What is text message marketing?

All right, in this video, we're going to discuss what is text message marketing? And a lot of times when people are asking, how can we do text message marketing, what they are thinking is that, oh, I need to have a phone here and text people. There are platforms that are out there and we've mentioned them before in other videos that you can text clients or people that you work with or prospects that have given you their information. And you can text them and say, hey, I'm going to be in your area next week, or hey, here's a $25 off coupon or whatever it is. And so how does text message marketing exactly work? I'm going to show you in this video how you can use it in your business. So let's say that you are a local business, let's say maybe even a restaurant or H vac company or remodeling company. You build a list of customers that are in your database. So, so let's say that you like Chick Fil A, for example, and you download their app or you're on their rewards program or whatever you want to call it. You can collect people's names, right? They text the word chicken to 9,957 and they join this loyalty program. And once a month they get some coupon of some sort. So the way it works on the back end is that you're building a list of customer names, customer phone numbers, maybe even email addresses or whatever other qualifiers that you want. So if you're like a local service business, maybe the last service date that you serve them, the city that they're located in, the product that they like, you know, that kind of stuff, their favorite color, whatever the qualifiers are, if you're a restaurant, what their favorite meal is, last time they ate with you, you get it. So you're building this database of people and it's compiling inside of a CRM, a client relationship manager. And what happens is you can drill down based on last service date, for example, and you can send out a text to all these people or the city that they're in. And you could send a text to all these people or membership status. Say it's yes or no. So all the people that are in the yes membership status, they get a $20 off coupon, for example. There's a million different ways that you can slice how you do this. But at the most simplest, basic form, text message marketing is segmenting out your database or having a whole database of people and texting those individual people something. So I gave you some examples before but that's how it works. And then you can see, did they click on anything, did they interact with this information? Did they unsubscribe for whatever reason? What we found is that especially with local businesses, is having a more personalized text message. For example, hey, my name's Phil with, or hey, this is Phil with Flash consulting. I have 10 gift cards for, you know, $10 nuggets or something like that. I was wondering, wondering if you're interested in that, in getting on the list for that, or if you wanted one of these vouchers that I had or whatever it is. And so what this allows you to do is to get in front of those people and it comes off more natural, as if it's a personalized text from a person. If you send a text that's just like, hey, this is Flash Consulting, blah, blah, blah, it comes off very spammy. But if you say, hey, this is Phil with Flash Consulting, it comes off much more personalized and people are less likely to unsubscribe or press stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And the other thing is that you don't want to do this every month or every week or even every day or whatever. It's much better to do gradually, like quarterly or semi, annually. As far as, like a text blast out, because people don't want to be spammed in on their phone. And if it gets to be too much, they're going to say, oh, this is spammy. But the more custom that you can get, like for example, let's say that you have their city and you say, hey, John, I'm going to be in Boston next week and I want to see if, if you're free or if you would like to have your carpets clean, for example, that's a good way to use this data to then send out a text message to just John, or let's say Jane and John, but not Phil, because Phil's not in Boston. So there's a bunch of different ways you can use it, but at the basic level, that is what text message marketing is. We've made videos about how you can implement this in your business as far as from a tech stack standpoint, a technology stack standpoint, but that is what text message marketing. If you have a question, drop a comment below. I'll put some links down below that might be beneficial. And if you like this video, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post videos about growing local service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.