A Look at How the CTIA Show Used SMS Marketing

One of my takeaways from the marketing for this week’s CTIA Enterprise & Applications trade show in San Diego was the prominent promotion of an SMS alerts programs in its attendee brochure and on the show Web site.

Ad units headlined “Be the 1st to Know” promoting the SMS program were on three different pages in the attendee brochure. A large unit ran across the entire bottom of the back cover. They were also on the right sidebar on most of the pages I visited on the show Web site. You could not miss the promotion of this program in the brochure or Web site.

The SMS call-to-action (CTA) in these ad units invited readers to text “CTIA” to a short code to receive MMS/SMS alerts from CTIA. I tried it out and received a variety of texts.

• Upon signing up, I received a thank you note encouraging me to attend the show, with a link to the show Web site.

• On the day before the show opened, I received one text inviting me to participate in a CTIA onsite contest, including relevant links, and another advising me that a pre-show boot camp was about to start.

• On the opening day of the show, I received three texts. The first was a reminder that the keynote was happening now, a second text invited me to participate in the same contest mentioned above and a third text promoted a specific show feature that was just about to start.

In addition to seeing the type of content that CTIA delivered through the SMS channel, the above execution also shows the frequency they chose to employ. I was certainly comfortable getting this number of texts during the show week. Make sure you sync with your audience on text frequency, or else you risk having your SMS subscribers opt out.

Promotion, text frequency, content and the CTA all are all key parts of an SMS program

Posted on October 13, 2011