Here’s the next “big thing” you ought to be taking very seriously.

There’s something really sad about SMS marketing. It’s always been “nearly” interesting but it’s never quite managed to live up to the hype. You’d expect Think Smart Marketing to have an opinion about it and we do. You’d also expect us to be looking for what’s about to break and sharing it with you when we find it and we will; and you’d expect us to have a view about how you can be using it today to be one step ahead of the less Smart Thinking organisations among us!

We won’t let you down then…. here it is.

I don’t think I’ve been alone in feeling that SMS has some way to go before I will consider it a serious B2B marketing communications tool; one that we can integrate into an overall communications strategy, gain Management Information from, build customer acquisition programmes with and see tangible and demonstrable ROI from.

In fact I know I’m not – I’ll tell you about that later.

I would be an idiot not to recognise that in some parts of the B2C sector however it has seen phenomenal success.

It seems to me that the major difference is that in the B2C sector the lines are more readily blurred between inter-personal and inter-business communication and we seem a little more accepting of what looks like comparatively remedial technology – just for the sake of expediency and the relatively low cost of communication.

I suspect that most of us however are quietly impressed when we receive a level of personal service, where a company seems to be entirely in tune with where we are, what we’re likely to want or need next and exactly when we’re likely to need it. And to some extent our knowledge that this can be done has made us almost indignant when it isn’t……for us as consumers, the same intelligent technology we’ve become dependent upon via the internet (to book flights, hire cars, buy and sell for example) or in email communications, such as this one, should extend into our mobile engagements.

It seems that after being coaxed and pampered through an internet and eMarketing experience, we are all too quickly dumped into a text based, one way, reasonably unintelligent communication via SMS and our mobile phones.

So you don’t need to be a genius to work out that the next generation of communication we can afford to take seriously is an integration between internet and mobile technologies; one that bridges the gap between our desktop and our mobile experience.

Imagine receiving messages that are timed perfectly to where you are in a process (such as a purchase or picking up a hire car) or even in terms of a building or street, “Mr Ashby your hire car, registration ABC 123, a blue Fiesta is in bay 32… turn left from where you are now and you’ll find it”. Or “Welcome to Euston, the coffee shop in Tavistock Street has a coffee and a bacon sandwich offer on, see you there!”

As a marketer imagine being able to acquire and engage an entirely new audience in a real-time two way survey or questionnaire that can then direct them to a specific stand at an event, a book in a shop, a room in a hotel or conference or the fact that the Sea Lion show starts in ten minutes and then gathering enough intelligence to continue that dialogue via the internet when they get back home or to their office.

Imagine being able to do that using rich media and intelligent (internet based interaction) and being able to track and monitor it in exactly the same way you do your eMarketing messages today.

Then imagine that you do all this on a “Pay as you Go” basis.

In my view the technology is already there (and we’ve found a great example of one provider on the cutting edge), it’s now up to us as marketers and business people to drive the technology to do what we want it to do, to work in the way that we need it to work, to decide how we can integrate it into our Marcomms programmes…just like we did with eMarketing.

Those of us who “get it” first will create new routes to market, will find incremental revenue streams, will build and maintain better loyalty programmes and will be delivering low cost up and cross sell models and will be on the leading edge of new business acquisition strategies.

It would appear that Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP) and Scott Seaborn of Ogilvy agree (see a recent discussion article) here.

To learn more about the technology or to discuss how and where this might work for your organisation and as a part of your Marcomms strategy, contact Owen Ashby.