Every business owner hears the refrain that you must invest in marketing. It’s a constant refrain because, yes, businesses that don’t market themselves generally fail. Yet, business owners also face the problem of people simply ignoring ads. There’s even a catchy little phrase for it: banner blindness. In the face of those problems, business owners need other options. One such option is broadcast text messages. Of course, that brings up a new problem. Just how do you craft an effective text broadcast message? Keep reading for some key tips to craft messages that people won’t just ignore.
Hone Your Message
A lot of businesses make the mistake of trying to get their marketing to do too many things at the same time. They want one ad or one piece of marketing collateral to build their brand, discuss their product, promote a sale, and a hundred other things. This is a sure recipe for failure on all fronts. You need your marketing messages honed to a fine point.
That means you must pick one thing, and only thing, that you want each text message to do. If you’re in the brand-building mode, you need a brand message. If you’re promoting a product, the message should focus entirely on that product. The most effective marketing sticks to doing one thing as well as it possibly can.
Keep It Short
With very few exceptions, such as long-form sales letters, marketing and advertising work best when they’re to the point. Text messages are not the time to wax rhapsodic about your business, service, or products. The reality is that most people won’t slog through a long text message unless it comes from someone they are very close to, such as a family member or long-time romantic partner.
Instead, spend your time boiling down the message to as few lines as possible. That’s a roundabout way of saying that the first draft of your broadcast SMS message should not be your last draft. In most cases, you need several rounds of revision to cut away the unnecessary words and hone your message.
Leverage Links
While texting on modern smartphones theoretically gives you more room to work with than say, a message over on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that you can get the message to do everything you need it to do. For example, let’s say that you’re launching a new product or service. Saying everything you need to say about it in one text message is a losing battle. What you can do, courtesy of smartphone technology is embed a link into the message.
That link can lead your customers or leads to a page that does discuss the product or service in more depth. Rather than trying to entice or convince the recipients to get the new thing in the text message, you only need to entice them to click on the link. Once they do that, you can use the space on the product page or landing page to talk about the features and benefits of your new product or service. You can even link out to a video you post on a service like YouTube that shows the product or service rather than telling people about it. Those kinds of videos often prove more effective at converting would-be customers because they see the product or service in action.
Don’t Overdo It
Text message marketing can prove powerful, but it works best in small doses. Don’t overwhelm the people on your list, or they’ll learn to ignore your texts the same way people learned to ignore banner ads. Even worse, they might simply opt out of the messages altogether. At that point, you’ve truly lost them.
Text Message Marketing and You
Text message marketing offers you an alternative to marketing methods that many consumers have become all but immune to, such as banner ads. Text messages come right to the person’s phone, usually with an alert noise. They’re much more likely to look at that than pay attention to ads on a website. Do make sure that you employ some best practices in crafting the messages. Hone your message so it’s only doing one thing. Keep it short. Leverage links if you need more room. Most importantly, don’t overdo it. Sending too many marketing texts is a great way to alienate your customers and leads.