Archive for the ‘Mobile Marketing’ Category

Myrtle Beach Dining and txtMB

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

TxtMB is the area’s only interactive SMS-based marketing campaign, and it works by aggregating promotions and discounts from many area attractions and then broadcasting them directly to visitors’ cell phones. Myrtle Beach area restaurants still have an opportunity to join txtMB before the 2010 tourist season comes to a close.

Summers in Myrtle Beach usually end with a bang, not a whimper, drawing big crowds in August and into September for Labor Day festivities. Myrtle Beach area restaurants that have not yet joined txtMB can still enroll before summer ends, but the sooner the better: joining before the start of September will be crucial for getting the most out of this year’s campaign.

Labor Day Weekend
Labor Day weekend is a huge draw for tourists and locals trying to savor every last drop of summer. While people are enjoying the street parties, retail sales, and golf tournaments that are typically offered during this big holiday weekend, restaurants can help themselves stand out by putting their offerings and promotions directly in consumers’ hands. TxtMB advertises promotions for all kinds of entertainment options in Myrtle Beach, and subscribers who opt in to receive discounts to golf courses and water parks will also enjoy discounts to area restaurants.

txtMB is free to join and is used by visitors and residents alike. With so many unique dining options in the area, and with the development of the area’s new boardwalk, consumers will have much to choose from this year. TxtMB can help direct people to specific restaurants that offer discounts and give smaller, lesser-known restaurants and bars an opportunity to stand out.

Football Season
While Labor Day may signal the end of summer for many travelers, Grand Strand residents will continue to enjoy the benefits of membership to txtMB. Eateries can stay on people’s radar through the occasional SMS reminder of good deals and discounts.

September 2 offers the kickoff of college football, with NFL season beginning soon after. Restaurants with sports-viewing capability can increase the size of their crowds by getting the word out early. Offering drink or appetizer discounts is great enticement for sports fans. TxtMB provides a low-cost way to advertise discounts directly to those people who have expressed interest. Sports fans can be very loyal to the establishment of their choice, so bringing in crowds from the beginning is the key to building season-long customer loyalty. Being part of a well-targeted SMS campaign that advertises through mobile can make a big difference in a restaurant’s or sports bar’s weekend attendance.

The best part about txtMB for participating restaurants and bars is that businesses can choose which time of day their promotion is sent out, enabling food/beverage places to reach people at whatever time of day they are most likely to come in and redeem an offer. If an establishment caters to a dinner or after-dinner crowd, that restaurant can choose to send its promotion later in the day than a business that serves breakfast or lunch. Marketing directly to people wherever they are—and at the time of day they are most likely to enjoy a food or beverage promotion—will increase the rate of redemption.

txtMB offers the least expensive method of direct advertising to interested visitors and residents. Participating businesses are guaranteed that their offer will reach every person who expresses interest, and no unsolicited messages are ever sent. Contact OIR for more information about adding your restaurant’s promotion to the campaign and getting the most out of the last remaining weeks of summer.

Posted in Mobile Marketing, txtMB | No Comments »

New Mobile Campaign Includes Activities for Kids

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Thousands of families travel to Myrtle Beach each year, many of them looking for fun activities for children. Most people know that Myrtle Beach is the home to over one hundred top-notch golf courses as well as popular restaurants, resorts, and live-show venues, but it is not always easy to find kid-friendly attractions. After parents have taken their kids swimming in the ocean and hotel pool, they begin to look around for other ideas. Mobile marketing can help child-friendly businesses stand out and give vacationers and residents options for entertaining children.

Young children can be difficult to entertain on vacations because they need consistent supervision and are easily bored. Businesses that cater to children—particularly vacationing children—can optimize their marketing campaigns by including a mobile element. Taking advantage of a text campaign already in place for Myrtle Beach is an inexpensive and low risk way of getting started with mobile.

txtMB, an interactive mobile campaign that broadcasts discounts for local attractions directly to visitors’ cell phones, offers a category specifically for child- and family-friendly activities that lets vacationers know about all the things they can do with their kids. txtMB aggregates coupons, discounts, and alerts for area businesses and sends them out via text message (for free) to users who opt in. txtMB is the only comprehensive mobile campaign in the Grand Strand that gives vacationers and residents exclusive discounts directly on their cell phones so there are no coupons to remember to carry. Kid-friendly attractions can join txtMB and be guaranteed to have their company’s coupon or promotion in the hands of every parent who signs up.

Water parks, amusement parks, museums, and mini-golf courses are popular choices for parents, but with so many competing businesses—and with no way for parents unfamiliar with the area to discern among them—a mobile campaign that sends alerts directly to parents’ cell phones narrows the choices dramatically. And since new coupons are texted to subscribers’ cell phones each day, businesses are likely to see their offers redeemed the very day they are sent out.

When assessing the kid-friendly aspects of your business, don’t forget teens. Three-quarters of American teenagers have mobile phones, and texting is the fastest, most effective way to reach them. How likely is a teen to conduct his or her own extensive research about area attractions when on vacation? Not very. But businesses that offer entertainment options for teens can market to them and their parents directly through txtMB.

Offers sent to cell phones have a high open/read rate, and with txtMb, offers are guaranteed to go only to those who have expressed explicit interest in kid- and family-friendly activities. txtMB is free to subscribers and offers a simple opt-out option to people when they leave the area; it is also the area’s only mobile marketing campaign that brings together promotions from dozens of area businesses and broadcasts them to consumers directly. With the tourist season in full swing, there is no better time to join.

Posted in Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Myrtle Beach Bikers Go Mobile Too

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Hundreds of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts come to the Grand Strand each year in the spring and fall for bike rallies. While vendors compete for biker business in Myrtle Beach and the surrounding areas, a mobile marketing campaign could be the key to putting some vendors ahead of the competition.

Resorts, hotels, restaurants, bars, sporting stores, t-shirt and apparel shops, and every other business that caters to these seasonal guests should look into a text message campaign that addresses bikers’ unique interests and traveling needs. A targeted SMS campaign that invites bikers to join—in return for exclusive discounts and pertinent alerts—has enormous potential to expand a client base and gain interested customers who are guaranteed to bring friends and to return seasonally.

Business owners who want to make the most of the upcoming Grand Strand Fall Rally this September can launch an SMS campaign that sends out one or two texts per day advertising an exclusive discount. Remember that the bikers who come down here for the Fall Rally tend to ride socially, traveling with friends and other enthusiasts. Keeping that in mind, take advantage of the viral nature of a text campaign. Many of the motorcycle enthusiasts come down with a group and meet even more people once here. If your deal is a good one, your subscribers will spread the word; those who redeem your offer are also likely to bring guests to your establishment. All of this can increase your marketing pool exponentially.

An SMS campaign for the Grand Strand bike rallies is particularly manageable for even small businesses new to mobile marketing because the timeline of the campaign is so limited. The local bike rallies tend to last only 5 or 10 days, depending on the season, so even daily or twice-daily messages do not risk overexposing your advertisements. And any biker who does not opt out at the end of his or her stay can be remarketed to next year. If your business decides to offer mobile marketing this fall during the Grand Strand Bike Rally, the numbers collected can be reused again in the spring before and during Bike Week in May.

The Grand Strand’s Fall Rally is set to start soon. Since there will be fewer vendors in the fall than there were in May, now is a good time to get your marketing campaign off the ground and establish yourself as Bike Week’s major mobile marketer. Then, when the larger rally comes in the spring, your business will be that much more ahead. Chances are, people will remember you again and will tell their friends. OIR’s TextBoard offers an inexpensive and very simple platform for organizing a text campaign and sending automatic, regular alerts to all your opt-ins.

Posted in General, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Myrtle Beach Mini Golf Can Reap Benefits of Mobile Marketing Campaign

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Miniature golf is a fun and popular pastime, and an activity of choice for hundreds of thousands of families who visit the Grand Strand every year. In spite of the fact that there are dozens of miniature golf courses in the Myrtle Beach region, there is, surprisingly, no central place for course owners to advertise their discounts and deals. There are also very few places that tourists, parents, and mini-golf enthusiasts can obtain coupons. Several of the area’s discount-promoting sources require a paid membership; otherwise, you just have to be lucky and stumble upon a useful coupon.

Fortunately, a new marketing co-op has just begun, advertising discounts and promotions exclusively for Myrtle Beach Businesses. With txtMB and its ability to broadcast coupons and alerts directly to visitors’ cell phones, miniature golf courses can get their promotions out to every vacationer who expresses an interest.

The cost of joining the area co-op txtMB is very small because it spreads the costs of a mobile campaign over many businesses. For a small monthly fee, mini-golf course owners can join the campaign and have their chosen coupon or promotion sent to mobile phones of every resident or visitor who expresses an interest. Business owners do not have to gather the names or numbers of interested people, or keep track of new opt-ins and recent opt-outs, or invest in any special technology or equipment to participate in a mobile marketing campaign. TxtMB does all that for you. All you have to do is decide upon the enticing deal you want to send out, and then enjoy the benefits of having all the marketing and advertising done for you.

The best part of txtMB is its targeting ability. Your deals will be sent primarily to people who express an interest in playing miniature golf within the next 15 days. Of course, subscribers can remain in the campaign to receive discounts for as long as they like, but many people who sign up for txtMB offers are vacationers looking for daily activities, so they are most likely to take advantage of area offers very soon after receiving them. With txtMB, you do not waste your budget advertising to indifferent people; the only consumers txtMB sends to are those who have specifically requested information and discounts to area golfing.

TxtMBalready offers deals to over a dozen local golf courses that golf enthusiasts can enjoy, but mini golf—which is also very popular and particularly kid-friendly for vacationers—is underrepresented and would benefit from a targeted, interactive marketing campaign that puts discounts directly in customers’ hands. And while txtMB will appeal most heavily to vacationers now, consider the longer-term advantages of a mobile campaign on the mini-golf slow season. Even after the tourist season slows down, txtMB will continue to broadcast mini golf deals to the local subscribers and give the participating courses an edge on the competition.

Posted in Golf, Interactive Marketing, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Stores Go Mobile Before Students Go Back to School

Monday, August 16th, 2010

The Back-to-School season is already here. This is the best time of year for retail businesses to draw in parents, teens, and college students who will be spending a lot of money on clothes, shoes, backpacks, lunch boxes, dorm essentials, and school supplies. If you’ve never tried mobile marketing before, back-to-school season is a great time to start.

You have three large demographics to consider: parents, teens, and college kids. Your mobile campaign should take into account your products, and from that, the mobile usage of your targeted demographic. If you sell items for younger children (clothing, lunch boxes, elementary school supplies), you are obviously attracting parents, and a successful mobile campaign will consider the deals most valued to this group. Research continues to show that adults in their 30’s rely heavily on texting; an SMS campaign for this group is a great way to promote your deals. You may develop a campaign in which parents opt in to receive announcements about sales and deals, or you may invite people to text keywords to receive a discount coupon on their back-to-school shopping. In doing so, you not only help your business stand out from the many school-supply competitors, but you gain their permission to remarket to them in the future.

If your target audience is teens who may or may not shop with their parents, consider the kinds of deals that will appeal to them and how you can use SMS to reach them. Unsurprisingly, 75% of teens aged 12-17 own a mobile device, while 50% of teens send at least 50 texts per day.1 Teens are most likely to opt in to an SMS campaign if something comes with it.

An incentive like a free item is especially helpful in attracting teens, as are contests and polls, which are very popular and
go viral quickly. Remember that teens tend to stay in frequent contact with friends, so a great incentive or contest will get passed around quickly and can reach a lot of people for a small investment.

College-aged students have unique back-to-school needs, which often include not only study materials but also living and traveling essentials. Most college-aged students continue their “back to school” shopping long after school has started because new needs come up with the changing semesters and because their living arrangements are more frequently adjusted. Consider SMS and email campaigns that reward loyalty. Encourage mobile clubs in which membership grants continuing discounts and incentives, making consumers more likely to remain on your business’s marketing list even after school begins. Since 95% of people aged 18-29 use text messaging, and 65% access the internet from their mobile device, develop a mobile marketing strategy that can reach college-aged shoppers directly on their devices.2

No matter what your marketing strategy, a mobile component can and should be incorporated for the back-to-school season. Updating your website is crucial, and it is particularly helpful if your site is customized for mobile so that the many smartphone owners—teens and young adults in particular—can access your site and promotions as they shop in your store. You can even use your store to advertise your mobile campaign just by hanging signs that invite people to text a keyword for an instant discount. This is totally free advertising for you, and it guarantees that you will grow your contact list with the mobile numbers of interested shoppers for future remarketing. Develop a mobile marketing strategy to build or expand your contact list and create a loyal base of customers who will return year after year for their school shopping.

Posted in Interactive Marketing, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Mobile Gift Cards for the Busy Shopper

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Mobile gift cards are the next step in gift-shopping for Americans. Already a growing number of businesses offer shoppers the opportunity to purchase mobile gift cards, which greatly simplifies the gift-card transaction and eliminates postage, shipping/handling fees, and time delays associated with traditional gift cards.

Developing a strategy for mobile gift cards does not have to involve expensive equipment or complex application development. The technology can be simple, and the more straightforward and convenient for the average mobile user, the more popular it will be.

One way to reach out to consumers with mobile gift cards is by having a website customized for mobile. Not every cell phone user is a smartphone owner—only about a quarter—but those who do use their smartphones use them a lot. If they can access an easy-to-navigate mobile site that allows them to purchase a gift card and have it directly sent to a friend’s cell phone number, they are far more likely to shop with you than your competitor.

But even for non-smartphone-owning customers, mobile gift cards can be a huge draw. When a customer purchases a gift card from a business, whether online or in person, he or she can be given the option of having the gift card sent as a text to a recipient’s cell phone. The gift card contains a code, and can be used exactly the same way a physical gift card is used, with purchases deducted from the amount and unused balances saved automatically.

When considering whether or not mobile gift cards are right for your business, ask yourself: What are the biggest reasons people choose not to purchase gift cards?

Shoppers do not always know what stores are local for a long-distance friend or relative. People don’t want to guess and hope that a certain retail or dining establishment is in the recipient’s neighborhood. Customized mobile sites and location-based applications tell shoppers right away what shops are convenient to the recipient. Have store-locating information prominent on your mobile website.
Mailing physical cards is a pain. When a shopper purchases a gift card from a physical establishment, she or he must consider the postage and process for mailing the card. While many stores will ship the card to the recipient, the shipping/handling fees are annoying—especially when a customer is charged $4.99 to ship a $10 or $20 gift card. A mobile gift card sent by text incurs only the messaging fee (if there is one), which is far less than a shipping fee.

Shoppers do not want to wait in long and inconvenient customer service lines. This applies primarily to large shopping malls and outlets, where the gift-card purchasing process is time-consuming and out of the way of a customer’s normal shopping routine. Particularly during the holiday season, when the lines look endless, a mobile gift-card buying process would appeal to many time-limited shoppers.

Shoppers are not sure that the card will be used. Even if you know that the store is in the recipient’s region, can you be sure that he or she will remember to carry the card around? But you never wonder if your friends and relatives will remember to carry their cell phones. Mobile gift cards can be stored for as long as the user owns the phone number, ensuring the gift card is with that person any time he or she shops.

A knowledgeable developer can customize your website for mobile and work with you to create mobile gift cards that are sent via text message. Like mobile coupons, they reach interested shoppers instantly and cheaply. Using the automated gift card technology you already have in place, mobile technology can expand your market reach, make you more convenient and tech-savvy than your competitors, and ultimately give you a huge edge with mobile shoppers.

Posted in Interactive Marketing, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Mobile Marketing for Myrtle Beach Hotels: Three Ideas

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Another tourist season is here and the millions of vacationers coming to Myrtle Beach from all over the U.S. will need accommodations. There are many beautiful hotels and resorts on the Grand Strand, but most are not nationally-known brands that out-of-towners will immediately know to search. Hoteliers trying to gain more visibility can consider a few ideas.

Improve Your SEO

It is 2010. So, of course, you have a website. (Right?) A well-designed website is a must. With the growing ubiquity of mobile devices and public WiFi hotspots, today’s travelers do online research not only before their trip, but during it as well, so an online presence for your business is essential to staying competitive. For hotels and resorts, a website creates the opportunity to make a visual argument about your services. Your site should feature a photo gallery with pictures of rooms, amenities, and your particular view of the beautiful Atlantic.

But what good is all that visual bragging if no one can find your site on Google? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a service that makes your site visible to popular search engines; the better your SEO, the higher your website will appear on a search engine’s “results” page. Thus, your SEO is directly related to your number of hits. It is imperative that your site is designed and coded properly with strategies for maximum SEO in mind.

Get Mobile

Many hotels and resorts in Myrtle Beach have some kind of website, but how many are customized for mobile? The sale of smartphones is on the continual rise, enabling Americans to do just about everything from their mobile devices: email, research, shopping, etc. Travelers in particular depend on their mobile devices to provide them with location-based services, so customizing your website for mobile is another must.

But here, again, the right web developer is vital. Just as you need a qualified developer who can format and code your website to suit SEO, you also need one who understands the purpose of a mobile website. The best mobile websites are not merely shrunken versions of the original desktop sites, but they are sites that understand the consumer habits most prevalent in mobile usage. Mobile users, and tourists especially, are people on the go; they are less likely to be browsing and more likely to be goal-oriented in their searches: they want directions, availability, contact info, and real-time rates. A mobile website should be as easy to navigate as possible, and if consumers can book their room right from their mobile device, you are several steps ahead of your competitors.

Go Viral

Take advantage of social media and the viral nature of email by encouraging your promotions to be passed around. Have a great deal to offer? Make it as unique and appealing as possible and advertise it on your website encouraging people to link to it. If you have an email campaign in place, include your special promotion in an email message, inviting people to forward it to friends and family members. This not only creates rapid, viral advertising for your hotel, but it will boost your search engine ranking while expanding your market reach.

In the era of mobile marketing, the only limit is your own creativity. Designing a marketing strategy that intersects web, email, and mobile campaigns is a guaranteed way to increase your visibility and stand out from the many Myrtle Beach hotels and resorts. The more people can learn about your services before they arrive, the better the business interaction—for them and for your brand.

Posted in Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

OIR Can Make Your Site Ideal for Mobile

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Even with the number of mobile web users growing daily, smartphone purchases on the rise, and mobile web usage predicted to soon outpace desktop web access, many websites, unfortunately, are still not adapted for mobile. Failure to design a site specifically for mobile usage—ignoring the wide variety of available applications as well as consumer habits—leads to a poor user experience. The growth of mobile web users offers enormous potential for businesses and advertisers, but only for those who make smart use of the technology and adapt their site to adequately compete in the market.

The most important thing to remember when developing your company’s website is that people interact differently with a mobile site than they do with a desktop site. Since the navigation on smartphone is more tactile, and since users are often engaged in other activities while using their devices, people who visit mobile sites are usually looking for something specific. Unlike the typical desktop site user who may be browsing for information or comparison shopping in multiple windows simultaneously, typical mobile users are on the move, and thus, more goal-oriented in their web usage. They may want directions, pricing, or a quick way to contact you.

A mobile site is 100% different from a desktop site in terms of the end goal, which is why businesses should take the time to develop a mobile site that reflects consumer behavior. And while we are hearing about all the innovative features of new devices like Apple’s iPhone 4, keep in mind that not every phone supports elaborate images and videos or display settings. An effective mobile site, therefore, should be navigable for all users so that it can enjoy as extensive a market reach as possible.

OIR will develop or adapt your site so that it is compatible with advanced features of a smartphone but will work well with other phones, too. This is where device detection can be vital: OIR can design your website with an eye toward how it is viewed on a variety of devices. This ensures that the user experience will be positive for desktop site users and mobile users of various devices.

Redesign Your Site for Mobile

Most companies with extant desktop sites are already tracking some kind visitor data to the site. OIR can determine which types of computers accessing this site, including mobile devices. Analyzing the content that those mobile devices have been most heavily accessing gives a good indication of what mobile users will want from that particular company’s site. This, in turn, helps dictate the mobile content that should be offered.

Using device detection helps differentiate the desktop users from the mobile ones, and we can also use that detection to serve up different “levels” of content. If we detect a device that supports things like CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript, then we can offer a more enriched version of the website. In general, OIR will build a mobile site with high performance and sophisticated visuals for the benefit of advanced devices, but will degrade gracefully on older or more basic devices.

If you haven’t developed a site specifically for mobile, or if your site would benefit from redesign and/or updating to be accessible to the highly variant mobile technologies, OIR can help. OIR is the only interactive marketing company in Myrtle Beach that specializes in email, web, and mobile marketing, and we can create the perfect mobile site for your business.

Posted in Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Mobile and Email Marketing for Myrtle Beach Golf Courses

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Myrtle Beach is one of the most popular golf resort locales in the U.S. and people come from all over the country to golf for recreation, business, and tournaments. For course owners, that is the good news. The bad news, unfortunately, is that being part of one of the most attractive golfing regions in the country means that your competition is at its peak. Myrtle Beach visitors have access to over 100 nearby courses. How will they know to choose yours?

To stand out from your competition, you have to market aggressively and with an eye toward long-term loyalty. Paying attention to shifts in consumer behavior will give you an edge over your competitors and allow you to use technology to reach likely golfers in ways that are both direct and cost-effective.

Three solutions:

Email Marketing

Sending out email messages that advertise exclusive deals, discounts, and event announcements is instantaneous and the cost is nominal. But blindly emailing tons of people who may be totally indifferent to your offer is a waste of time and money and may weaken your brand by creating an unfavorable impression of your business as a spammer. Instead, develop a targeted email campaign in which your clients are invited to opt in to receive information about your course. Golfing can become an expensive habit for the true enthusiasts, many of whom will be attracted to the idea of exclusive deals available only to those on your email list. OIR offers complete management of your email campaign, including designing, sending, monthly reporting, and data analysis.

SMS

Billions of text messages are sent and opened each month, and SMS offers a method of advertising faster and more direct than any other used today. Typical text messages are opened within only minutes of receipt, and thus make an excellent way of communicating with your clients about short-notice tee times or last minute deals designed to bring people to your course that very day or weekend. OIR offers all the tools you need to start and manage an SMS campaign that lets you craft text messages and send them out at whatever frequency suits your marketing goals. We also track the effectiveness of your keywords and advertising venues so that you can adjust your campaign utilizing only what works.

txtMB

If you are new to mobile marketing or want to test its effectiveness before launching your own campaign, consider joining txtMB, the area’s newest interactive campaign designed specifically for Myrtle Beach visitors. txtMB is a cooperative marketing campaign that gathers together promotions from many area businesses and sends text-message deals directly to interested people’s cell phones. txtMB offers its subscribers exclusive deals to area events and attractions, and it offers advertisers a cost-sharing model that enables them to participate in a text marketing campaign without absorbing all of the expense. Upon joining txMB, a subscriber has the option to select announcements about Golf deals specifically, and will then start receiving text ads (no more than three per day) for area courses. txtMB ensures that all people who specify a golf interest (and only those people) will receive your message. Tourists often like to try out different courses, and txtMB can make sure yours is on their radar.

For more information about how OIR can help you make use of technology to attract more clients and reward the ones you have, contact us at 843-628-1619, or email us at sms@oirinteractive.com

Posted in Email Marketing, Golf, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

A Cooperative Mobile Marketing Strategy for Myrtle Beach

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Harnessing mobile technology to reach clients—current and potential—is becoming less of a novelty and more of a necessity for any business that wants to stay on the cutting edge. Mobile marketing, and SMS text-message marketing in particular, allows your business to reach consumers at any time of day, anywhere they happen to be, on the one device they never leave home without.

In addition to being one of the fastest growing marketing trends, SMS marketing is also one of the least expensive. The high opt-in and coupon-redemption rates make SMS one of the most practical, far-reaching, and cost-effective ways to advertise. In our challenging economy, consider the benefits of integrating SMS into your company’s marketing strategy.

New Opportunity for Myrtle Beach

Myrtle Beach businesses can now take advantage of all the benefits of SMS marketing at an even lower price than before by joining a new cooperative marketing campaign that spreads the cost over several area businesses. Want to try mobile marketing, but not sure if your budget is big enough? Not sure if your campaign will reach enough people or be enticing enough to make a difference? Or, does your business cater predominantly to a tourist client base that turns over too quickly to take advantage of all your offers? If any of these apply to you, an SMS co-op is the way to go. txtMB is the area’s newest interactive marketing campaign that gathers together all the promotions from area businesses and broadcasts them directly to visitors’ cell phones. Created by OIR Interactive, txtMB is designed to be a one-stop-shop for tourists to gain access to exclusive deals from area restaurants and attractions.

What We Do

We do extensive local advertising on billboards and through newspaper and broadcasting venues inviting people to text business-appropriate keywords to our short code. For example, one billboard advertisement invites people to text FOOD in order to receive coupons to local restaurants, while another ad invites people to text GOLF for local deals and discounts. Once a person responds to our call-to-action, he or she becomes a subscriber to our network and receives an instant message with our terms; subscribers can opt-out at any time by simply texting STOP. People can also enroll through our website, txtMB.com. Subscribers are invited to choose as many business categories that interest them and will receive messages that pertain only to their selected interests. And membership to txtMB is free!

We coordinate deals, promotions, and discount coupons from our participating sponsors and send them out each day to our subscriber list. We guarantee that your business’s promotion will be sent out to each person who has opted in to your category.

What You Do

First, decide which category or categories your business fits (Golf, Dining, Entertainment, Attractions, Nightlife, etc.). Then, choose a promotion that you want sent to interested consumers. This can be a coupon or promotional announcement, and OIR can help you come up with creative incentives if you are new to mobile marketing. Finally, decide which day and time of day your promotion should go out. Do you want to reach people in the morning, as they are making their activity decisions for the day? Or do you want to reach people later in the day, just as they are making lunch or dinner plans? Do you want your advertisement to go out on Day 1, or later in the campaign? You even have the option to have your promotion sent out instantly, reaching users seconds after they opt in.

During the 5-day campaign promotions are sent out three times per day, each day, with your promotion going out during the day and time you’ve chosen. After the first five days, the campaign frequency slows down to one message per day—sending out each sponsor’s promotion on a rotational basis—until the user opts out.  This prevents people from receiving extraneous messages after they have left the area. And it does not matter when a user joins the campaign: the initial message, follow-up message, and subsequent series of messages will all be the same and last for the same amount of time. So make your business’s promotion something that can be redeemed any time.

Why join? A Few Good Reasons:

Cost Sharing

For less than $100 a month your business can buy into the Myrtle Beach co-op, txtMB, and begin participating in a targeted mobile marketing campaign. We make this possible with a price tier structure in which you can choose a monthly payment that correlates to your preferred advertising day and time slot. Instant messages are the most expensive, but also get the highest redemption rate and ROI because they reach every subscriber as soon as he or she joins the campaign.

Client Sharing

Everyone who golfs also eats, and most people who vacation on the Grand Strand appreciate the variety of shopping and entertainment options Myrtle Beach affords. We orchestrate our campaign so that our participating sponsors can advertise non-competing business categories in their stores, thereby promoting other txtMB categories to their customers. Retail shops, for instance, advertise our food or entertainment calls-to-action, while restaurants and attractions advertise calls-to-action for dining. This way, the entire network benefits by reaching as many visitors as possible, growing the profit-potential for everyone.

Start Small, Plan Big

Joining txtMB is a great way to get started with mobile marketing if you’ve never tried it before. The risk is very small, but you can experiment with different types of promotions and advertising time slots to see what gets the best ROI.

After a season with txtMB you may choose to expand your mobile marketing initiatives and start your own separate campaign. Get you own keyword, build your own client list and send out more frequent messages to your subscribed customers.

Joining txtMB will allow your business a cost-effective entry into text marketing without reducing your control over advertising decisions. You have control over the type of advertisement you want to send, the campaign day you’d like it sent (Day 1 through 5), and time of day that makes the most sense for your business. OIR must approve your offer, only to make sure that it complies with our high standards for appropriate marketing. We can also help you design your promotions or craft your messages to maximize effectiveness.

With another tourist season upon us, and an economy that is recovering slower than we’d like, a cost- and client-sharing marketing plan is an ideal way to reach visitors for a small investment. Text messages are received instantly and typically opened within only minutes. SMS texting is the most direct method of marketing available, and our co-op campaign guarantees that only interested people receive our offers. No unsolicited messages are ever sent.

To become a participating sponsor, contact OIR Interactive to get started. Call us at 843-628-1619, or email us at sms@oirinteractive.com

We look forward to introducing your business to SMS marketing and, with the collaboration of our area sponsors, creating a convenient venue for visitors to make the most of their time in Myrtle Beach!

Posted in General, Interactive Marketing, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

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