Mobile marketing through text messages

There are lots of new marketing schemes that are being used by advertisers to reach their customers. One of the newest, and in my opinion the most effective, could be text message messaging. You see it all the time on TV telling you to text “a word” to “a number” and you receive some kind of information. The most recent example I can think of is during episodes of Desperate Housewives you can text “Housewives” to a number and you will get a free little video from a mini series thing that Sprint is doing.

Of course, this marketing method can easily be applied to other aspects of advertising. Websites are beginning to pop up that offer the same marketing technique. The website 84444.com offers advertisers the ability to market through a text message service. One of the sites that it has working with it is a discount glasses retailer; if you text LENS to 84444 you will be directed to the glasses website. The company also offers other text message services such as text voting and contests.

I believe with this new type of marketing plenty of businesses, including our own, could benefit. For one thing, we could send out up to date, real time information to anyone who sent a text message to us. It would also give us the ability to add the subscriber to a database and we could easily tell where our customers were and give us a bit more demographic information. Of course, demographics are extremely valuable information when it comes to marketing. This all has to be within your (or our) company’s marketing budget, but it looks as though this is all very budget friendly for the type of information you are gathering (with a service like this you aren’t going after cold leads, these are all people who are already interested in your products or services).