Getting Foot Traffic With A Targeted SMS Campaign

An SMS geo-fencing campaign is a little-known method used in local marketing to attract customers to your brick-and-mortar store with close proximity tracking. If you own a shop or store in the real world that could benefit from increasing your local foot traffic, then SMS geo-fencing may be the ideal method to boost your sales and bottom line. Here's how.

What Is A Geo-Targeted SMS Campaign?

Geo-fencing/targeting in SMS marketing is the key to reaching your target audience and engaging many new leads. Have you ever thought that you can send bulk text messages to the clients when they pass near your restaurant, beauty salon, exhibition, sports club, cinema, any specialised event, etc? The geo-targeting feature allows you to identify, which client would you advise using radius targeting, the engaged recipient with high accuracy and send him your promo SMS at the right time and place.

Text marketing for each business begins a few different ways. The key is to understand that text marketing is not about your personal device, cellphones or tablets. It’s about text-enabling a number or short code that allows you to reach large groups of people at once (or just one person)! To do that, you need an SMS platform. That’s where we come in.

How Will This Drive Traffic To My Store This Festive Season?

Depending on the needs of your business, try to combine location with interest in creating a target mobile promo campaign. Geo-targeting works well with location-based businesses. Typical examples are restaurants, large brand shops, service sectors and more.

A target audience is the focus and guiding force that determines your marketing message. Specifically, it’s the persona you wish to receive your messages. The “intended” audience, if you will.

By creating a target market, you’re not keeping others from your marketing material. Just helping to create a focus. For example, if your target audience for a new gaming mouse is teenagers, your marketing material would be geared towards them. That doesn’t exclude middle-aged people from buying it, it’s just not who the product is heavily advertised towards. In other words, you won't market a lifeboat to a guy in the Kalahari.

Velocity Media case study

To announce the opening of its Edenvale branch, McDonald's South Africa partnered with Velocity Media to inform the local community of the store's opening. This was done by running a geo-targeted SMS campaign within a 5km radius of the new store's location, offering a discounted meal item limited to the first 500 customers. The SMS was sent to 13 888 numbers with a 90% delivery rate. 

This campaign accomplished:

• Brand awareness,
• foot traffic to the store,
• a high delivery rate,
• and a high open-rate.

Needless to say, McDonald's was loving it. 

Let's Target Your Audience Today

You’ve grown accustomed to lead generation channels such as email, banner ads, Google Adwords, and Facebook advertising campaigns. But mobile devices open up an entirely new channel for a business to reach a highly targeted, receptive audience. The use of text messaging is quickly emerging as one of the best and most reliable ways to successfully communicate with your customer.

Your customers are texting, so why aren’t you? Text message marketing gives you the perfect opportunity to connect with your customers on the devices they carry with them all day, every day. 

Benefits of SMS marketing:

• Allows for mass reach at a low cost per reach.
• Great medium to drive app downloads.
• Powerful competition tool.
• Provides a medium for location-based advertising.
• SMS boasts a 90% immediate read rate.