SMS marketing is a very successful means of communication as a wide range of customers can be reached anywhere through their mobile phones. A current analysis regarding SMS marketing shows that 95% of the marketing messages are read which proves how efficient they are compared to the conventional marketing methods. Text messaging has also become a part of fashionable television programs such as The Apprentice and The American Idol. SMS marketing also plays a vital role in creating publicity for various game shows and award functions. With this rapid increase in demand for mobile marketing methods, many small business owners throughout the world have started using SMS marketing techniques to enhance their business. They feel SMS marketing as a direct, personal and reliable means of producing incomparable exposure to their products. Nowadays we also see SMS marketing being used in the major sporting events in the name of trivia contests, puzzle and interactive voting games.

You might now ask yourself, what a small business would do with mobile marketing. For this, the small business owner needs to build a permission-based marketing campaign to reach their customers directly on their cell phones. If you run a small business say a healthcare operation, services business, restaurant, cafe, retail store, or anything similar to that, then developing your own application might seem to be much hard. In such a case, you can try to work out a deal with companies that already have experienced a considerable growth with mobile marketing techniques. Most of the popular mobile phone applications allow ad placements, by which your business can get some exposure. Listing your local business on Google Maps and Yelp can get your business viewed by significant number of users via mobile phones.

Just like email marketing, marketing also involves lead generation, relationship building, value adding and of course, selling. With SMS marketing, you certainly don't want to try sending dozens of customer texts from your phone directly. The technique works out by sending text messages to as many cell phone numbers as you want directly from the web. It truly takes less than five minutes to set up and send promotional messages to a few customers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have their mobile version of their sites as well as mobile applications that have direct or indirect relationships with them. Hence it is very much important to make sure that your business or company website is mobile-friendly.

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