One Degree

When you are running a business, especially a small business, it is absolutely vital for you to market yourself. As it can be extremely expensive to send out postcards, mailers or advertise in newspapers, magazines, on television and on the radio, it is suggested that internet and mobile advertising be used as much as possible. If you are already online and taking advantage of free social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, taking your campaign mobile is relatively simple.

SMS, or short message service, is the acronym for what most people call text messaging. This form of marketing on a cell phone has become much more prevalent in the marketing community for the past 12 or so years. When you are running any online marketing campaign, your goal is conversions. For every conversion you get, the higher payout you will receive on an affiliate network and the more traffic your business will also receive. As most people read their text messages in less than five minutes, mobile marketing has a much higher conversion rate than most email marketing or social advertising ever could.

Short message service marketing is usually ran one of two ways, by short codes or by email. When running a short code message service, you, the business owner, or your marketing director will come up with a short call to action. You will then send that message to a short code that will act as the liaison between you and your customer base. The code will send your message to everyone on your marketing list and then report your conversion rate. You can usually view your analytics on how well everything has converted on a separate webpage or the liaison company will usually send you a weekly reported email to inform you of your marketing campaigns growth and progress.

Another way SMS can be used is through an email marketing platform. Let us assume you already have a weekly or monthly newsletter. Be sure on that page, there is a space for customers to send in their phone number. If their number is already on file, when you send out your newsletter, you can also have text notification set up. This can also be used to inform them of upcoming deals, coupons, late or early business hours and special promotions. You can send your short, call to action to an email liaison company that can send everything out to your clientele if you are unaware of how to make your call to action clear and concise.

Mobile marketing is one of the best new ways to market your business. Not only is it inexpensive, often times, free, but it is highly accessible with great conversion rates.

Sam is a blogger with a background in Internet marketing. His latest endeavor has been to learn how to build an iPhone app and this is a skill he now finds to be very marketable.