Unique in its cost-effectiveness and wide reach of users, text messaging offers an ideal marketing platform for small to medium businesses. While smartphones and tablets have no doubt enjoyed a rising popularity with features like RSS feeds and flashy apps, the humble SMS remains as an essential part of a business’ marketing strategy.

Text message marketing is not only the domain of large, international companies. Small to medium businesses can also jump in and gain leverage thru SMS marketing. Two things why SMBs should adapt a mobile SMS strategy: wide consumer base and cost- effectiveness.

Wide Consumer Base

Despite smartphones’ growing popularity, great populations of consumers still do not own smartphones. Feature phones even outnumber smartphones in some parts of the world. On the contrary, virtually every mobile phone user is capable of sending and receiving text messages. For SMBs to provide customer service capabilities, they need to reach as much of the target consumer base as possible.

Using text message marketing gives SMBs the best opportunity to reach as much users as possible and build the largest opt-in database. It’s no secret that every mobile marketing strategy has an inherent ‘audience limiter’. For mobile sites it’s the requirement of HMTL capability in mobile phones. For mobile apps, it’s unit compatibility issues. For QR codes, it’s QR reader installation. The more technical requirements users need to meet, the smaller the final consumer base gets. Take advantage of text message marketing to reach the largest audience possible and plan to build the more technologically updated groups later.

Cost-effectiveness

Compared to an SMS marketing strategy, building a mobile app is resource intensive no matter how much promising it looks. Launching an app on a single platform, let alone two, entails a significant amount of money. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as your business can set aside funds for a resource intensive marketing campaign.

With SMS, you can launch an effective marketing strategy on a budget. Almost all SMS marketing providers base their charge either on the amount of messages or the number of subscribers in a company’s database. This means upfront costs of SMS marketing services are small and increases in proportion to the success of the campaign. Text message marketing can also complement traditional media for minimal costs. Simply add a text-in call to action on a printed sign to launch a mobile marketing campaign.

A text marketing service, if done properly, can be one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for small to medium businesses.