An online marketing strategy is general and overall approach you'll take with your marketing and encompasses big picture. It's starting point for choosing most effective marketing tactics to use and then actions you need to take. A clear strategy helps you make right day-to-day decisions, saves you time and keeps you focused.

Before doing any marketing of your business, you need to develop your strategy. This gives you a clear picture of what you're up against and what you need to overcome through your marketing. This enables you to choose best marketing tactics. The tactics are means of achieving your strategy.

The mobile phone has revolutionised everyday life as well as way we do business. A less well-known fact is that it also opens up fantastic opportunities for interaction between companies and their customers.

The following statistics clearly demonstrate fantastic take-up of Text Messaging, or SMS (Short Messaging Service), in consumer market:

-Over 20 billion text messages were sent in UK in 2003 (Mobile Data Association) -Over 25 billion text messages were sent in UK in 2004 (Mobile Data Association) -Expected growth for 2005 to reach 30 billion text messages (Mobile Data Association) -56% of direct marketers are planning regular SMS use this year (Forrester)

Over past few years, text messaging has become by far most popular mobile data service, and mobile marketing has established itself as an attractive medium in terms of entry cost, response rates and interactivity. We will see it become an increasingly important element in communications mix in future.

SMS as a Marketing Tool

For marketers SMS opens up completely new opportunities. Provided recipients have actively opted-in to a service or promotion, an SMS campaign is very well received. The results speak for themselves: recall rates of 60-90% and response rates of 5-20% are often achieved. This is why SMS is becoming incredibly popular to use as one of many components in an integrated marketing campaign. Still, this medium is very much in its infancy, and sky is limit. The following factors will drive future growth of mobile marketing:

-Further adoption of text messaging among older age segments -Introduction of further content and services available only on mobile phones (ring tones, alerts, logos, pictures etc) -Introduction of new standards and formats that offer a richer user experience and further interactivity (MMS with colour and sound, polyphonic ring tones etc)

The bottom line is, mobile phones are becoming an integral part of social fabric. As such we strongly believe in power of mobile marketing!

Case Studies

An East-end Pub using SMS to market theme nights

A small east-end pub wanted to increase turnout to their pub during week. So they decided to create theme nights for both Tuesday and Wednesday. During weekend they had membership sign-ups to SMS TXTing service.

Using a web-based interface, pub owner would prepare a text message night before event and send it to his database of members, usually offering a 50% off discount if member would show up with that text message. It proved a great success with 27% of those who received text message showing up at pub.

A London-based security company – Off-site SMS timesheets

A London-based security company, wanted to centralise and automate their timesheet system for all of their off-site security officers. At each site a supervisor was provided with a mobile phone with an allocated monthly amount of SMS text credits.