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A small business is usually working on a tight budget and the cost of marketing and promotion can be prohibitive. For example, the cost of a Yellow Pages ad can be up to $20,000 per year, a local newspaper ad $3,000, and brochures and pamphlets as low as $1,000, depending on what you want.
However, the scary thing is that the Yellow Pages are rarely used anymore, newspapers are often read online and people only read the parts that interest them and brochures and pamphlets are thrown away.
The large proportion of searches are now done online through Google or other similar search engines. In fact, if you asked most people under the age of 30 to find a product or service for you, they wouldn’t even think to look in a yellow pages phone book. They would go directly to their computers.
This means that to be effective, your small business marketing needs to be done online or somewhere else that people regularly search for.
The ideal solution is marketing your small business through the mobile phone.
DID YOU KNOW THAT:
(a) there are almost 22 million mobile phones in Australia;
(b) there is a 97% OPEN RATE for text messages received on those phones;
(c) nearly 6 BILLION text messages were sent in Australia last year; and
(d) only a small percentage (less than 2%) of companies use mobile marketing to increase their sales.
This means that if your small business is promoting itself through text messages, there’s a good chance that the recipient will read the message and take action, especially if the deal you’re offering is a good one.
For example, restaurants are often slow on Monday nights. One solution might be for your marketing agency to reach out to your client list via their mobile phones with a text saying they’ll get a buy one get one offer, or a free garlic bread, or something more if they arrive before. 8:00 pm and show the text message. This type of offer has proven to be very effective and has greatly increased business at little cost to the business owner. This type of marketing works for almost every industry. As long as you have a mobile phone number for your client, your marketing agency can develop all kinds of mobile marketing strategies for you.
To make use of these new types of marketing strategies, you need to come up with ways to get your customers’ mobile phone numbers. For example, you could have a competition where you have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to win a cake (if you were a bakery). The entry form is simple, just the number of jelly beans guessed, prize details, and a place for the customer’s mobile number so you can contact them if they win.
Your marketing agency can help you with this type of marketing by preparing tables with the contact details of your clients, designing marketing strategies and managing the issuance of text messages.