When it comes to reaching out to consumers, small businesses have a variety of methods to choose from.  While social media has gotten a tremendous amount of publicity recently as a means for small businesses to reach out to potential customers, doing so is by no means a simple process.

The complexity of tailoring social media efforts to reach consumers means that it is typically larger companies that can hire experts to help them tailor their social media messaging strategy that benefit most from this medium.  Smaller businesses, on the other hand, may prefer to send text messages as a way to improve ROI for their marketing efforts.  A few reasons for this are listed below.

Immediacy

One advantage of using SMS marketing is the immediacy of the strategy.  Social media marketing depends to a great degree upon the browsing behavior of consumers.  Not only does it take time to build up a company’s social media presence online, but, in addition, getting a particular marketing message across can also be a lengthy process as social media activity levels wax and wane in hard-to-predict cycles.

Text messages, on the other hand, are typically read within 5 minutes of being sent.  This means that for time sensitive messages such as those pertaining to sales or special offers, SMS offers superior delivery time.

Scope

While social media campaigns, when it comes to mobile delivery, are limited to those who can browse the web with smartphones, SMS campaigns are accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.  Especially in emerging markets, where smartphones are less prevalent, this gives text messages a wider scope than that of social media.  In addition, accessing social media on smartphones is made more difficult by limited screen size.  Two way SMS New Zealand, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from these limitations and thus offers greater deliverability potential than social media does.

Targeting

Being able to direct your social media outreach efforts at the appropriate target market for your company’s products or services is not easy to do.  The complexity of this process, as mentioned above, makes it difficult for small businesses with limited marketing budgets to make the most of social media marketing.  Text message marketing ideas, on the other hand, can be precisely targeted with a high degree of deliverability as well as a high likelihood that the messages will be read once received.  As a result, this approach works best for small businesses that need to optimize their marketing efforts.