But, wait, it’s 1:17 PM – far past lunch time for most people in the Eastern time zone. I just happened to be eating that late because I got delayed. Sure, the text coupon is good through the 11th of November, but do they have any idea how many text messages I will receive between now and the next time I decide to eat out – even if that is tomorrow at lunch? I’ll probably entertain at least 100 text messages before I eat out again – maybe even more.

However, if I had received the text coupon at 11:30 AM, I might have actually gone to Arby’s instead of where I was seated now. My stomach would have thanked me and my wallet would have, too. But, because the timing was off, Arby’s lost the opportunity to capture my business today and possibly may not capture it for the remainder of the time that the coupon is good.

Text Marketing is a very powerful method of reaching your customers. Why?

Because a text coupon finds your customer – your customer doesn’t have to find the coupon. How many times have you looked feverishly for a coupon never to find it. Then, a few days later, you find it, but it expired the day you were looking for it originally. A text coupon can reach your customer where ever they are.

Because a text coupon can find your customer when they are in the buying (or decision making) mode. Sure, Facebook Deals is a powerful marketing method – but the customer is more than likely already at your establishment, so why do they need a coupon to entice them to buy when they just “checked in”.

Because a text coupon can reach ANY potential customer with a cell phone that can receive a text message (and over 90% of phones can receive a text message unless the user has blocked them). While Facebook Deals, Foursquare, Mobile Coupons, and such are really sharp looking and can reach your audience with some really cool deals, they only reach those people with “smart phones”. Facebook deals can only reach people with iPhones and Android phones at this point. What about the other 80% of your potential customer base that has a standard cell phone? A text coupon can reach them with enticing deals that bring them in the door.

However, Text Marketing has some drawbacks. What are they?

Trackability - you must make provisions in your POS system to track redemptions since there is no paper coupon for the consumer to bring in. If your register system allows it, you can simply program a button or code on your register to track it. If this is not an option, simply use a business card size paper with something denoting “Text Coupon” on it and staple it to the register tape, put it in the drawer or where ever, and then you can track sales from it. Regardless, be sure to get your team’s buy-in on tracking it. Don’t let them take the easy way out and just “comp” out the item – that doesn’t help you or them in the long run.

Abuse – I hear this quite often. “Well, what if they come in several times and use the coupon?” If the text coupon is tied to a sale, then have you really lost anything. If the customer would have come in once without the coupon, but now comes in two or three times with the same coupon, you’ve made three sales from sending one text coupon. You’ve actually increased your ROI on that campaign because you only paid for ONE text coupon to be sent while getting three redemptions. Plus, you’ve had three opportunities to impress the customer to the point that they return with either friends or that they return without a coupon the next time.

Sharing – “What if they share the coupon with their friends?” First, would you loan your cell phone to a friend while they go to lunch? I probably would not. But, I would probably forward the text coupon on to them if we were going together. Regardless, even if one person has the text coupon on their phone and a group of six is sharing the text coupon, if it’s tied to a sale, have you really lost anything? Just as with the “abuse” answer, you are actually picking up sales and opportunities to impress customers with your product and service.

So realistically, text marketing really doesn’t have any drawbacks if you make a concerted effort to track the results. Get your team on board with it and maybe even promote it within your team offering a small prize for the team that gets the most signups over a period of time.

At Maverick Growth Solutions, we can help you design a text marketing strategy that fits your business needs. If you’d like to become a part of a larger text marketing strategy than just your business customer list, then check into our TxtDealz system. This is effectively a marketing co-op of local businesses but is run by Maverick Growth Solutions – a company that is only marketing. We don’t sell lawn services, dry cleaning, meals, or anything else. We serve the local businesses and consumers here in Clarke, Oconee, and the surrounding counties. Call us today at 706-363-0202 to see how one of our text marketing strategies could help you market your busienss to local consumers looking to do business with you.

Click here to watch the video or continue to read and click the link at the end of this article.

This video demonstrates the value of Social Media answering the question that many business owners have, “Can Social Media benefit my business and provide a positive return on investment?”

To begin, we must define Social Media (for those that are unfamiliar with the term). Social Media is having a presence on the internet where people gather. These types of media are places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and a host of other sites. The most common comments we hear are things like, “I just don’t get Twitter.” and “How can I get any business from Facebook?”

Even though we can answer these questions with results, we recently answered theses questions from a personal experience. On a recent Sunday after church, we decided to take our families out for a Pizza Buffet. But, being frugal as we are, we were wondering what coupons were available from our favorite pizza restaurant. We simply visited their Twitter profile and in about a minute, we had our answer, knew which paper had the coupons, and were cutting those coupons out to go to lunch. Without the quick use of Twitter, we probably would have searched for the coupons for 30 minutes or so. Plus, if we couldn’t have found the coupons, we probably would have gone to a different restaurant that we had a coupon for. Twitter brought that pizza restaurant a sale that they otherwise would have missed.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at different cell phone providers and in doing our research, we decided to “Become a Fan” of the Facebook Pages for each of the companies we were considering – and even some that we were not considering. This allowed us to connect with people making comments on those fan pages and read their comments (both positive and negative) to learn the good and the bad about each of the cell phone providers. The result? we ended up changing our cell phone provider. For less money than we were paying before, we now have unlimited minutes, text, and more internet time that we could possibly use in a give month. Oh, and did we mention, we didn’t have to buy new phones because the ones we had would work with this provider. At 9:06 PM, our phones were working on the original provider, and at 9:09 PM, the first phone had been changed over to the new provider – seamless and we didn’t have to stand in a store waiting to be helped.

Does Social Media work? Can it have a positive Return on Investment (ROI)? What do you think? For the cell phone company what was their investment? The had one of their employees (or their internet marketing company like us) establish their Facebook Fan Page and probably monitor it for comments. For the Pizza Restaurant, their internet marketing company established their Twitter page (and their Facebook account) and the marketing group feeds the info to their pages. Their investment was very small compared to their costs to market using traditional methods.

If you’ve not taken the time to watch the video yet, we encourage you to take just over four minutes to watch it now! Click here to watch the video You might be amazed at the facts revealed in the video.

I’ve watched these several times and I always come back to the same question in my mind, “Who Are They Marketing To?” They’re not really selling a product – at least not a product that I’m going to buy. How many people are going to watch one of these commercials and then pick up the phone to say, “Hello, Boeing. Yes, I’d like to buy one of those 767′s. Can you deliver it tomorrow?” I’d venture a guess that probably NO ONE is going to do that.

So what is the purpose of the commercial? I don’t know for certain, but I’ll take a guess – in a moment?

How about other similar companies that have produced very slick marketing campaigns that when you take a moment to examine them, they leave you asking similar questions? Remember the old BASF commercials? “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy; we make a lot of the products you buy better!” I always wondered, “O.K. What is being sold here?” I always came to the conclusion, “I dunno”. Since I couldn’t run out and buy a BASF computer screen, a BASF red dress for my wife, or any of the other products that BASF claimed that they made better, I always felt it was a total waste of marketing dollars.

O.K. so “Who are they marketing to?” Well, at first glance, it appears that both of these companies are either marketing a product that no one can buy – either because of price OR because they don’t make a product to buy – or just throwing away money on marketing that doesn’t even sell their product. And that is true, one could easily reason that some marketing person (or company) was very impressed with their slick and creative marketing campaign and sold it very well to upper management. However, this is only part of the story.

These videos were probably produced to make investors feel compelled to buy stock in these companies. Notice that both of these commercials tout the innovative nature of the company, the quality of what they produce, and the necessity of their product to the world. These videos are probably produced to elicit a specific emotional response from someone that has funds to invest in these companies.

I still contend that these commercials are probably being placed in front of the wrong audience at the wrong time. But, that’s the problem with traditional marketing methods. You can’t really control who sees your marketing or when they see it – other than your chosen outlet and time frame.

Using “non-traditional” methods of marketing, you can place your marketing in front of your potential customer at the very moment that they are looking for your product or service and are ready to buy.

Contact us today to learn how you can put the power of the internet to work for you – connecting you with customers who are looking for your product or service.

If you’d like to see the Boeing Commercial…

Or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

This video shows some of the power of the internet and social media. In the past few years, the internet (specifically high speed internet) has changed the way everyone does everything. If your business is not adapting to this change, you may find yourself spending more and more money to market to a smaller and smaller audience. Contact us today to discuss how you can capture the power of the internet to market your buisness to a growing group of people.

The statistics in the video are included below for your consideration:

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
- 96% of them have joined a social network

Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web

1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via social media

Number of years to reach 50 million users:

- Radio
- TV
- Internet
- iPod

- 38 Years
- 13 Years
- 4 Years
- 3 Years

However:
- Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months
- iPod application downloads hit 1 Billion in 9 months

If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s fourth largest. The top five would be:
- China
- India
- United States
- Facebook
- Indonesia
Yet China’s QZone is larger than Facebook with over 300 million using their service

A 2009 US Department of Education survey revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction

1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females

Ashton Kutcher & Ellen Degenres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway, and Poland

80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
- people update anywhere, anytime
Now, imagine what that means for bad customer service

Generation Y and Z consider email passe’
- In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming Freshmen

What happens in Vegas stays on…
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Orkut
- Bebo
- FlickR
- DIGG
- MySpace
- YouTube

In fact, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
>100,000,000 videos exist on YouTube

Wiki is an Hawaiian term meaning quick
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
- Studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica
- 78% of these areticles are non-English
If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23….per hour

There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
-54% of bloggers post content or Tweet daily

Word of Mouth (or more appropriately World of Mouth)
- 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
Do you like what they are saying about your brand?
YOU BETTER!!!!
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
Only 14% trust advertisements

Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can TiVo ads – actually do

Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009

70% of 18- to 34-year olds have watched TV on the web
- only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo
- 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle

24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
- In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services…they will find us via social media

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate

More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…DAILY

In 1992, James Carville stated “It’s the economy stupid.” but in 2009, Erik Qualman changed that to “It’s a people driven economy stupid.”

Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy
- Listening first, selling second

Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Still think Social Media is a Fad?

Are You Ready?!?

Contact Us Today To Begin Using the Power of the Internet and Have More Customers Finding You Where They’re Looking For You