Harnessing the Power of SMS Text Messaging
The Power of Interactivity
Consider a typical brand manager’s media budget for brand building. It used to be that 100% would be spent on broadcasting messages across traditional media — print, radio, television and out-of-home. This open-ended communication lacked any interactivity or dialog with people. However, now the largest growing media spend is the Internet – but why? Because it’s interactive. Your audience engages directly with you — with a simple click. Now the wealth of knowledge built by direct marketers using direct response (DR) marketing techniques has become relevant to all advertisers, including brand builders. And it’s widely accepted that if you interact with your constituency, your communication is much more likely to meet your marketing objectives. The Internet has changed branding forever.
Out-of-home advertising has yet to fully leverage this level of interactivity. There are direct marketers that have invested in call center assets who post phone numbers to “call now” in their creative, but these tend to be brands that can execute a transaction and monetize the call. Also, many advertisers post the URL to their web sites on signs, but this does little more than tell a consumer that there is an online presence that they can ’Google’ for later since it is rare they can actually stop and write down a long web address.
Since people on the go typically do not have the time to have an extensive dialog with a call center agent, nor do they have the time to remember a web or email address, there has been little interactivity in out-of-home brand advertising. Some envision a day when Bluetooth technology transmits messages from signs to people’s handsets that they can respond to, but this has proven slow as consumers have not opted into this type of interaction due to privacy and nuisance concerns.
So what’s different now?
The answer is SMS or text messaging.
What is SMS?
The Short Message Service (SMS), often called text messaging, is a means of sending short text messages to and from mobile phones. Just about every mobile phone handset allows you to send a short text message to another handset. You typically select the messaging option from a menu, then type a phone number to whom you are “texting”, and then type the message. On standard handsets you spell messages with the numeric keyboard (and the alphabetic overlay) so for example for an “a” you hit the number 2, for “b” you hit 2 twice, and for “c” you hit 2 three times. Push the send button or menu option when you are done typing the message. It’s quick, easy, and prevalent. Europeans and Asians communicate in this manner regularly. It is a part of every day life. In the U.S., young people now do it. Your average American teenager can look you in the eye, engage in a conversation, but be simultaneously messaging a friend with their handset in one hand. It’s happening. And it’s big. It’s a new way of interacting.
And it’s growing.
But text messaging is not just for people to communicate with each other. Organizations now routinely use text messages as well. A new standards group called the Common Short Codes Administration (CSCA) www.usshortcodes.com has made this much easier.
The CSCA website states, “Long popular in Europe, CSCs – short strings of numbers to which text messages can be addressed – allow wireless subscribers to access applications on all participating wireless carriers’ networks, at any time and gives content providers access to 150 million SMS subscribers. The possibilities are endless: voting and polling, contests, surveys, direct marketing, chat, games, and the like all can benefit from CSCs.” So what does this mean? This means you can have a five digit code like “46604” as your standard “phone number” for any consumer regardless of whether they use Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon.
Most applications of SMS and short codes result in one line in the creative copy: “Text [some short keyword] to [a short code] and [get this offer]. For example:
- Text “more” to 46604 and receive a website address that you can go to later and register for more information
- Text “more” followed by your email address ” to 46604 to get more info emailed to you
- Text “code” followed by the secret code shown below ” to 46604 and win a prize
- Text “hunt” followed by the code below ” to 46604 and win a prize when you find all 10 codes
- Text “invite” ” to 46604 and receive an invitation to a special invitation only event.
- Text “song” to 46604 and receive a link to download a song (or similar for a video or ringtone)
- Text “join” to 46604 and subscribe to an alert about some topic or offer
- Text “save” to 46604 and receive a promotion code that you can show at checkout
- Text “enter” to 46604 to enter a contest and receive text notification if you win
As you can see, the possibilities for creative treatments are endless, ranging from requests for information and invitations, to contests and promotions. Utilizing SMS also lets you create a seamless integration between out-of-home, mobile and internet interactions. Out-of-home is used to communicate a branding message with a call to action. Mobile SMS is used to initiate the interaction with a direct response. And the internet is used to convey more rich multi-media information and enable ongoing email dialog.
SMS on SeeSawAds.com
Without SeeSaw, adding interactivity to an out-of-home campaign requires labor-intensive coordination across multiple vendors. First you have to line up a mobile marketing agency and an SMS gateway (that has all the carrier integrations), and then you have to coordinate across all the networks in your campaign. This overhead is now part of the distant past. With SeeSawAds.com you can seamlessly integrate SMS interactivity into your digital signage campaign. Here’s how it works.
As you create your digital signage media plan you will be able to check a box indicating that this advertising campaign will have an SMS component. Then you specify what keywords you want to track. And finally you specify what message you want the respondent to see when they text the short code. When the campaign is live you get real-time reports showing responses to the keywords broken down across geography, time and creative. Imagine real-time reporting for responses to out-of-home digital media. With SeeSaw, it’s easy.
Summary
Finally, you can easily leverage the power of interactivity and direct response as part of your digital media campaign – the opportunities are almost unlimited. With SeeSawAds.com it’s easy to do. Pick your keywords and specify your response message and away you go. Real-time response reporting is at your fingertips. This new feature will be generally available on SeeSawAds.com in the fall of 2007. For those interested in our beta program call us at 1.877.SEESAW8, email us at sms@sessawnetworks.com, or better yet, text ‘seesawads’ to 46604.
