Small businesses in Australia (and worldwide) are usually very focused on cash-flow and have limited budgets to spend on marketing and promotion. It is a vicious circle because although marketing and promotion is essential to grow the business it is difficult to find the money to spend on this until the business is already growing.
Until recently small business has generally taken out an annual advertisement in the Yellow Pages (with a cost of up to $20,000 per year), spent money advertising in local newspapers, or had brochures and pamphlets printed. Although television and radio advertising are other options the cost is generally far too prohibitive for small business.
A major problem for small business is that the traditional forms of marketing and promotion no-longer work. The Yellow Pages are rarely used any more by families or in offices, newspapers are often read on-line and people only read the bits that interest them which are not advertisements and brochures and pamphlets get thrown in the bin without being looked at.
Most people (at least those under 65) now search for all goods and services that they want on-line. They would not even think of looking in a phone book.
To have any chance of success your small business marketing must be conducted on-line, or by another means that attracts a lot of attention.
Solution
A reasonably new and very effective solution includes marketing your small business by way of the mobile phone.
This makes extraordinary sense when you consider that:
(a) there are over 6.8 billion people in the world;
(b) over 5 billion people in the world have mobile phones;
(c) there almost 22 million mobile phones in Australia;
(d) there is a 97% OPENING RATE for text messages received on
mobile phones;
(e) almost 6 BILLION text messages were sent in and from
Australia last year; and
(f) only a small percentage (less than 2%) of businesses are
using mobile marketing to increase their sales.
These statistics are mind-boggling in terms of the marketing opportunities that they present to small business. The reality is that any product or service you promote by way of a text message has a very high chance of reaching the recipient and there is no reason for them not to take action if the deal is good.
For example a real estate agent may be running short on sales stock. They get their marketing agency (Office Help Genie) to contact their list of customers by way of their mobile phone numbers with a Text that tells them that anyone who refers a client who signs up to sell their home will receive a free trip, or a dinner for two – anything at all provided that the person who signs up tells the Agent that they were referred by the person who received the text message.
This type of offer has proven to be very effective and has increased businesses enormously at little cost to the business owner as compared to other marketing strategies.
Mobile marketing works for almost all industries provided that you have a mobile phone number for your customer.
In order to make the broadest possible use of mobile marketing you should be constantly devising ways to get potential customer’s mobile numbers and email addresses.
Office Help Genie can help you develop targeted and effective mobile marketing campaigns. It will prepare Tables setting out your customer’s mobile phone and email details based on information you provide, devise marketing strategies and manage the sending of the mobile text messages.
