Think Texting Is Still for the Youngsters? Change Your Mindset!

If you think SMS/text messaging is just for teens and young adults, you may be missing out on the potential of SMS marketing for your shows. While text messaging is still strongest by far in the teen and young adult segments, it has clearly evolved into a mainstream media habit. You can just take a look around and see this. However, taking a quick look at some recent stats may be more convincing for you.

In an August 24, 2010 nielsenwire blog post, there is an excellent graph showing text messaging usage by age (it also shows voice usage, which is a topic for another day). Expanding use of SMS across the age spectrum is also reflected in a July 8, 2010 comScore press release, which indicates 65.2 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device in May 2010.

In order for you to make the best decision about whether or not to use SMS to promote your shows, you must recognize that it is not just the huge number of texts being sent every day that makes SMS valuable but rather the media behavior itself. If you want to use an SMS media overlay to increase audience engagement and build an opt-in list for remarketing, the people in your target audience do not have to be sending/receiving hundreds of text messages a week. As long as a person knows how to text and engages in this activity regularly, you have the opportunity to capture incremental engagement from them.

As an event marketer, you don’t need to engage in a lot of texts with a person to drive action. In fact, in our experience, just a few texts may make the difference for a show.

Posted on September 16, 2010