Busi­ness SMS Text Mes­sage Marketing

Our mobile phones have become the most widely used medium for day to day com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Mobile devel­op­ments con­tinue to improve with more fea­tures and func­tions. In fact, some smart phones are bet­ter equipped than our desk­top com­put­ers! Because of this, busi­nesses must start “mobi­liz­ing” if they don’t want to get left behind by their competition.

One of the best ways to stay on your customer’s minds is by using SMS Text Mes­sage Mar­ket­ing. SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing allows you to com­mu­ni­cate directly to your clients and cus­tomers by send­ing a quick, sim­ple text mes­sage. This is really effec­tive because it is a permission-based pro­gram where your recip­i­ents have opted-in to receive your updates and promotions.

Although email mar­ket­ing should def­i­nitely still be a part of your mar­ket­ing strat­egy, it is a com­monly known fact that the major­ity of your sub­scribers will never see your mes­sage. Emails can get lost in the shuf­fle, skipped over, end up in the spam folder or are imme­di­ately deleted. On the flip side, one of the great things about SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing is its’ deliver-ability and open rates. Recent stud­ies show that 98% of text mes­sages are read within min­utes of receiv­ing them. This makes this the per­fect way to deliver your mes­sage and get your pro­mo­tions across to your tar­get audience.

SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing is also more time-efficient com­pared to tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing meth­ods since there are lim­i­ta­tions on the amount of char­ac­ters that are allowed to be sent in a sin­gle text mes­sage. Putting together text mes­sages for your list can take just a few min­utes instead of days and weeks to prepare.

In addi­tion, SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing is very easy to track. You have the advan­tage of mon­i­tor­ing your text mes­sag­ing cam­paigns and find­ing out what hap­pens each time your mes­sage is sent. It’s much more chal­leng­ing, and costly, to do that with any news­pa­per, TV or radio adver­tis­ing, unless you’re adver­tis­ing your text mar­ket­ing cam­paigns through those channels.

SMS Text Mes­sage Marketing

SMS mar­ket­ing is also a great way to retain your cus­tomers at a very low cost and remind them to spend more money with you. Most busi­ness own­ers under­stand that it costs 6–7 times more money to acquire a new cus­tomer than it does to keep an exist­ing one. Uti­liz­ing text mes­sage mar­ket­ing is a per­fect way to keep your exist­ing cus­tomers who have already spent money with you.

Busi­ness own­ers have many dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strate­gies avail­able to them today; how­ever, not all of them are as sim­ple, effec­tive and prof­itable as an SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing cam­paign. The impor­tant thing to remem­ber is to make sure that you take care of your list.

While the money is still in “the list, the list the list”, it is mov­ing away from the email list and into your text mar­ket­ing list. Take good care of your list and your busi­ness is likely to make more money with the use of this amaz­ingly effec­tive technology.

Are you look­ing for an easy, afford­able way to start using text mes­sage mar­ket­ing for your business?

BizBuzzText.com offers an afford­able SMS text mes­sage mar­ket­ing plat­form with many robust fea­tures includ­ing: text coupons, sur­veys, polling, appoint­ment reminders, a mobile web­site builder, lead noti­fi­ca­tions and a web wid­get to col­lect leads from your web­site or your Face­book Page. Set up your cam­paigns, cre­ate groups and track your pro­mo­tions in your back office. Take a free 14-day trial on all do-it-yourself pack­ages start­ing at just $17 per month. Learn more here.

Down­load Your Free Report Here

Make the Ulti­mate Direct Mar­ket­ing Tool by adding a sim­ple line of text to your exist­ing adver­tis­ing that you’re already pay­ing for. Whether it’s print ads, fly­ers or leaflets, poten­tial buy­ers can sim­ply text the MLS# of any prop­erty to our short code (short­ened phone num­ber) for your text mar­ket­ing campaigns.

After the poten­tial buyer texts the MLS num­ber, they’ll receive a link to a video vir­tual tour on your cus­tomized YouTube chan­nel which they can watch right there on their phone.

While they’re tak­ing their vir­tual tour our sys­tem adds their phone num­ber to a text mar­ket­ing list. At the same time, you get a noti­fi­ca­tion that they’re inter­ested in that par­tic­u­lar prop­erty along with their phone num­ber and the prop­erty iden­ti­fier. This noti­fi­ca­tion is sent in the form of a text mes­sage right to a mobile phone, and an email noti­fi­ca­tion is sent to your inbox.

This all hap­pens in less that 30 sec­onds from when the poten­tial buyer sent the text, so the leads are super fresh, deliv­ered in real time, and you can call them back to fol­low up once they’ve had a chance to watch the tour.

Imag­ine how many more prop­erty list­ings you will get when you can demon­strate this hot lead gen­er­a­tion sys­tem to peo­ple want­ing to sell their prop­erty, giv­ing you a major advan­tage over other realtors.

Of course you can also text the mobile sub­scribers list with spe­cial announce­ments, open houses, and new list­ings, etc. With just one text the whole list gets notified.

This is quite lit­er­ally the most effec­tive lead gen­er­a­tion and cus­tomer acqui­si­tion sys­tem you can use.

Call us now at 407–433-8609 to find out how afford­able this hot lead gen­er­a­tion sms mar­ket­ing sys­tem is. Learn more here.

Con­tact me to arrange a Free Demo of the sys­tem.

No mat­ter what busi­ness niche you are in, times are tough these days when it comes to get­ting more sales and increas­ing prof­its. Busi­nesses are forced to uti­lize strate­gies that can reach their poten­tial and exist­ing cus­tomers both eas­ily and affordably.

With the amaz­ing pop­u­lar­ity of mobile phones and mobile devices, busi­ness can­not afford to over­look mobile mar­ket­ing tech­niques and strate­gies. For instance, most mobile phone users now use their phones to surf the web. How­ever, most busi­nesses still do not have a “mobile-friendly” website.

Tra­di­tional web­sites are built to be viewed on a com­puter screen instead of a small mobile phone screen. So view­ing a tra­di­tional web­site on a mobile phone is almost impos­si­ble. You have to scroll all over the place just to find the infor­ma­tion you’re look­ing for due to the lim­ited space.

In fact, most web­sites don’t even load on mobile devices. Most peo­ple use their smart phones to search for local busi­nesses while out on the go. As soon as they hit a web­site that they can’t nav­i­gate or view eas­ily on their phone, they quickly exit the site and move on.

Can you start to see how com­pa­nies are miss­ing out on some SERIOUS busi­ness by not hav­ing mobile-friendly websites?

Here are a few other rea­sons your busi­ness MUST have a mobile website:

Porta­bil­ity and Acces­si­bil­ity

Com­pared to a desk­top or a lap­top, mobile phones can be taken any­where peo­ple go at any time of the day or night. In fact, most peo­ple keep their cell phones within reach at all times.

Not only that, but peo­ple are using them more than ever to surf the web. If you want to get noticed eas­ily and main­tain the proper mobile pres­ence, a mobile web­site is the per­fect place to start.

Mobile Search

Most smart phones today are equipped with appli­ca­tions that assist in con­ve­nient online search resources such as Google and Yahoo! Your busi­ness can eas­ily be found when peo­ple search for prod­ucts or ser­vices such as yours from their mobile devices. How­ever, that vis­i­bil­ity is use­less if they click to get to your web­site and can’t find the infor­ma­tion they need because your web­site won’t dis­play prop­erly on their phone.

Local­iza­tion

Cre­at­ing a mobile ver­sion of your web­site is the per­fect way to help your local cus­tomers find you. Mobile web­sites have to be smaller than tra­di­tional web­sites, which means you have to limit the amount of con­tent you put on them. So it’s impor­tant to only put the infor­ma­tion your vis­i­tors need while vis­it­ing your web­site from their mobile devices. Most peo­ple on the go are look­ing for your phone num­ber, direc­tions to your estab­lish­ment, or your ser­vices list. So make sure these things are read­ily avail­able and eas­ily acces­si­ble on your mobile website.

Mobile web­sites can dras­ti­cally increase the num­ber of poten­tial cus­tomers who are exposed to your busi­ness with­out spend­ing a lot of extra money on advertising.

While on the go, peo­ple look for local busi­ness infor­ma­tion right from their mobile devices. This means they are look­ing at mobile web­sites. Unfor­tu­nately, most busi­nesses do not have a mobile-friendly web­site yet. In fact, many of them are not even aware that their web­sites are almost impos­si­ble to view on most mobile devices.

Here are a few tips to help you think about how to start mobi­liz­ing your web presence:

1. Check for Mobile Plug-ins

If you use like Word­Press, check out some of the mobile plug-ins avail­able to make your web­site mobile friendly.

2. Cre­ate a Sep­a­rate Mobile Ver­sion of Your Website

If you have an HTML web­site, it’s best to have a mobile ver­sion of your web­site built. This way, when­ever some­one tries to go to your web­site from a mobile device they will be directed to the mobile ver­sion of your main web­site. This will allow them to view your web­site eas­ily on their mobile phone.

3. Avoid Using Flash on Your Mobile Website

Avoid using flash appli­ca­tions on your mobile web­site as it isn’t sup­ported by most mobile set­tings. In addi­tion, flash makes your web­site take for­ever to load, which makes the viewer leave the site out of frus­tra­tion. So if you want to keep vis­i­tors on your web­site, I rec­om­mend stay­ing away from using flash.

4. Only Include Impor­tant infor­ma­tion on Your Mobile Website

Since mobile phone screens are rel­a­tively small in com­par­i­son to a com­puter mon­i­tor, you can only put so much infor­ma­tion on a mobile web­site. There­fore, think about what your poten­tial cus­tomers would be look­ing for when they visit your web­site on their mobile devices. Most peo­ple who are search­ing the mobile web are usu­ally look­ing for a phone num­ber, hours of oper­a­tion, or direc­tions to your estab­lish­ment. So make sure infor­ma­tion such as this is read­ily avail­able on your mobile website.

A mobile web­site is becom­ing a must have for busi­nesses that want to reach mobile consumers.

I spe­cial­ize in help­ing local busi­nesses gen­er­ate more cus­tomers and rev­enue through mobile and social media, mobile web­sites, SMS text mes­sag­ing and QR code mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Give me a call to dis­cuss how I can help you gen­er­ate more cus­tomers and rev­enue through mobile media marketing: (407) 433‑8609.

New QR Code real estate mobile mar­ket­ing sys­tem works around the clock cap­tur­ing prospec­tive home buyer leads that would oth­er­wise be lost.

Every­day prospec­tive buy­ers are dri­ving by prop­er­ties they are inter­ested in only to find the take-one flyer box empty. So what do they do? Do they call the num­ber on the sign or rider? Most of the time they will sim­ply drive away. They are not ready to speak with an agent. They want to find out more about the prop­erty before speak­ing with anyone.

Most of these prospec­tive home­buy­ers have mobile phones with them, but they may not have a pen and paper to write down your web­site address or con­tact infor­ma­tion on, so they drive away. Just think about the num­ber of times this hap­pens everyday.

Let’s face it, with more and more homes for sale, Real Estate Agents have their hands full. Many of these prop­er­ties stay on the mar­ket longer because prospec­tive home buy­ers can­not get the infor­ma­tion they want while they are in front of the home for sale.

This new Mobile List­ing, QR Code and SMS text mes­sage fol­low up sys­tem could be your answer.

Give prospec­tive real estate buy­ers an easy method to find out more about your list­ing. Add a QR code to your For Sale signs and prop­erty list­ings to increase buyer leads. A mobile list­ing site can be cre­ated with price, home descrip­tion, vir­tual tour, images and agent con­tact info. Your mobile opti­mized list­ing site will be hosted on our servers to save you money. The QR Code will be encoded to deliver your list­ing details to a prospec­tive buyer’s mobile phone. The QR Code image can also be added to the front of your take-one flyer box.

Learn more here…

This arti­cle will high­light four ben­e­fits of adding Quick Response codes (QR codes) to your busi­ness mar­ket­ing strat­egy. How­ever; before I out­line the ben­e­fits, I’d like to intro­duce a lit­tle his­tory along with how these two-dimensional bar codes are being used in busi­ness mar­ket­ing today.

His­tory:

QR codes were first used in Japan to track down auto­mo­bile parts needed for the man­u­fac­ture of vehi­cles. These two-dimensional bar­codes were orig­i­nally cre­ated by Toy­ota sub­sidiary Denso Wave in 1994. They were designed to have the encoded con­tent read at high speed uti­liz­ing smartphones.

The tech­nol­ogy has seen fre­quent use in Japan and South Korea, with the United King­dom being the seventh-largest national con­sumer of these two-dimensional barcodes.

Today quick response codes are gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity all over the world.

QR codes are embed­ded with infor­ma­tion that can be imme­di­ately accessed by scan­ning the code with smart­phone soft­ware and the phone’s built in cam­era. These codes can be gen­er­ated using free and pre­mium soft­ware found online or by hir­ing some­one to encode them for you.

Busi­nesses can use these codes to pro­mote coupons, spe­cial offers and discounts. They are used to build mobile sub­scriber lists, send peo­ple to a web­site, a video and a Face­book fan­page, or to deliver your con­tact infor­ma­tion instantly.

These two-dimensional bar­codes are show­ing up on store prod­ucts, mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, busi­ness cards, real estate signs, menus, car deal­er­ships and store win­dows every­where. How­ever, even with the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of quick response codes, there are still many busi­nesses that are unaware of the ben­e­fits of using them. As a result, these busi­nesses are miss­ing out on the increased busi­ness this cutting-edge tech­nol­ogy can deliver.

Fol­low­ing are four ben­e­fits QR codes can deliver to your business:

1. Reduce Print­ing Costs

Using QR codes can reduce your print­ing costs. When used on real estate signs for exam­ple, you won’t need to replace the take-one fly­ers since the prop­erty infor­ma­tion­can be sent  instantly to a mobile phone after the prospec­tive buyer scans the code.

2. Build Cus­tomer Excitement

QR codes project mys­tery and increase excite­ment because peo­ple are curi­ous about the infor­ma­tion hid­ing behind the code. All they have to do is scan the code to receive instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, which is a great ben­e­fit for business.

3. No Wait­ing

QR stands for “quick response”. This means your prospec­tive cus­tomers and clients won’t have to wait to receive addi­tional infor­ma­tion about your prod­uct, ser­vice or spe­cial offer.

4. QR Codes are Inexpensive

Use free online soft­ware to cre­ate QR codes on the fly or if you’re not the techie type, hire some­one to cre­ate one for you.

QR codes can also be used to con­duct sur­veys and gather feed­back about your prod­uct or ser­vice.  Although they are still con­sid­ered new tech­nol­ogy, QR codes are quickly gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity around the world. Are you using them to pro­mote, brand and mar­ket your business?

I spe­cial­ize in help­ing local busi­nesses gen­er­ate more cus­tomers and rev­enue through mobile and social media, mobile web­sites, SMS text mes­sag­ing and QR code mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Give me a call to dis­cuss how I can help you gen­er­ate more cus­tomers and rev­enue through mobile media mar­ket­ing: (407) 433‑8609.

Cus­tom Designed Face­book Fan­page Mini-Sites

for Your Business

Get your busi­ness in front of over 500-million Face­book users!

A Face­book Fan­page is the per­fect solu­tion for a brick and mor­tar busi­ness with or with­out an exist­ing website.

Your Face­book fan­page or mini-site can serve as a web­site for your business.

Your fan page mini-site will act just like your busi­ness web­site inside of Facebook.

You get a cus­tom designed mini-site for your busi­ness with cus­tom menu just like this.

Client Fan­page — Click image below to visit.

“The page, looks fan­tas­tic! Feed­back has been great on the page!” -
Drew Cohen, BuzzOnBroad

See more sam­ples below:

Our Fan­page:

(Click the image above to Visit our fan­page — link opens in a new
window)

This pack­age includes cre­at­ing an SEO opti­mized 5-tab fan­page mini-site using your graph­ics, text, video and col­ors of your choice.

It includes a Free QR Code for your fan­page, and Free Host­ing of your fan­page on my domain!

Order Now and Save Big!

Click the but­ton below to save 98 bucks!

Get Your Cus­tom Fan­page now for just 99!

Click below to place your order.

Your New Fan­page will be ready in just a few days!

Ques­tions? Call me at 407–433-8609

or click here to con­tact me.

The fol­low­ing graphic depicts the results of a sur­vey of 500 US con­sumers. This sur­vey was con­ducted in July of 2011 by Tatango.

Tatango pack­aged this sur­vey up in the fol­low­ing SMS Mar­ket­ing Infographic

Click Image to Enlarge

Source: Tatango SMS Mar­ket­ing

What you should con­sider before build­ing a text mes­sag­ing list for the pur­pose of sell­ing that list to mul­ti­ple businesses.

This arti­cle will explore the prac­tice of build­ing text mes­sag­ing lists to sell to mul­ti­ple busi­nesses. For exam­ple, adver­tis­ing a free dessert in exchange for a con­sumer opt­ing into a mobile text mes­sag­ing cam­paign for restau­rants in the Orlando, Florida area.

An exam­ple of one scenario:

Let’s say we want to build a list of cell phone num­bers to sell to restau­rants in Orlando, Florida. For exam­ple: Text *Free Dessert* to 12345 to receive coupons for a free dessert at local eater­ies. This list would be offered to local restau­rants for a fee.

At first glance, this may appear to be a lucra­tive ser­vice; after all these con­sumers are opt­ing in to receive these text mes­sages, right? And there may be a mar­ket for your list; however…

Prob­lems that could arise:

1. The first poten­tial prob­lem with this sce­nario is that the con­sumer may not be aware that their cell phone num­ber may be sold to mul­ti­ple busi­nesses (in the above exam­ple — mul­ti­ple restau­rants and eateries).
2. When the con­sumer begins receiv­ing numer­ous texts from busi­nesses they don’t remem­ber opt­ing into, it can give the whole text mes­sag­ing indus­try a bad name.

At the very least, the con­sumer needs to be made aware that they may receive mul­ti­ple text mes­sages from mul­ti­ple busi­nesses sim­i­lar to the pop­u­lar daily email coupon cam­paigns like Groupon. The major dif­fer­ence is that Groupon mes­sages come from them and not from mul­ti­ple sources. The end user knows that they signed up to receive these daily coupon offers and can opt out any­time they choose.

The prac­tice of build­ing SMS mar­ket­ing lists to import into new cam­paigns with­out the express con­sent of the con­sumer to receive text mes­sages from that new cam­paign is frowned upon by the Mobile Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (“MMA”).

Here’s what the MMA has to say about it in their Code of Con­duct:

“Mobile Mar­keters must imple­ment con­sent (opt-in) for a spe­cific mes­sag­ing pro­gram. Con­sent is not car­ried into other pro­grams unless the user has con­sented to such com­mu­ni­ca­tions either 1) when they con­sented to the ini­tial pro­gram or 2) upon the com­mence­ment of a sub­se­quent mes­sag­ing program.”

It clearly states that con­sent is not car­ried into other pro­grams unless con­di­tions 1 and 2 above are met.

A safer alternative:

A safer alter­na­tive would be to build a tar­geted list and sell your text mes­sag­ing ser­vice to mul­ti­ple busi­nesses in exchange for send­ing their spe­cial offers to the list. In this case, you are sell­ing your ser­vice; not the list.

Ben­e­fits with this strategy:

1. The mes­sages are being received from one source; your business.
2. The con­sumer knows they signed up to receive mes­sages from you so they are less likely to think they are being spammed.

By Rose­marie Calabro

http://mobilesocialsolutions.us

407–433-8609

Con­tact Me

This post has been updated. Click here to read…

After try­ing sev­eral scroll bar removal scripts and meth­ods, includ­ing reduc­ing the width of my fan­page, I found one that works with­out fail. I’m writ­ing this post to share my find­ings with you in the hope of sav­ing you time and frus­tra­tion with scroll bar issues on your Face­book iFrame Fan Pages. You can find the orig­i­nal source of this script here.

You will need to enter your page width and length when using this script; how­ever, it is easy to tweak the page length so that you don’t have any scroll bars show­ing on your Face­book fanpage.

In addi­tion to get­ting rid of scroll bars, another ben­e­fit of using this script is that you can cre­ate your page using the max­i­mum width of 520 pix­els. I read that reduc­ing my fan­page width to 510 pix­els would remove the scroll bars; how­ever, after test­ing that method, I can report that it does not pro­duce the desired result of scroll bar removal.

Ok, with that said, here is the code plus the instruc­tions on insert­ing it into your page’s HTML code.

<!–[if !sup­port­Lists]–>
A. Open your page in Notepad or your favorite HTML edi­tor. If you have more than one iFrame page, please add this code to each page adjust­ing the page height for each accord­ingly. I rec­om­mend that you copy this code into Notepad before adding it to your page to elim­i­nate any issues with quotes.

 
1. Replace the first line of your html with:

<html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=“ltr” lang=“en-us” xml:lang=“en” “http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xmlns:fb=“http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”>

<!–[if !sup­port­Lists]–>
2. Place the fol­low­ing javascript right before the </head> tag:

<script type=“text/javascript”>

func­tion framesetsize(w,h){

var obj = new Object;

obj.width=w;

obj.height=h;

FB.Canvas.setSize(obj);

}

</script>

<!–[if !sup­port­Lists]–>
3. Replace your <body> tag with this code:

<body onload=“framesetsize(520,2300)”> <!–spec­ify the height and width for resize–>

<div id=“fb-root”></div> <!–this div is required by the Javascript SDK–>

<div style=“height: 2400px”>

Note: adjust the “height: “ to the length of your page.

 
4. Replace the </body></html> tags with the fol­low­ing lines of code includ­ing the extra <div> tag (these will be the last four lines of code on your page:

</div>

</body>

</html>

<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js”></script>

Insert­ing the above code snipets into your page’s HTML will remove the scroll bars from your iFrames fan page. Just remem­ber to set your Face­book iFrame appli­ca­tion to ‘auto resize’. You may need to adjust the page height sev­eral times to remove the scroll­bars, but it is worth it!

Please share your results using this method here in addi­tion to your own tried and tested meth­ods of iFrame scroll bar removal.

Look­ing for­ward to read­ing your com­ments… Rose­marie