As we all know, integrating all of your marketing communications with one clear message and a similar feel is far more effective at driving a strong response from consumers, and sending texts online is no exception to this.

Setting up short codes for people to text in a word for more information, to receive an offer or enter a competition, is an easy way to integrate mobile marketing with other more tradition advertising methods such as TV and print. Mobile is a great way of making traditional mediums more measurable - determining effectiveness by response rates - and it also makes your brand feel accessible at any time.

Sending out texts can also broaden the reach of other mobile marketing efforts, as texts are not limited by device capabilities or data usage limits. Sending texts online can also assist consumers in finding a mobile app you may have created, remind them to use it or inform them of any updates. Texting can also drive people to other richer media experiences too, by providing a link to your mobile website for example.

The great thing about texting is that it is in real-time; you can let people know about upcoming offers, or reward customer loyalty with advanced offers. Mobile network O2 is great at this. You could also provide teaser content as a way of letting your customers know when a product or service is being released. Techniques like this are highly successful as they make consumers feel engaged with your brand, and more likely to notice your other marketing efforts and use your products or services as a result.

Integrating online texting is easy and can enhance your other marketing efforts at very little cost to you. Currently sending texts online is an under-used medium, possibly because texts have been around for so long they don’t have that shiny new feel to them, but they are incredibly effective for informing and engaging with your consumers, which is great when two-way communication and relationship building is so key to marketing now.

Competitions are a great way of increasing the interactivity between your brand and consumers. Sms competitions are fun and offer a clear benefit to consumers; a key concern with sms marketing is to be adding value so as not feel intrusive. With competitions, consumers can gain something with little effort or money and entering is quick, able to be completed instantly. This means that text competitions have high response rates as people are more likely to take the time to enter, simply because it doesn’t actually take much time!

Setting up a text competition is easy, they are quick to implement and can be very targeted and personalised. With so many mobile phone users, the potential reach is huge and the effort required from organisers is very minimal. Competitions which require phone or postal entries are time consuming for both organisers and consumers; they also require a lot of manpower which pushes up the cost of running the competition. Text competitions are more cost effective as the system used to implement the competition collects all entries for you, and can even select the winner(s) at random too.

You can send out competitions to your existing consumer base, rewarding them for their loyalty, or you can use it as an opportunity to gain new customers by using a text competition as the call to action on your traditional advertising methods; this also allows you to build your mobile numbers database at the same time.

Using things like text competitions, promoted via existing marketing efforts, also has the potential to help you assess the exposure of and attention paid to your traditional advertising, as you can see how many people decided to enter. If you’re feeling fancy, you could even use different keywords on different forms of promotion to assess which method works best for your company, by looking at the most used keyword by entrants (e.g. ‘text WIN to ...’ on a poster and ‘text ENTER to ...’ on a door drop).

There is also potential to make back some money with reverse billing enabling you to charge people to enter, this is optional, it can be free for people to enter. One last thing, it is considered best practice to send a confirmation text to entrants which thanks them for entering, and can remind them of the end date or when they’ll hear if they’ve won.