How Texting Can Boost Online Marketing and Social Outreach

Trying to reach potential and existing customers through effective marketing methods can sometimes feel like a shot in the dark. With so many options available, it’s hard to know what’s effective in a way that makes the most of your marketing budget. Texts, the ubiquitous messages that are sent by the billions every day, are, surprisingly, one of the most effective marketing methods. To prove this point, here are a few ways that texting can boost online marketing and social media outreach.

Real-Time Results

Unlike other marketing platforms, texting provides real-time results as people respond to texts they receive on their phones. While emails might sit unread for days or weeks on end, most people view and respond to text messages as soon as they receive them. This allows you to quickly see the effectiveness of a particular marketing campaign so that you can make adjustments to increase success.

Ongoing Conversations

Marketing shouldn’t feel one-sided. To engage your customer base, it’s important to build a relationship with each individual through ongoing conversations. Texting is a great platform to host these conversations. With peer to peer text messaging, you can eliminate the appearance of corporate marketing altogether and instead allow individual agents to connect with your customers at their leisure.

Lots of Data

Once you engage people with a text, they tend to let their guard down. This means that any questions that you ask them in the context of that original text are far more likely to be answered. If you have the right software to be able to track these answers, you can collect quite a bit of data that you can use to personalize your marketing efforts even further. This ensures that you make the most of your advertising dollars and reduce the risk of alienating customers with corporate marketing.

Easy to Forward

A text messaging campaign is far more likely to catch fire among a group of people than most other types of campaigns. This is because text messages are easy for individuals to forward to their friends without any intimidation factor. If a marketing message is being sent from one individual to another, you get free marketing and a much higher chance of a positive response. Of course, this ease of spread also means that you need to ensure that any texts you send are engaging and appropriate so that they’re forwarded for the right reasons.

Always Stay Compliant

The main advantage of texting is that it reaches customers quickly on their personal devices. However, if you aren’t careful to stay in compliance with your text marketing, this can also be texting’s greatest risk. Therefore, it’s crucial that you have the proper opt-in and opt-out messages to accompany your campaign so that you don’t run into problems with the Federal Communications Commission.