The Power of SMS

A nice read.

This is probably the most important part of mobile advertising. There will be an art to staying in touch with a customer and not ticking him off.

With a mobile campaign being so personal, there comes great responsibility too.

From BusinessOwner.co.za SMS Marketing: Creating new relationships with customers.

IMAGINE an advertising tool that pinpoints your target market, that sends messages customers literally cannot ignore and indeed welcome and encourage.

If used wisely, SMS technology can create a new marketing relationship between you and your customer base. Used carelessly however, SMS marketing will do more harm than good.

From the client's perspective, SMS is far more intrusive than email. Cell phones have no spam filters and it is almost impossible for a user to stop receiving messages. Even if they want to delete the message they have to engage with it. The deletion process also takes longer than with email.

He says people can become very aggressive when they feel they are being harassed.

"The only way to use SMS successfully therefore, is to send people messages that they want to receive.”

Du Toit adds that e-mail is used to send spam because it is free, with SMS you pay for every message sent.

You therefore have to choose your recipients carefully. SMS is not really for recruiting new customers. Rather, it should be targeted to existing customers, as a way of retaining them.”

A key thing to consider. When, not if, advertisers realize they have a one-on-one interaction with their consumer through the mobile phone, will more of their advertising dollars shift from the Internet to mobile?

Here's what I see happening. There will be a very creative mobile marketing campaign in the US. It will probably involve a major brand (McDonald's,Apple, Starbucks etc). The campaign will be so unique and so buzzworthy that brands will be lining up to create their own mobile marketing campaign.

It won't cost a lot of money, and the exposure it gets will make companies question the ratio of dollars spent on keywords versus a good creative mobile campaign. This "tipping point" will be the catalyst that changes the valuations of search engines. Just my opinion.

Comments, suggestions?