By Godslove Adagbonyin, Communications Manager at Kirusa
Mobile is now a key part of the marketing strategy for Nigerian businesses. But it doesn’t have to be limited solely to large companies.
Today, a world of mobile opportunity awaits for smart SMEs who are willing and able to get behind the mobile revolution and put a strategy in place. And it doesn’t have to require a huge commitment in terms of time or budget.
Here are four tried-and-tested mobile marketing quick wins that you can start implementing today.
The Flash call
Companies of all sizes traditionally devote much of their efforts to outbound marketing activities – pushing out messages and offers to prospects and customers through a variety of channels, including mobile of course.
However, mobile has a critical role to play in so-called inbound marketing – the art of creating pull from customers and prospects to build relationships and generate leads.
Just one example is the simple flash call – where a prospect is given a specific mobile number to use to express interest in a product; or pledge to a particular cause; enter a contest; vote for something they love or provide feedback on a company.
The consumer’s call is not answered so no calling charge is incurred. Instead your company grabs the caller’s number so that they can be either called back or provided with more information via text.
Getting a flash call campaign up-and-running couldn’t be easier. You simply buy a batch of mobile phone numbers (either long or short) and advertise them on printed materials such as billboards, posters, brochures, flyers, and even invoices.
Best of all, the success of a flash call campaign can be easily measured by simply tracing the calls made to the mobile numbers you’ve purchased.
- Outbound Dialling
You don’t need expensive call center agents to reach out to customers via mobile technology. It’s now very easy for companies to send customised voice messages to large groups of customers and prospects.
These messages can be used to provide information about new products and special deals; or to check on customer orders and activity.
3. SMS Tagging
Many of us are bombarded with promotional text messages from multiple (and sometimes unknown) sources. As a result, we activate DND lists, and get used to ignoring these messages.
So how can you ensure that your promotional SMS gets opened and viewed by the recipient? One solution is SMS Tagging, a unique service that sends your message as part of a transactional SMS from the prospect’s operator.
Because this message comes from a trusted source (the operator) it is far more likely to be viewed – and acted upon.
In the past, SMS Tagging could be difficult to deploy because operators didn’t make it easy. However, this has now changed with the advent of CPaaS, which leads me neatly onto my next tip…
- CPaaS
This acronym stands for Communications Platform as a Service. It’s a cloud-based platform that provides companies with an easy and cost-effective way to communicate with customers and prospects via SMS, voice, email and chat.
Most importantly, it does all this without the need to build expensive and time-consuming backend infrastructure and interfaces.
In fact all the examples outlined above – Flash Calling, SMS Tagging and outbound dialling – are extremely easy to conduct using a CPaaS system. The infrastructure is established and ready to use, along with the necessary relationships – for example with all the Nigerian and West Africa’s operators. It’s a genuine plug-and-play solution.
Taking the first steps to success…
There has never been a better time for Nigerian SMEs to benefit from mobile marketing technology. Campaigns are now very easy to deploy, manage, monitor and measure.
As the industry evolves, companies like Kirusa are now enabling smaller organisations to conduct successful mobile marketing campaigns using the CPaaS and so avoiding the need for a huge capital investment.
Kirusa has been active in Nigeria and West Africa for 6+ years and is known for the high-quality voice over data services that it provides for Mobile Network Operators. The company has used its R&D team and existing expertise to develop Kirusa Konnect – a family of voice and message-based tools that organisations of all sizes can use to create unique and meaningful mobile communications campaigns for their target audiences.