Inspiring SMS Campaigns

SME marketing is a very multi-faceted exercise nowadays, consisting of far more than the newspaper/radio/television golden trio of the 90s! Now web-based campaigns, blogs, search engine optimisation and scheduling text messages for marketing have all become viable and cost effective means of branding and drawing customers to your business. It can be difficult to see the way forward with scheduled SMS message promotions, though, so today we aim to lead by example. We're checking out 4 of the biggest and best SMS advertising campaign ideas!

McDonalds and Monsters Inc Text to Win campaign

McDonalds has the big budget to make sure they don't have to do anything by halves, so it's not surprising that their very first scheduled SMS campaign went exceptionally well. Consumers had to text in a code on their box of French fries to see if they had won a prize, either small instant style prizes or major ones.

Guinness and the World Cup

When you are able to capitalisee on the buzz surrounding a big event and tie it inextricably to your scheduled SMS campaign, the results can be massive! A Nightfly-led campaign involved Guinness, St Patricks Day, World Cup soccer and an Asda beer promotion. It was a crazy sort of campaign - some of the main items on offer included wigs of David Beckham's Mohawk and Bobby Charlton's sweep-over - but around 49% of the 10,000 people that received an offer redeemed it!

UIP

This SME promotion campaign is one to think about for when your budget is much bigger, and you're far more used to scheduled SMS message marketing … but is so inspiring we couldn’t leave it out! The teen spook film Long Time Dead was promoted with a text-message intelligent Ouija board that responded to questions like 'What is the meaning of life'!! The average respondent sent 20 messages about the campaign and contacted the board 3 times.

Cadbury's Text to Win

This scheduled SMS message campaign ran during the 2002 Commonwealth Games on 78 million packets of selected Cadbury chocolate bars, with each pack containing a special code to text in and check if you’d won a prize.