Mobile communication is now a necessity, and today it is difficult to imagine modern people without mobile phones. Mobile communication is also used by businesses to advertise products through bulk SMS.
We’ve already defined that SMS advertising as the promotion of a brand, products, or services through mobile phones by sending SMS in bulk. Companies send text messages to inform customers about promotions, discounts, updates.
In the article, we’ll talk about the ways mass SMS increases brand awareness and helps to build trustful relationships with the target audience. Working on brand awareness, one should first assess the overall brand awareness of the target audience.
Assessment of Brand Awareness
There are three levels of brand awareness:
- Recognition with a hint. The consumer recognizes the brand, seeing its name, logo, packaging, etc.
- Spontaneous recognition. The consumer recalls the brand, listing the companies that produce goods of a certain category.
- Top-of-Mind. The first brand that comes to mind when a consumer mentions a product category.
One way to analyze brand awareness is to survey consumers: find out what brands they think of by hearing the name of a product category, and whether they can recognize your brand without prompting.
Other ways to learn brand awareness? Google services such as Google Alerts and Google Trends – allow you to see if there are more brand mentions and queries associated with the brand. Using the Viral tool Checker, you can get the social indicators and determine a degree of customer involvement.
General Ways of Building Brand Awareness
High recognition and memorability of the company’s brand are achieved by the product promoting on the market. Product promotion provides consumer contact with the company’s products and services. The more targeted contacts with the product, the higher is the quality of this contact (duration, right place, and time), and the faster is the increase of brand awareness.
To build knowledge of the brand, it is necessary to use all available opportunities: direct advertising, BTL, trade marketing campaigns, product display, and, of course, the product packaging.
We offer a simple working scheme to form and increase brand awareness in the market. Each stage of the model described below is a separate advertising campaign for the product. Sometimes the passage of a single-stage will require the same advertising campaigns.
- To attract the attention of the target audience, to stimulate interest
- Build a strong link between the product and the product category in which the product is sold
- Tell the needs of the target audience the product can solve and why it can solve them better than others
- Build an associative link with the right images and create the desired image of the product
- Constantly strengthen knowledge of the key competitive advantage of the product
It is impossible to furnish all these stages in one advertising message, it is a long (at least 2-3 years) process. But performing all actions consistently, you will be able to increase the brand awareness of the company in the market and strengthen the knowledge achieved for a long time.
Advantages of SMS Advertising
- High level of engagement. People check their mobile phones an average of 80 times a day. Therefore, sending promo by SMS demonstrates a high rate of openness. Using SMS, companies effectively distribute relevant offers and thereby increase brand awareness.
- Reach audiences around the world. SMS services deliver messages to all countries of the world. Due to the fact that 5 billion people use mobile communication, SMS advertising plays an important role in marketing strategy.
- Opens up opportunities for local businesses. Marketers can target SMS advertising on a geographical basis — this makes the SMS campaign is a powerful tool for promotion. SMS promotions allow local companies to send limited-time offers to potential customers at any time.
- Easy to set up. Let’s take our web service SMS-Smart, it takes only a few minutes to create and send SMS campaigns.
- Works effectively in combination with the other channels. SMS advertising works best in combination with email marketing and web push notifications. Marketers often use promotional SMS as an addition to email campaigns. For example, if the email was not opened, the client is sent an SMS to the mobile phone.
What are the General Tips while Developing Brand Awareness with SMS Marketing?
- Be consistent: use the same Sender ID (better to use company name) as a sender if the SMS, use your company name in the signature of the SMS text to create a stable image of your brand.
- Provide your customers with some value, whether it’s quality content or good customer support teamwork.
- Interact with your audience using several marketing channels that are most appropriate for your type of business (i.e. SMS, email, Facebook ads, Google Ads).