

Know Your Goals


Your team needs to determine the goals of your campaign before you begin.

Before you start mapping out your marketing strategy, you first need to identify the goal of your campaign. Potential goals could include increasing sales, growing your subscriber list, attracting more customers, increasing brand awareness, and more. Although you may want to achieve more than one goal, you should prioritize the most important one and build your strategy accordingly. This will provide more focus, which will help you to succeed.

Review Old Marketing Campaigns

Learning from the past will help you build a better campaign. Your previous marketing campaigns, whether digital or print, can provide you valuable insight into what resonated with your customers. For example, there may be a particular type of discount that generated high conversions or a theme that facilitated the strongest response. You should not completely reuse these successful endeavors, but you can build a new strategy based on them. You can also recognize what did not work and avoid repeating your mistakes.

Conduct Market Research to Determine Your Target Audience


Before you can write messages, you need to know who the recipients will be.

Market research is an invaluable tool for creating a strategy no matter what marketing channel you plan to use. You may already have a strong idea of the target audience for your campaign. Additional research can help you recognize their buying habits, likes, dislikes, and other important information to help you build a strong plan with more targeted messages.

Find the Most Valuable Content

Once you have identified your ideal target audience, you can start to create categories of the most valuable content. The most successful marketing campaigns provide content of value for customers. This could mean offers and discounts, tips, appointment reminders, customer service, transactional messages, and more.

Brainstorm Ways to Promote the Campaign

Before you can start sending out messages, you need to promote your mobile program. You can include a keyword and short code on printed ads so that people can opt into your program. Adding extra incentives, such as deals and discounts, provides additional encouragement for people to join. You can also actively promote your mobile program with special ads, social media posts, and email or direct mail campaigns.

Get Permission


You must first get permission before you can send messages to your customers.

By law, you can only send messages to those who have opted into your program. Even if people have signed up for another channel, such as email or social media, you cannot send them text messages. Therefore, it’s important to attract subscribers before you can start sending out messages. The easiest way to build your list is to offer a deal for opting into your texting program.

Building a strong foundation for your campaign can help you achieve text message marketing success. If you are finished planning and ready to start texting, try Group Texting for free.

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