Setting goals is a fundamental part of marketing. A helpful guide set up these targets are the 5 S’s of digital marketing. This guideline was created by PR Smith and outlines a basic but effective starting point for your marketing plan.
The guideline has been applied to SMS in this article, as opposed to digital marketing as a whole.
E.g. Your goal could be, a 30% click-through-rate, 10 lead conversions, or a 2x return on investment. Set a realistic and achievable goal to give you a starting point on what type of content or call-to-action your campaign should include.
The benefit of using the 5 S’s framework with targets, is that it has five clear sections that can help structure your next SMS campaign;
- Sell
Most companies will be using SMS marketing to increase sales. A message of this nature usually entails an incentive or some content that is worth the time of your customers. This message should offer value to your customers. Your text campaigns could include a discount (buy one get one free, limited time deal etc.) or exclusive offers on new products to push clients towards opting in.
2 – Speak
Your SMS messages don’t always need to sell something, they can be used to communicate or speak to your customers. As mentioned above, relevant content is key and your customers will be happy to listen or in this case, read. Speaking to your customers can pay off in the long run. How? By increasing brand reputation and loyalty. Here are some reasons to speak to your customers:
- Collecting feedback,
- Confirming work hours,
- Sending out system updates or degradation messages
- Sending personal messages such as “Happy Birthday”.
- Serve
This part is all about serving your customers and adding value with regard to SMS marketing. this can be broken down into two different segments.
Firstly, your text campaign should invite customers either interested in purchasing or offer some emotional appeal (such as happiness after a happy birthday text).
Secondly, be prepared to deal with customer responses as they can have a direct impact on company reputation and brand loyalty. It is important to ensure that you dedicate resources to check for responses and engage with the customers that reply in relation to your campaigns.
- Save
One of the most important factors to consider with any marketing campaign is your return on investment. The benefit of SMS marketing is that it is a very cost-effective platform, with high a return on investment. Gikko’s SMS system also allows you to target various groups of customers based on how your database is set up ie, platinum members or customers in a certain location. This will significantly reduce your cost per conversion whilst also meaning that you do not need to send a campaign to the whole of your database.
- Sizzle
The final part S in digital marketing is sizzling. Chaffey states that this part is all about building your brand but more importantly, customer experience. Be creative, think of your brand image and be sure that your tone of voice matches how you want your company to be perceived.
