Introduction

Marketing is a very important aspect of any business. Your marketing plan should detail how you plan to attract new clients to your business and retain them. In today's world of technology, there are endless ways to create awareness and reach out to your targeted audience. The traditional methods include Radio and Television broadcasts, newspaper adverts, Billboard adverts, word of mouth and others. Many businesses still utilize these and some other traditional methods to get to their target market.

With technology around, marketing has gone digital. Email campaigns and other electronic methods of creating awareness are popular. However, this article will look at a very important way to reach out to new clients and stay in touch with them - Bulk SMS. Lets take a deeper look at why you should consider Bulk SMS as a form of marketing.

What is Bulk SMS?

Bulk SMS is a technology used in sending SMS to a large number of recipients at once. If you own a mobile phone, you must have received a Bulk SMS campaign from any of the services you use such as your bank, insurance service provider, your child's school, your Internet Service Provider and so on.

Bulk SMS is easily identified by the unique sender ID which is always branded. The name of the sender is usually a branded business name. If you scroll through your text messages, you will find so many Bulk SMS you received from various businesses. Now having known what bulk SMS is, the next thing is to know why it is an important tool for marketing. Here are some reasons you want to use it.

Here are 6 benefits of Using Bulk SMS for marketing

1. Wider Audience: Virtually everyone living in the city owns a mobile device. There are billions of mobile phone users globally. It means that almost all your customers use mobile phone. Basically, sending Bulk SMS to your clients is the most effective way to get all of them updated. And when targeting new customers, Bulk SMS equally gives you the largest audience possible. You will notice that banks for example use bulk SMS to alert you about transactions in your account. Other businesses also do the same. This is because as explained earlier, you can stay in touch with more people through SMS than other methods.

2. Target Audience: How do you reach out to customers from a specific demographics? In essence, how do you channel your marketing campaigns to the specific audience you have in mind? The easiest way to do it is through bulk SMS. When you do marketing through Radio broadcasts, it is very difficult to determine who will receive your message. It is the same with Television campaigns or distributing fliers and handbills. But Bulk SMS helps you target a particular audience effectively. For example, you can choose to send SMS to clients from a particular state or city, specific interest or to clients that purchased goods during a particular period of time. If you have been effective in building SMS contact last from your clients, it would be easy to configure and send SMS to specific clients - for example to those that accepted to receive periodic updates.

3. Quicker Response time: SMS is one one of the fastest ways to get response or feed back from your clients. This is because mobile devices and phones are always with the owner. Whether they are attending an event, enjoying a vacation, visiting a friend or even resting right inside their bedroom, your target client or even old clients can always be reached through SMS because they have their phone there. So if there are time-based campaigns like seasons promotions, sending a bulk SMS is usually a fast way to get reaction from your audience than email and other methods of marketing. Most clients will react to your messages within the first few minutes. So why not utilize bulk SMS and get your clients to respond as fast as possible to your marketing campaigns.

4. Branding: Bulk SMS is a perfect way to represent your business in its true image. One thing about bulk SMS is that the sender ID is usually customized with the business name. For example, all SMS from you internet service Provider comes in the company business name. When clients receive SMS with such branded names, it makes the business stand out from the rest and looks unique. So a very effective way to build and maintain brand names is to send customized bulk SMS to your clients.

5. Cost effective: Another important reason to use bulk SMS is that the cost is far cheaper than standard SMS rates offered by Telecom companies to individual users. Besides, the business owner can work with whatever budget he has. He can choose to target a specific demographics based on his budget. Bulk SMS campaigns can go as low as 1 naira in Nigeria per SMS. With this cheap rate, it is possible to run a campaign to thousands of receivers with a small budget. So if you are a business owner with a small budget, you can start looking at the using bulk SMS as one of your tools for marketing.

6. Convenience: Another thing to consider when it comes to marketing is convenience. SMS is really a convenient way to reach your customers. It does not require a special device to access SMS. Even clients with less sophisticated devices can access access SMS with a basic phone. Checking emails require internet connection, but SMS does not need internet access to work. So sending bulk SMS as a form of marketing is a convenient way to reach clients and get your messages across to them.

Bulk SMS in Nigeria

Each country has so many Bulk SMS providers and their different rates. Nigeria is no different. There are many Bulk SMS providers in Nigeria and their rates. Before choosing any for your SMS marketing campaigns, you need to be sure that their service is reliable and their rates competitive. I have been using bulk SMS for more than 10 years now. I have trusted the service of Smslive247.

Smslive247 is a Nigeria based bulk SMS provider. Through out my years of using their service, I can say they are reliable. I can say their rates are not the cheapest, but their almost instant delivery time has mad them my number one choice. It is up to you to make some research, maybe a google search of bulk SMS in Nigeria will come up with other providers. In my next post, I will demonstrate how to create account with SMSlive247 and how to schedule bulk SMS using this service.

Conclusion

Marketing is an important aspect of business development. It must be carefully planned and implemented. There are many ways to do marketing, but bulk SMS remain an important to way to do it. From the above, you can see the many benefits that a business owner can get from using this powerful tool. I hope you will try it soon and share your experience with us. Watch out for my next article on how to send bulk SMS using SMSlive247. Thank you so much.