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Every industry has a target market, and your SMS strategy deserves a little specification. Before achieving success, you need to identify your regular user base, your typical customers and a tailored approach. Every business is different, and every strategy takes time to create, implement and solidify.

While bulk SMS senders are incredibly useful for engaging massive audiences, they still need a little direction. Blasting a large user-base without direction garners less results than judging your audience beforehand, and bulk SMS campaigns can slowly diminish a marketing strategy if not handled well. Below, we discuss the importance of targeting in your bulk SMS sender, and what you can do to ensure it.

Important Factor One: Your Competition

Mobile users are a happy bunch, but they hate text blasts from every direction. Likely, they’ve engaged other brands, too. Many brands offer customer-specific deals, discounts and amenities, and they’re targeting customers in demand. If your SMS strategy is aligned with a consumer base, it’ll stand out.

Inc.com’s “Defining Your Target Market” covers this aspect, and it extends itself to covering niche markets. Mobile users are propositioned with new deals daily, so having niche benefits will serve you in the long run.

Important Factor Two: Your Metrics

A specified user bracket is a resourceful one. Your bulk SMS campaign offers quite a bit of analytical data, but it’ll fail to create opportunity if your measured data is ambiguous. Targeting market segments produces real-world, useful data. Measuring success is important, and identifying key strategies—even more so.

Important Factor Three: Interest

An engaged target market stays interested. Unfortunately, the mobile boom’s biggest benefit is also a marketer’s biggest hurdle. Smartphone carriers like personal approaches. They enjoy self-specific offers.

• 30 percent of consumers interact with brands via text.
  
  
• Mobile coupons are 10 times as likely to be redeemed as traditional coupons.
  
  
• Text messaging is the world’s largest mobile marketing channel by revenue.
  
  

If you can specify benefits on a demographics basis, you’ll extend a new world of opportunity to your consumer. Mobile users are shying away from generic bulk messages—and for good reason. Because the mobile industry is becoming more personal, anything impersonal is considered spam. The bar has raised, and targeting is a must-have for any mobile marketing platform.

Important Factor Four: Trends

A targeted market reveals trends. While major shifts can be identified through bulk SMS campaigns, a highly specific outreach program yields niche market movements. By identifying consumer bracket trends, you can influence future sales. A company capable of taking branded steps towards a trend can greatly enhance its advertising, strategic and marketing prowess.

Moreover, developing trends appear in small brackets. If you’re able to catch a trend before it’s mainstream, you’ll gain a huge market advantage. Mobile users comprise a literal hive-mine of cultural movement.

Important Factor Five: Cross-Market Viability

Mobile users access email, engage social media, browse online forums and search for information constantly. A bulk SMS strategy simply can’t cope with their cross-channel maneuverability. Segmented SMS approaches, while small, can pinpoint channel access points by denomination. If your brand is capable of identifying these access points, it’ll thrive.

Important Factor Six: Benefits

It is an SMS platform after all. QR codes, location-based benefits and in-store discounts are loved by a variety of consumers, but benefits may not translate to every audience. Narrowing your scope increases the perceived impact of benefits. If your consumer engages behavior-specific amenities, they’ll thank you.

Even if you’re only able to locate 50 consumers meeting your benefit criteria, you can perfect your balance by proposing further benefits. Reaching back into the measurement section, identifying most-wanted benefits is entirely conducive to market success.

Important Factor Seven: Activity

While 70 percent of consumers feel SMS strategies are good for business communication, a large portion still sways in activity. If you’re not dividing your audience, you’re likely losing feedback to inactive texters. Other texters, while active, may require a specific text frequency. To maximize your SMS efforts, you need to identify, engage and reciprocate with mobile users on their terms.

Your SMS strategy, once implemented, still has time to grow. Many SMS strategies engage a funnel approach, where a brand slowly narrows its audience scope. Always be on the lookout for new market indicators, and constantly examine emergent markets for new, long-term solutions.

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