Combining SMS and Social Media to Elevate Your Small Business Advertising
4 ways that SMS and social media can be integrated for your latest campaign
Hot cocoa and marshmallows. Summer days and strolls on the beach. Early mornings and a quiet office. Yes, some things just work better together, and where your small business advertising plan is concerned, you can add SMS and social media to that list.
While SMS was born in another era, it endures to this day as a cost-effective means of connecting businesses to their customers. Social media marketing is a lot newer, but it delivers unparalleled brand awareness and is a popular way to humanize your brand. Together, bulk SMS messaging and social media can be used to increase customer engagement, build brand loyalty, and ultimately improve sales. Let’s take a look at 4 simple ways you can do this.
Use SMS to link to new product announcements on social
Think of SMS as the headline or preview text and social media as the full article. A single SMS message is of course limited to 160 characters, but this is the perfect amount of space to pique the interest of recipients — you can simply send them a message about a new product and include a link to the full announcement on social media.
By encouraging interaction with your business across two channels, customers will also be communicating with your small business for a longer amount of time, which can help to increase brand loyalty.
Did you know? 82% of text messages are read within 5 minutes.
Use text messaging as a call-to-entry on social media
While social media competitions are a great way to boost your small business advertising and promote brand awareness, it can be tricky deciding how people will enter. What if your page’s inbox gets flooded with entries? Will these entries congest your company’s email and risk you missing other important mails? Or, maybe you don’t have the resources to build a special competition landing page.
By using SMS, you can simply include a short code on social media where people can send a specified keyword to — that’s all it takes for them to enter. If you’re undecided about running contests, consider that according to this survey, 75 percent of participants said that social media competitions had an influence over their purchasing decisions.
Ask for feedback… and offer choice
Sometimes, it’s easy to overthink the ways in which we can gain insights from our customers, when the best option is simply to ask. So, if someone recently purchased a product from you or used your service, you can utilize two-way SMS messaging to ask them about their experience.
Even better, customers love options in how they can interact with your business. So, in the same SMS message, you can offer the alternative option for the customer to begin a chat session with your business on Facebook — of course, if you do this, ensure that you have either an online customer service agent or an engaging chatbot or live chat tool ready on the other side to continue the conversation.
“When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.”
Kristin Smaby, “Being Human is Good Business”
Event invitation reminders to enhance your small business advertising
Are you hosting a big company event? Or, perhaps you’re running an online seminar that anyone can sign up to — wherever they are. While social media is an ideal space to promote these events, algorithms that prioritize the content of friends and family over businesses mean that your post could easily get lost in the maze. Using SMS, you can ensure your invitation gets seen by your customers, such as this example for a small web design agency:
Rather than a siloed approach to your small business advertising, text messaging and social media prove that different channels can work together to deliver even better results. And after all, this is what a customer expects when interacting with your business — an integrated, similar experience regardless of the channel they’re using.
To find out how SMS and social media can be used to reach niche markets, take a look at this article. It expands on the benefits of both channels and can help you to deliver messaging that your specific audience will love.
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