Text for success – its the consumer lingua franca

The launch last week of O2More, the carriers location and time targeted advertising service marks something of a watershed in how mobile marketing works. Now consumers can, when they enter a ‘geo fence’ around a brand offering something they have pre-opted into, will get a message offering money off or other inducements to engage with that brand. Such offers can also be targeted around time of day also and are showing how mobile in retailing and commerce isn’t just about buying stuff via the mobile channel, but is also about retailers using mobile to drive footfall into the stores they have already heavily invested in.

But what makes it all the more exciting for the telemedia industry is that it uses text. Yep, good old SMS. OK, if you are a smartphone user you get a graphically enhanced MMS, but the service is designed to use SMS wherever possible as that is useful to the vast majority of people with mobile phones.

This move ‘towards’ SMS in retailing and marketing is clearly driven by expediency among those wanting to reach the widest audience possible. It is also the lingua franca of the people right now.

A survey by mBlox has found that 71% of consumers in the UK want mobile coupons sent to their phones while they are out shopping and 59% wanting retailers and brands to contact them using SMS.

Looking specifically at the role of SMS for business communications, 59% of UK and 17% of US consumers surveyed stated SMS as their preferred choice when being contacted about appointment reminders.

“More and more people are turning to SMS for important communications because emails can easily get lost or overlooked in an email inbox,” says Brian Johnson, senior vice president of sales and marketing for mBlox. “Mobile phone penetration in the US is now catching up to the UK and mBlox is experiencing a hockey stick effect in growth for business-to-consumer messaging. Businesses are beginning to give their customers the option of how they want to communicate with them and increasingly consumers are realizing the power of mobile messaging.”

For payment reminders, such as credit card and utility bills, the consumer research showed that more than one in three consumers chose SMS as their preferred communication channel in the UK, but just one in 10 chose SMS in the US.

“To stay ahead of our clients demands in key verticals such as Finance, Communications, Pharmacy and Travel we will launch 15 unique SMS programs this year,” agrees Jennie Hanson, SVP of West Corporation’s Alerts and Notifications business. “We see many companies adding SMS to their customer contact strategy for payment reminders, order ready notices, appointment reminders, customer care, promotions and a variety of other notifications as consumers begin using text messaging to communicate with businesses and not just family and friends.”

So text is firmly on the agenda again driven by retailers. But it is also looking likely to gain credence in the business sector too and, should it ever return to TV, in the voting stakes as well.

Personally I use text all the time and think that its an easy and cheap way of marketing and of developing communications between business, brands and consumers. We don’t need all the flash ‘flash’ graphics; we need simple messaging. It is also cheap to do and everyone can do it.

In these straightened times we are likely to see a lot more text based services happening as brands reach out to the maximum number of people with the minimum amount of outlay.

Find out more on how SMS and MMS marketing are going to effect the market at Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November, when we have keynote presentations from mBlox and OpenMarket.

Register here 

Lipsmacking thirstquenching acetasting motivating goodbuzzing cooltalking highwalking fastliving evergiving coolfizzing IVRdriven mobilemarketing Pepsi

In this day and age of apps and mobile web, canny cross platform marketing, multimedia video downloads, social media and all the other things that gets people in the telemedia space hot and panting, you’d think that there wasn’t any room for such prosaic services as IVR and ringback tones – they are so 90s and early 00s.

But you’d be wrong. IVR and ringback tones look set to get a new lease of life. Both technologies are still widely used, but both have lost their sex appeal years ago. IVR in particular is like death and taxes, boring but important and totally unavoidable (unless you are Tory donor Lord Ashcroft, in which case you can safely dodge one of them, if not the other). Ringback tones are up there with Strictly Come Dancing as the king of cheese.

But they both have a hugely important role to play in the development of mobile marketing, as ably demonstrated by Pepsico (makers of, to my mind the far superior of the colas) Pepsi in Turkey.

Cola wars are intense in all regions and Pepsico, having seen its market share hit by a new kid on the block – Cola Turka – in 2003, looked at how it could use the then nascent mobile marketing – among other things – to take on this rival and to try and chip away at Coke’s lead in the market too.

Fast forward to 2009 and the company had seen off Cola Turka, and was gunning for the big red ‘un and was seeing some stunning results with mobile marketing campaigns that offered those that texted or called the numbers inside the lids of Pepsi bottles free mobile minutes and the chance to win prizes etc.

So far all pretty standard. But Pepsi had a challenge on its hands. Between 2003 and 2009 it had successfully used mobile to target youngsters. Now it wanted to use mobile marketing to get itself in front of the primary shopper – mums. And this was a whole different ball game.

So the company turned to Turkey’s answer to Oprah to start getting the message across to this crucial, multipack buying demographic. And how did it do this? Well it used TV ads of course, but it also used IVR and ringback tones. When anyone entered to get free minutes, they got an IVR call back from Turkish Oprah telling them how great it was to get free minutes and to tell their friends a number to call to also get free minutes.  When the friends called they got a ringback tone message from Turkish Oprah telling them how great Pepsi was and so on.

Thanks to this canny use of IVR and ringback tone advertising, the offer spread virally like wildfire, notching up 25.8million calls, more than 5million of them uniques. Pepsi even claims that it out performed Coke in the market in the Spring of 2009.

Pepsico upped the ante again in 2010, using IVR, ringback tones and MMS videos to create an even more in depth – and totally mobile – spring marketing campaign (it saved money for the big summer push, when cola wars are at their height, by not investing in TV ads). This time it used the star of Turkey’s leading soap to do the IVR and ringback tone message and to create an MMS video advert too.

Again the campaign spread virally like, well a pretty contagious virus, and soon the company was again getting more than 6million unique interactions and sign ups and sales went through the roof.

And it is thanks, in part, to the use of IVR as part of the marketing mix. This lesson, learned today at the MMA Forum in London from Ugur Oglu, marketing director at Pepsico Turkey, shows how mobile marketing is a mixture of channels, technologies and some good old fashioned outside-the-box thinking. It also shows that IVR has a huge roll to play in turning static mobile marketing campaigns into celeb driven interactive campaigns that can spread, if you get it right, like the plague (well, they do call it viral marketing).

So take heart IVR providers: the future is yours to take – just get your message out there to those brands and mobile marketing agencies and show them how its done.