Smart messaging can broadly be used to refer to multimedia messaging. This has a host of excellent advantages for marketers, giving them the option to send media-rich messages to their potential customers at any time of day, wherever they are.
Marketing once meant going around door to door and posting pamphlets through mailboxes. Thanks to the internet and modern technology in general, that has largely changed (though it can still happen!). Today, we have access to all the world’s mailboxes from the comfort of our home, via email, via blogging and via smart messaging. Smart messaging is actually a propriety technology created by Nokia for sending messages with multimedia elements (images, movies, music). However, term can today be considered synonymous with any form of multimedia messaging: such as WhatsApp messaging. Using any of these methods can be considered evolved forms of sms marketing or text marketing.
So, what is the advantage of the smart message, or of SMS marketing in general?
Text marketing, as the name suggests, is a form of marketing aimed at mobile phones via the medium of text messaging of SMS. This is a form of marketing that is often overlooked by businesses that are fixated with e-mail, SEO and more traditional forms of marketing, but this is a big mistake when you bear in mind the many different benefits that come from this method of addressing your audience.
Marketing to Short Attention Spans
If you want to get a point across and make it stick then you need to get that point across quickly. And there no forms of marketing that act faster to deliver your message than text marketing. Think about how long it takes you to read a text message – at worst it’s a minute but more often it will be over in less than five seconds. This is such a short piece of information that your recipients almost won’t be able to help themselves from reading the whole thing. They can look at the recipient, notice that it’s not from a friend and is probably just marketing, but still read the whole thing because they’ll have taken it all in within seconds.
This forces you to be succinct in getting your point across and it ensures that the people who receive your messages will read the whole things rather than getting distracted halfway through. Of course this is also something that we’re more and more used to, and that we demand from all of our informational outlets in general. The internet has created an environment where we can retrieve any information we want within minutes, and this has made many of us much more impatient and much less willing to read an entire paragraph – Twitter of course is a product of this new global lack of attention.
