The 3 Cs of Text-based Marketing
Let's talk about the three steps CS of text-based marketing messaging. If you prefer to make it easier to answer the question of, should I post. Text or email this message, boiled it down to three C words.
And it's not the one you're thinking of you, sick, sick person.
If the ultimate goal is to sell and retain more business over time, then somewhere in that strategy we should include something about not annoying the hell out of your recipients. In this case, we're talking about your clients. And possibly your prospects.
The last thing you want them doing is closing off any channels. You'll accomplish this strategic goal by not abusing the rules of engagement.
Write these down on posted notes and stick them around your computer like it's 1998.
Social --> confirmation
Email --> community
SMS/text --> Convenience.
That's the three Cs.
Obvious question: Are there exceptions? I answer your question with another question. Can one do bicep curls in the squat rack? How about another question? Can one do squats in the preacher curl rack?
The correct answer is. No.
If you stick to this strategy, say 90% of the time, then fine make calls from the pitch, like a baller.
And if you don't know what a pitch is, that's what cool people call a football field. And by football, I mean soccer.
Social Media
So let's start with social media now, not to confuse matters. We're talking about your organic social media efforts here. So none of your paid ads. But the content that you put here is not designed for your existing clients.
It's not designed to engage them. I mean, they will engage that content, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to, to represent what your brand is about and put that out there for the lurkers, the people that aren't yet your clients.
When someone clues into your brand, either through organic or paid search, maybe a promoted ad on social media or just a good old fashioned referral, you want them to find content on your social media account that tells them about your brand. Something that gets them excited. Something that doesn't suck.
You'll also want to include happy that informs them on how your thinking about your business and how it relates to their pain points.
This will sound counterintuitive, but this platform, social media is not where you'll build a sense of community.
Email
Email is the place where you're going to build your sense of community. It's weird. I know, to be honest, I don't have a great answer for why it works this way, but you can draw from your own personal experiences.
There is of course a social aspect of social media, but it's not quite as intimate as the inbox. I think that's what it's about. When you reach into somebody's inbox, you're reaching into a very intimate space. But I like to think of it as sacred.
I know that sounds a little bit dramatic, but if you start thinking of that space in that way, you start treating it that way and you realize that it really does resonate in that way for recipients, maybe it's because you can personalize an email experience in a way that you can't quite personalize with social media.
Iknow you can personalize social media to a certain extent, but it's not the same. You don't... you don't have the control of personalization with social media, the way that you have it with, with email, email messages can land deeper, uh, far from the, the anxiety associated with social media.
One can sit intimately with them, message an email and read it like a private note or, or a private message. If your emails aren't doing this, then, then you're missing an opportunity.
SMS/Texting
Let's talk about SMS or texting as you might like to call it. I want you to brace yourself a little bit because I'm going to say some things that you might not want to hear, you might not want to accept, they don't tend to match your bias perception of what's going on
For the record, I think texting is great. Good brands engage their audiences with SMS in very effective ways. We want to connect with brands that we like on SMS, but it's because we liked them. And so there's absolutely a place for SMS.
Many modern operators are asking SMS to do the heavy lifting that would normally be done by email because frankly email is a little bit harder to set up and it takes just a little bit more effort in the long run. It's also easier to text. It's more convenient. It's faster. It's easy to see why one would gravitate towards that as an alternative to email.
It's a mistake to run your marketing this way, even if you think it's fine. You know it's not. You know that when a business blows up your SMS with attempts to close you, how that feels
You'll tell yourself that people can simply reply with the word, “stop” to get those texts to stop coming through. The problem is that by the time they get to that point where they're willing to take the time to tell you to stop the damage to your brand has already been done.
The bridge has been burned. You can't go back on, on what's happened in that case. Maybe you've got an endless market of prospects, but depending on where you were with that relationship, it can be hard to unwind at that point.
Keep using SMS when you've been granted permission by the recipient to send short messages; quick messages. Use it too augment your email marketing program by reminding people periodically to open an important email that you've sent.
This works great: Hey, did you get that last email we send out about... yada yada, yada?
Boom. Your open rates go up. Your email engagement goes up. It's beautiful. But, please don't ask SMS to do the heavy lifting of email marketing, of what would normally be done with email marketing?
Thanks for reading.
Cheers,
Damon