While the concept of mobile advertising is becoming more understood, most people still have trouble understanding how SMS text advertising, the most popular form among small business owners, works.  Here is a quick explanation:

1.    A small business advertiser encourages customers and leads to text a special keyword through the use of other forms of advertising and promotion.  When the consumer does this, they have opted into the vendor’s mobile distribution list (similar to an email list).  A vendor can promote multiple keywords for different campaigns. 

2.    The customer who has opted into a distribution list by texting a keyword will receive an automated response message from the vendor.  The vendor has to option of setting up recurring auto-responses or even different responses for consumers who have keyed in a code word more than once. 

3.    At that point, the advertiser will periodically send out bulk SMS text messages to the entire distribution list, or even to just a small portion of the list. 

The uses for these SMS messages are only limited by your imagination.  Some uses might be for a realtor to send information about selected properties, service vendors sending appointment reminders, and restaurants sending coupons or special selection offers. 

Voting and contests by popular TV shows is one well-known way SMS text messaging has been used.  An advertising campaign could be as simple as notifying your distribution list that new post has been made to your blog.  It can be very effective to set up advertising campaigns to coordinate between email messaging, IM and text messaging. 

For small business owners to stay in touch with their customers and build relationships with potential customers, mobile advertising is quickly becoming one of the best solutions. 

Be sure to visit SmallBusinessMobileAdvertising.com to learn much more about how small businesses can use mobile phone advertising to grow their business. Make sure to get your free mobile phone advertising trial (and mention the promo code “mobilenow” and receive double the credits during your free trial period).

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