Big Miami Show Dials into Mobile Marketing

Newspapers. Trade pubs. Magazines. Outdoor. Television. Cable. Direct mail. Email. Online display. Social. The 50th Anniversary Original Miami Beach Antique Show is employing a wide set of media channels to attract buyers to see more than 800 national and international dealers from 22 countries that will be showcasing millions of dollars of antiques, art and jewelry next month at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Based on a successful SMS marketing test in 2010, text messaging will take its place alongside these other channels and for 2011 be tasked with a specific objective—maximize ROI on the significant print media spend. This will be accomplished by integrating an SMS call-to-action (CTA) into local newspaper ads, which provides a special registration offer to those who respond. Text messaging and newspapers are a natural fit—and an SMS overlay provides a valuable bridge between the offline and online worlds.

This cross-channel SMS marketing program will enable the world’s largest indoor antique show to: (1) Increase engagement with an incremental CTA. (2) Build a mobile database to send follow-on messaging. (3) Establish a new channel to communicate with the show’s audience. (4) Leverage the personal nature of mobile. (5) Measure the performance of print media.

While there are certainly more exciting mobile technologies, audience acquisition is not about using the most glamorous media tool. It’s about using tactics that will cost-effectively move the needle and generate more traffic. Scale is certainly a key driver of this, and SMS delivers scale. It is by far the top mobile content activity in the U.S. today, with 68 percent of mobile subscribers using text messaging according to a press release from comScore last month, and more than five billion text messages being sent per day in the U.S. according to the CTIA.

Posted on January 13, 2011