The key to successful marketing is reaching the largest number of your preferred customers as possible with the right message and product. Your marketing strategy should reflect this ideology, using the best marketing tools available to meet your company’s goals. As such, both Social Media and SMS Marketing should be a part of your business’s potential marketing plan, as they are two of the most innovative and effective tools of our time.
Choosing between focusing your resources on Social Media Marketing and SMS Marketing can thus present quite a challenge for newcomers by seeming to address the same market base in similar methods. However, they actually differ in several important ways that can significantly affect the efficacy of your marketing campaign. So, what are the major differences between these two modern marketing tools?
Reach
Both Social Media and SMS Marketing attempt to contact customers through commonly used personal communication tools – our phones and our emails. Social Media Marketing puts your company’s message on the newsfeed of your clients, more likely to be both seen and ignored along with the thousands of other updates the customer is receiving simultaneously. Sending an SMS to your client’s phones, however, has a much better chance of being noticed due to the significantly lower number of SMS received daily and the frequency in which people check their phones (purportedly over 150 times a day). Both methods allow you to reach thousands of people with a few clicks, but SMS Marketing increases the chance your message is actually read. SMS has a 98% message received rate, compared to 29% of tweets, 22% with Facebook posts and 22% with most emails.
Risk
Social Media Marketing uses sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to post messages and advertisements on public (or semi-public) forums for followers to see. The danger in this lies within the nature of these websites: users can comment on other posts, often without review, even leaving negative or offensive comments on a message your company has left. These negative posts can sometimes be removed, but not before any number of other users see them. With SMS, users can send a reply or comment only to the company, not to your entire customer base. This protects you from any possible malicious commentary or publicity.
Time
Managing a Social Media Marketing campaign requires hours of dedication to the many sites and profiles that deliver your messages. At times, this can even require your company to hire additional workers just to assure that the sites are regularly checked and updated and that comments are promptly responded to. SMS marketing requires very little time management beyond the initial organization of clients’ phone numbers and efficacy research after the completion of the campaign – time-consuming elements of any campaign. If you would like to effectively reach thousands of your customers without dedicating multiple staff to the endeavor, try out SMS Marketing.
Budget
In a similar vein, because of the more intensive time investment necessary for Social Media Marketing, this form of a campaign can cost your company significantly more than an SMS campaign. SMS can be sent for less than one cent per customer. Placing an add on a social media site like Facebook, for example, is extremely costly and provides very little guarantee that it will convert to sales.
If your company is looking to take advantage of some of the most contemporary marketing tools available today, investigating Social Media Marketing and SMS marketing are good ideas. When deciding which is best for your company, think about the reach, risk, time, and budget involved with the two and how they are significantly different and will affect both your company and the campaign in different ways. Use SMS to reach the largest audience with the lowest threat of risk and investment of time and money.
