Short Is The New Smart: SMS Marketing Is The New Normal

SMS Marketing will be the number one way businesses will reach out to customers.

How many times did you want to disconnect from technology and wish things are how they were some decades back—work is confined in the office, the home is where family and friends share some good talk, and there’s much time alone to enjoy some good read in your favorite bookstore, without work emails competing for your attention?

Let’s face it. With today’s content marketing boom, where more and more businesses create and send us free content assets of all types via email, we reach a point when we feel we’re already having more than what we can consume. To make it worse, these pushed information now hound us through our mobile phones, wherever we are—at home, the coffee shop, even at bedside where our phones stay for the night.

Content is fine. It’s a huge help and makes work much easier. Ask Google anything and chances are good, you’ll find an answer. That’s because the world wide web has become a universe of free content available to anyone plugged in on the internet. However, with the current mobile shift, when people are slowly migrating from desktop computers to their smartphones, things will be different.

I’m afraid the desktop computer will be limited to the workplace and with the number of mobile users estimated at 2.75 billion by the end of 2018, the number one way people will access the internet will be through their mobile phones.

What does this tell us?

SMS will be the new email. Messaging will be real short and limited to the most essential. We will no longer allow lengthy marketing messages. Email newsletters will be relegated to the “reading list” and read on laptops and desktops. And for one’s message to grab us, calls-to-action should reflect real value.

Mobile-first marketing will be the new normal. Marketers will need to apply the ‘mobile-first’ strategy and optimize their online presence for the mobile web. SMS marketing will drive traffic to mobile sites and squeeze pages—and will use a variety of formats, including digital flyers, voice SMS, even an SMS video message to engage mobile users.

The ‘third-screen’ will be the ultimate communication channel. For marketers, traditional, digital and mobile marketing will be the ultimate mix. Where traditional media is proven effective for branding, digital is king in terms of engagement, and mobile will be the deal-clincher.

Let me explain. Your IMC campaign may prescribe TV for introducing a new product or service, come up with interstitials to give it some boost and an initial shot at engagement. For a seamless follow-through, you introduce a microsite and cover social media to foster a broader social conversation and get a better feel of the market. As awareness spikes and the audience becomes ready to bite into it, then mobile will be an ideal channel to reach informed buyers through value-based SMS marketing.

Nexus SMS is a web-based platform for sending bulk SMS, voice and SMS video messages anywhere in the world. We help marketers and business owners communicate in real time to target audiences, especially those in financial services, schools, government, retail, e-commerce and related verticals.