The Ultimate Marketing Campaign Playbook for Small Businesses

There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace. If you want to break through and grab the attention of today’s buyers, you’d better have something compelling to say. 

That’s why it’s never been more difficult for marketers, especially at small and local businesses, to compete. Amid increasingly fierce competition, marketers have to rely on hard-hitting and high-converting campaigns to target the right buyers at the right place and at the right time. 

But what does a “great” marketing campaign even look like? And how can local businesses wow customers in the face of their big-budget competition? 

In this guide, we’ll tell you. Read on to learn about: 

• Different types of marketing campaigns and how to pick the right ones for your business 
• The components of an effective marketing campaign
• Successful marketing campaign examples and best practices 

Marketing Campaigns 101

We’ve all been inspired by “Just Do It” and “Share a Coke” at one time or another. Really effective marketing campaigns are inspiring and captivating—they speak to us on a higher level. But not all of them need to operate on a grand scale or use huge amounts of resources to have a significant impact. Some of the most effective marketing campaigns begin with a single text from a local business to a local customer. 

To begin, let’s talk through a few of the basic elements that characterize every successful marketing campaign. 

What is a Marketing Campaign? 

A marketing campaign is a promotional strategy (or collection of strategies) that is set in motion to achieve a specific marketing goal. Often, the most successful campaigns center around direct messaging with your customers and future consumers. 

The goal of marketing campaigns is to strengthen relationships with customers as well as evoke a strong response from potential buyers to persuade them to take action. Because of this, a strong call to action (CTA) is crucial. You also want well-timed, personalized messaging that connects deeply with the specific customers to whom you’re speaking.

Many people associate marketing campaigns with spam. However, as long as you know how to adapt your strategy to the modern landscape, direct marketing is far from being an annoying tactic of the past. Instead, it can be a great way to boost customer engagement and develop a relationship with potential buyers by catering your message to their specific interests.

What are the Different Types of Marketing Campaigns? 

Local businesses can use different types of marketing campaigns, all with different variations to fit their specific resources and needs. However, most can be funneled into one of the following types:

• Acquisition marketing campaign: Works to acquire new consumers; converts leads into loyal customers.
• Social media campaign: Uses social media to increase brand awareness, website traffic, and conversion rates.
• Paid advertising campaign: Uses paid marketing, usually digital, to reach customers.
• User-generated content campaign: Centers around customer-driven and produced content around your brand.
• Brand awareness campaign: Works to increase brand awareness (brand strategy, direction shift, etc.)
• Affiliate marketing campaign: Highlights your brand’s links/banners on third-party pages that get a commission set per click.
• Email marketing campaign: Utilizes email to achieve a marketing objective.
• Content marketing campaign: Targets specific customer segments with relevant assets.
• Product marketing campaign: Promotes purchase of a product.
• Referral marketing campaign: Works to get customers to refer friends/family through incentives.

You can use these marketing campaigns individually—or even in combination with one another—to target the specific customer segments you’re hoping to impact. As always, the key is to keep things clear and creative. 

How to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign

Stellar marketing campaigns aren’t created overnight, and there are multiple factors in creating a successful one. To start, you have to understand what your objective is, who you’ll need to go after to achieve it, how you will reach them, and how to execute well with your team. 

Know Your Personas

The most impactful marketing campaigns center around targeting the right customers. Instead of intrusively blasting a message that only a few people will pay attention to, you direct your marketing efforts to people who likely already care. This starts with knowing your customer personas. 

A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Creating a persona can help you better understand who you’re catering to, allowing you to create messaging that speaks directly to a specific segment of your audience and offer an experience that’s perfectly tailored to their needs and desires. With a clearly defined target market, you can keep your marketing budget low while maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

If you’re a dental care provider specializing in providing care for young children, you might end up creating a persona like the following as you narrow down your target audience:

Marketing Campaign Channels

As we mentioned, marketing campaigns can take many forms, reaching users on the internet, at retail locations, and even at home. Consider these marketing methods for your next campaign:

• Text message marketing
• Chatbot marketing
• Telemarketing
• Direct mail marketing
• Email marketing
• Targeted social media 
• Event marketing

In terms of cost, the average cost for a Google retargeting ad is $0.66-$1.23, and the average cost per click of Facebook ads is $1.72. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram all offer PPC ads for as low as $5. The average cost per click on a search network is only $2.32. Direct mail can cost $0.17 per unit to mail. And text can cost as little as $0.04. 

Each channel is also variously effective. According to research, this is how many customers are acquired by each marketing channel on an annual basis across industries (average): 

• Social media: 1,614
• Outdoor advertising: 1,188
• SEO: 1,025
• Remarketing: 921
• Paid social: 776
• Email marketing: 611
• PPC/SEM (Google Ads): 523
• Direct mail: 462
• Traditional advertising: 400
• SMS/text marketing: 365
• Pop-up shops: 279
• Tradeshows and in-person events: 248
• Other: 112

However, recent trends indicate that text is clearly the most popular channel that consumers want to use, offering ultimate convenience and flexibility. 

So, how do you decide which channel will be best for your next campaign? While taking buyer persona insights, goals, and data into account is key (we’ll get to these a bit later), it’s important to remember that you’re never limited to selecting a single channel for your campaign. Taking a multi-channel marketing approach by blending and optimizing a handful of these marketing techniques can significantly improve results.

Marketing Campaign Concept & Goals 

Speaking of results, every successful marketing campaign starts with outlining your concept goals. Ask yourself and your team: What are we trying to get out of this campaign? Answers could include:  

• Increasing purchases of a product/service we’re launching
• Doubling the number of in-person visits/appointments scheduled
• Strengthening our brand 
• Increasing awareness of a new product/service or event
• Encouraging existing customers to purchase additional products/services

Once you decide on your goal, you can begin to storyboard—working with your team to outline the concept that will get a specific segment of your audience to commit the action attached to your goal. 

As you begin conceptualizing your campaign, you should look back to past campaigns, other successful marketing campaigns that you’ve seen, local trends, and current events/cultural movements for inspiration. 

As always, an overarching goal of your marketing campaign should be to establish and maintain strong relationships. Your marketing efforts don’t have to—and shouldn’t—end just because you’ve successfully converted members of your target audience. Direct marketing can be particularly useful for forming a bond with your customers since you’re directly engaging them. Over time, buyers may develop an emotional connection with your brand, which builds customer loyalty.

The most effective marketing campaigns are able to reactivate consumers. One method you can use is segmenting your audience based on what stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey. This way, you’re not selling to your current customers with a sales pitch they’ve already heard. You’re giving them other reasons to return, whether it’s a new product or promotion.

Marketing Campaign Execution

Now that you’ve got a plan, it’s time to execute. Here’s what you should focus on for a flawless launch:

• Effective internal communication. Make sure each member of your team knows who will be sending what and when, which part of the campaign they will be owning, which sections of data they are responsible for tracking, and how you will measure the effectiveness of your campaign (see “Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaign” below). Using an effective project management platform like Monday.com, ClickUp, or Trello can help organize your team’s efforts and keep on top of activities. 

• Narrow your launch audience. Depending on the campaign, you will either need to start with an owned audience (subscribers, followers, etc.), pay for an audience, or run a campaign that is specifically to increase your audience. Campaign success is often a numbers game. The more subscribers, the more opens/views, clicks, and sales you are likely to get. 
• Create repeatable processes. Consider setting up templates that will be easy to use/re-use and creating a calendar for your marketing campaign that you can share out. Making sure everyone is on the same page is the most critical aspect of successful execution. 

Working with a Marketing Agency

Digital marketing, while worth the investment, comes at a cost—especially if you’re trying to establish a robust internal team. Building an in-house, full-discipline marketing department from scratch isn’t always a cost-effective option for small and local businesses.

Instead, local businesses may choose to work with a marketing agency. By outsourcing your company’s digital marketing operations, not only will you be able to focus on other areas of your business, but you’ll also be able to work with industry experts who can help do some of the heavy-lifting.  

By hiring an agency, you can: 

• Save money on overhead 
• Work with industry experts who are capable of delivering results
• Free up time to focus on other critical areas of your business

To learn more about selecting the right agency to work with, check out: How Do I Choose the Right Marketing Agency or Partner? 

Know the Who & Why: Buyer Personas and Objectives

There’s nothing customers crave more than personalization. According to Forbes, 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails, let alone text messages. 

Understanding who you’re marketing to and why is foundational to creating a marketing campaign that will help your business. Your customers want to feel that you get them—that you’re marketing to them because you care about them, understand their experience, and want to help. 

Defining the Objectives of Your Marketing Campaigns

The objectives of your marketing campaign are the boots-on-the-ground steps—the exact actions your team has to take in order to realize your vision. Understandably, clearly defining your objectives can make or break your campaign.

Objectives are specific and precise, usually quantifiable, narrow in scope, and medium-to-short term. 

If the goal of your marketing campaign is to drive a 15% increase in customer sales, your objectives might include setting five more appointments per week. Other common objectives include things like attaining 5,000 new Facebook subscribers in a year, or achieving a 20% increase in web traffic over the next six months. 

To achieve these objectives, you’ll create more minute objectives around when to send messages, how many, etc. 

As you sit with your team to define your objectives, make sure that they are simple, realistic, and attached to an achievable timeline. If your objectives are unrealistic, there is no way you will reach your overarching goal. 

Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile

Developing your ideal customer profile (ICP) and defining your audience helps you get a clear understanding of your market, particularly your intended audience. This strategic document details all the essential information you can refer to when developing content messaging, text campaigns, etc.

Buyer personas, like the one we showed earlier in this guide, are comprehensive profiles based on factual details of your potential accounts within your current audience base. When you know a person’s job title, education level, job position, company details, etc., you can better understand their goals and purchase influences. You can validate your findings with your sales team to make sure you’re on the right path.

When it comes to understanding your personas, it’s vital that you include customer pain points. A pain point is a problem someone would be willing to pay money to solve. Pain points could be related to finances, productivity, and processes. Ask yourself why your customers choose to do business with you. 

Maybe your target customer is a working professional who doesn’t have time to deep clean their home, so they come to you for monthly cleaning services. Or maybe they live in a cold, snowy climate and commute to work every day, so they come to you for snow tires that will help them drive safely. Once you know why your customers need you, you can target new prospects more effectively.

Using Segmentation to Personalize Your Campaigns

One best practice involves segmenting your customer base—that is, grouping your customer records into lists that share an attribute or characteristic(s) that aligns well to specific targeted messages. Even a little segmentation can increase customer loyalty, decrease your opt-out rate, and significantly increase revenue. 

According to recent research, segmented text campaigns boast open rates 14% higher than non-segmented text campaigns and 101% more clicks. They also significantly lower bounce rates, unsubscribes, and reporting incidences. 

Segmentation is a crucial aspect of personalization. 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that tailors their experiences for them. And 91% of consumers are more likely to patronize brands that provide offers and recommendations relevant to them. 

As mentioned, the purpose of segmentation is to create smaller lists of customers based on criteria you can easily document. There are several different customer segmentation models you can use, including:

1. Behavioral segmentation (tendencies and frequent actions, feature/product use) 
2. Demographic segmentation (age, gender, income) 
3. Geographic segmentation (country, state, city) 
4. Psychographic segmentation (personality, values, interests) 
5. Technographic segmentation (mobile vs. desktop use, apps)

The variables you use depend on your business, the promotions you’re running, etc. But, regardless of your industry, the characteristics you want to track usually fall into one of two buckets: behavioral or demographic.

Behavioral segmentation involves categorizing your customers according to their behavior. The most popular way to segment is according to purchase history. 

Perhaps you’ve noticed that customers who have purchased in the past year are more likely to come into your jewelry store for a Mother’s Day gift. Or that customers who come in on Labor Day typically make repeat purchases for Black Friday.

All of these “signals” can be used in planning your campaigns. Other key behaviors to track include:

• Website history
• Customer journey
• Frequent actions
• Product use

Some common, high-impact examples of behavioral segmentation in text campaigns might include using:

• Purchase or review recency as an indicator of positive engagement with your brand
• Response to past sales as an indicator of interest in similar sales
• Type of item or service purchased as an indicator of interest in similar offerings

Demographic segmentation is less subject to change and involves elements such as age, gender, and income. For example, it might be important to note that a certain group of patients is looking for denture packages over whitening packages. Or that your younger buyers are more likely to purchase from your Malibu boat collection than your Mastercraft.

If you have multiple locations, you always want to perform geographic segmentation as well. Consider which locations are performing best and what products consumers in each location gravitate toward.

Some common examples of useful demographic/ geographic segmentation in campaigns might include using:

• Home location (e.g. zip code) to inform subscribers about upcoming events
• Weather events in a specific location to customize messages or offers
• Knowledge of whether the household has children to offer a family package
• Birthdate to share a special offer that feels personal

When sending texts, it’s important to think about segmentation in tandem with personalization variables, such as customers’ names. You should always anticipate customer wants and needs by considering the following:

• Name
• Date of birth
• Location
• Last purchase
• Previous feedback
• Website journey
• Seasons and holidays

To make this easier, tie your marketing software in with your CRM database. With the right templates, your messages can sound and feel personalized with very little effort on your part.

Nail Your Marketing Campaign Messaging & Collateral 

You’ve planned. You’ve prepared. Now it’s time to create the actual content. But where do you begin? 

Start by asking yourself: 

• What is the message needed for each step of your campaign flow? 
• How can you capture interest, educate, give specific CTAs, convince customers to buy, and come back? 

Use the personas you’ve created, but also consider your own experience as a consumer. If you find something compelling, it is likely that your customers will find it compelling too.

How to Create Effective Marketing Campaign Messaging 

When it comes to being effective, the straight shot is the best shot. Be straightforward with your customers. Address their pain points, use personalization to increase loyalty, show how your business in particular can help them achieve their goals, and demonstrate care. 

Successful direct marketers take a customer-centric approach by forming a CTA that is both creative and relevant for targeted customers. As long as buyers know exactly what you want them to do and what they can get out of it, you’re on your way to building an effective direct marketing campaign. 

Here are five best practices to get you started: 

• Use conversational language. To appeal to your customers, keep personalized messages light-hearted, short, and conversational—just like you’re talking to a friend. And yes, you can include emojis to keep the conversation personal and informal! 👌😘😉
• Send during business hours. If your customer receives a promo at 4:00 am, they won’t be happy. Send personalized messages during the hours people are regularly working to respect your customers’ privacy and increase a human-like feel. Keep in mind that sales and event promotions (especially website promotions) are most effective when they’re last-minute impulses. If you have an event on Wednesday night, consider sending a message as late as Wednesday afternoon as a reminder.
• Respond in real-time. If a customer reaches out, they want answers now, not later. A seven-hour delay in response time doesn’t feel like a real conversation—it feels like a bot. 71% of consumers (16-24) believe a quick response can drastically improve their customer experience. Try to respond as quickly as possible to avoid disengagement and increase connectivity. 
• Don’t be subtle. Because you’re trying to spur action quickly, you need to be reasonably straightforward about your intentions with a clear CTA or sales pitch. For example, if you’re an orthodontist promoting Invisalign, you may explicitly encourage users to book a free consultation. To make a CTA even more enticing for potential customers, many direct marketers will offer a discount or other such promotions. Going back to our example, you may follow your CTA by stating that users who sign up for a treatment in the same appointment will get $50 off.
• Use multimedia. Put it all out there! Gifs, video, images, links, quizzes—the more interactive you make your marketing, the more likely it is to engage your customers. 41% of customers are more likely to engage with text messages that include images, gifs, or videos. 52% of customers are more likely to engage with text messages that include a link to more information online. 

If your campaign includes direct marketing, you should address each customer by name with relevant information according to their past experiences with you. Mass texts should sound like individual conversations.

Developing Different Campaign Assets & Collateral 

According to our research, customers want interactive messages sent at relevant times with content specifically tailored to their history with you. Of the types of promotional messaging content you can send, consumers most want messages with incentives, loyalty offers, and updates on inventory.

All of these types of communications fall under your marketing campaign assets and collateral—the tools and resources you use to promote your products/services, maintain relationships, and make sales. 

When developing assets and collateral, keep things as personal as possible. If you’re directing customers to your blog, make sure that you have posts specifically tailored to each customer segment that you’re targeting and that you direct those customers to those pages. 

Some of the most effective campaign assets include blog posts, website promotions and content, videos, images, webinars, ebooks, free templates/calendars, datasheets, and presentations. When it comes to choosing which types of collateral you will include, creating a strong concept, or high-level idea, is vital. As yourself and your team: 

1. What type of asset would best reach and impact our target segment? 
2. Which piece of collateral is best suited to communicate our particular messaging?
3. What type of asset is particularly suited to achieve this objective?

As you’re developing the assets you’ve selected, keep the following questions in mind:

1. Why do we need this piece?
2. How will this marketing collateral look? Feel? Sound?
3. How can we structure this piece to achieve our objective? 

When it comes to assets and collateral, budget is also a factor. If one of your marketing campaigns has simpler goals, you may be able to use less of your marketing budget and choose assets that will take less spend. For more complex campaigns with bigger expectations, you can plan on using higher spend. 

Optimizing Your Campaign for Local Traffic (Local Messaging, Channels, and Tactics)

As a small or local business, you want to optimize your campaign for local traffic. This means knowing what’s going on in your community, running localized campaigns, and being an active member. 

When it comes to marketing campaigns on social media, keep things local. Sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can all help you connect with your local community through your own page as well as other organization and small business pages. 

According to Wix, small businesses should use three types of hashtags: 

• Content
• Trending
• Brand-specific

You should engage with posts customers are putting up about your product/service or business as well as posts put up by your city about local events and causes. If your campaigns aren’t necessarily localized, post about them on local pages and highlight community members.

Another way you can optimize your campaign for local traffic is by hosting local events, teaming up with another local business, or sponsoring a local event as part of your campaign. Your campaign should be extremely visible to your customers not only online, but in person and in community settings as well. 

Regardless of whether you’re attending or hosting, you should always demonstrate strong brand identity. This is where the visible elements of brand identity really come into play, such as your logo. In 10 seconds, customers can form an opinion of your brand logo. After just five impressions, they remember your brand based on the logo. 

To establish an identity as a successful brand, show up consistently, be professional, and network authentically—especially with community members who aren’t patrons of your business yet. Community events can be the place where the most important relationship-building occurs. 

Finally, make sure that your business shows up everywhere—and we mean everywhere. On Google search, maps, Google Business Profile, industry review sites, and local reviews pages. You might even check to see if there are pages for your local neighborhood that you can join or post on. 

Choose Your Marketing Campaign Channels

It’s not just messaging that you should tailor to personally fit your customers, it’s the channels you use as well. You could run the best marketing campaign in the world, but if your ideal customers don’t see them, it’s all for nothing. 

With a million and one marketing campaign channels to choose from, how do you decide? There is no one-size-fits-all, but there is a helpful formula. Use persona insights, track trends, understand how each channel works in terms of ownership and payment, and map out your customer journey. Let’s dive in: 

Choosing Channels Based on Persona Insights

Your customers operate in specific and routine ways. 

You can use persona insights to choose which channels you should be using to contact specific segments. When analyzing your customers, think about where they spend their time—both in person and in the digital world. 

Consider our earlier example of Working Mom Maria. She’s very busy, on the fly, most likely using text to communicate with her children/teenagers, and using online research to inform her decisions. Once you figure out where your customers spend time, you can meet them in those spaces and try to capture their attention. 

It’s also important to pay attention to general consumer research and insights. When choosing channels, consider that ease of doing business is top of mind for more local consumers: 

While channels vary for different customer segments, text is emerging as one of the most convenient and preferred ways to reach customers. 

Identifying PESO: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Channels

While the PESO model used to have distinct components, today paid, earned, shared, and owned have somewhat converged into a marketing pool of blurred lines. However, identifying your channels can still be helpful in optimizing your marketing strategies, budget, and processes. PESO stands for:

• Paid. Paid channels (advertising) refer mainly to paid advertising, such as running Facebook campaigns or Google Search ads. You pay to place media in front of your target audience by way of an ad or sponsorship. 
• Earned. Earned media is what it sounds like—you earn it. You can’t control it, because your customers do. Customers use “earned” channels to promote or demote you of their own volition. Examples include when a customer gives you a shoutout on Twitter because of your spectacular customer service, leaves a negative review on Yelp, or reshares an article from your site. 
• Shared. Shared channels include the social media platforms you post and share content, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. Shared media includes all of the content you post to social media affiliated with your brand. 
• Owned. Owned channels include your app, blog, social pages, email, SMS, website, and media that your business has complete control over. Owned media is created for (sometimes by) your brand and is published to your owned channels. Creating owned media takes investment and time, but is basically free.  

At any given time, your marketing team should be paying attention to all of these different channels. However, if you’re a small or local business, earned channels are a great place to put your focus and effort first. 

For example, getting more reviews can deliver a lot of bang for your buck. They will give your local SEO a boost, increase trust and confidence in your business, and provide you with actionable insights needed to improve your operations all for basically nothing. 

To learn how you can start collecting reviews and receiving earned media, check out The Complete Guide to Online Reviews.

Creating a Marketing Campaign Customer Journey

A customer journey is a map of all of the touchpoints a customer has with your brand. This includes all of the stages a customer goes through—from the moment they start searching for a product to the moment they purchase something from your brand—and it even encompasses what customers do after purchasing. 

When you outline your marketing campaign, understanding how customers will be interacting with your messaging and assets can really help. 

Start by mapping out your campaign flow and funnels: What do you want your audience to do at each step? See an ad, get a text message, get an email? Click on an offer, visit a webpage? What is the final CTA? What will cinch the deal, and what do they need to keep coming back?

If it helps, create a visual outline that stories your customer’s experience from their first interaction with you to a long-term relationship, all from their point of view. Use each touchpoint in this journey to determine which channel will be most effective at different times and for different purposes. 

Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaign

How will you define success when it comes to your marketing campaigns? Think about what metrics can serve as indicators that your goals are being achieved. For example, you may consider tracking the number of people who opt-in to your service following a direct mail campaign, or the customer response rate from an SMS campaign.

Making your strategy measurable will help you figure out when your customers aren’t connecting with your direct marketing efforts. Even during your campaign, you’ll be able to adjust your methods in a way that can inspire your audience to take action. After your campaign is over, this well-tracked data can help your team get a clear picture of what occurred. For example, you may see a trend in what language increases click-through rates or what channel garners the greatest customer interactions.

Aligning Success Metrics with Campaign Goals

You can use your metrics for more than just figuring out the success of an individual campaign.

When you take the time to sit down and analyze the metrics from several campaigns, you’ll be able to pinpoint trends. With these trends in mind, you’ll know what channels and messages resonate with your buyers the most. You can use this information to make significant decisions for future direct marketing and website campaigns.

Your data about each customer will also grow the more they return. By taking advantage of information about your buyers, you can better curate a direct marketing message to each person. For example, growing data will allow you to implement better cross-selling techniques that match buyers’ interests so that you can increase customer lifetime value over the years.

Campaign Metrics & Definitions You Should Know 

When it comes to assessing campaign effectiveness, there are a few different metrics and definitions you should know. Gathering and understanding your data will help you make your next marketing campaign more effective–and the next one even better.

• Segment: A subset of your audience that shares a definitive commonality (often demographic and behavioral).
• Audience: Who your message is catered to, or who you want to reach.
• Channel: The method you use to reach your audience.
• Funnel: A marketing funnel describes how a potential customer becomes a customer.  
• Messaging: The content of your marketing campaign, including your angle or stance.
• Lead: A person or organization who shows interest in a brand’s products or services. Basically, a potential customer. 
• Conversion: When the recipient of your marketing campaign completes the desired action
• CTA: A call to action that you want the consumer to take.
• KPI: Key performance indicators are metrics your business tracks to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• Open rate: The percentage rate at which messages are opened.
• Conversion rate: A metric calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your website. 
• Click-through rate: A metric calculated by dividing the number of clicks your ad gets by the number of times it is shown.
• Impressions: The number of times your content is displayed on a screen.
• Opt-in: A form of permission given to a brand by a customer that allows the brand to send them emails, texts, or follow-up communication after a purchase.

5 Marketing Campaign Examples We Love 

Ready to see some marketing campaigns in action? We are too! Here are five stories of how five local businesses have run successful marketing campaigns that have changed the way they do business and revolutionized the way they interact with their customers. 

Pura Vida Uses Payments Links Via Text to Seal the Deal

After experiencing difficulties with external marketing agencies, Pura Vida brought their marketing efforts in-house to maintain a consistent brand message. To do so, Julie Davis (President/CEO) turned to SMS marketing, knowing that texting outperformed traditional marketing methods, such as email. 

In addition to simplifying internal operations, text marketing also drove serious revenue. 

“By way of example, we ran a campaign for Botox treatments and sent a payment request once they expressed interest,” Julie shared. ” They were prepaying on their account to get the deal. From that campaign, I put $20,000 in the bank over two days. Why would [a business] not do that?”

Woodstock Furniture Captures Subscribers Via Webchat

Jared Taylor, the Digital Marketing Manager at Woodstock Furniture, saw instant value in text marketing campaigns—instant as in, less than 30 minutes from send to sale. 

“We had a person text back with a response almost immediately that they were interested and wanting to know where they could purchase. So that was huge for seeing the effectiveness and how quickly it could turn around and reach people. That was a huge thing.”

Since its first message, Woodstock Furniture has tried to incorporate more campaigns into its regular marketing tactics. Since then, they’ve collected 3,258 subscribers in under 3 months, most of which have been captured via online chat. Jared also shared that most of their locations have an average campaign click rate of 5% or higher—some even as high as 8%.

Maus Family Automotive Retains Customers Through Text

Maus Family Automotive was already using text to capture leads, close deals, and gather stellar online reviews. But in the wake of COVID-19, they needed a better way to tell their customers that they were willing to negotiate on price and looking for trade-ins.

When the results of their email campaigns were less than ideal, marketing manager Devin Stott decided to try text marketing.

“At the end of the day, we were able to sell seven or eight more cars off that note in a 48-hour window. We bought a couple of cars too,” says Devin.

Maus is now even using text camapaigns to run retention plays to keep current customers happy and engaged.

LA Furniture Shortens Response Times with Text Campaigns

For LA Furniture, text campaigns became their go-to. Driven by their commitment to excellent customer service, LA Furniture worked hard to keep their customers updated and informed. However, their reliance on email was resulting in low response rates and customer dissatisfaction.

“Far too often our emails would go to a spam folder and customers would never read the email. And they wouldn’t know that they needed to agree to the delivery terms or wouldn’t get the memo that their item was out of stock.”

As dissatisfaction quickly turned into negative reviews, marketing manager Madeline Sweeten knew they needed to communicate in the ways their customers wanted them to. After seeing how text had transformed their review collection process, taking them from a 4.2-star rating to 4.8, Madeline decided to implement text for customer service, updates, and promotions.

In just under two months, LA Furniture’s opt-in list for text promotions grew to 1,547 potential buyers. Their first SMS promotion saw an 8.4% click rate, significantly higher than the average email click rate of 2.6%. Their customer service went through the roof.

Unstoppable Auto Group Clears the Lot with High-Converting Campaigns

Unstoppable Auto Group implemented text campaigns to send incentives, promotions, and other messages to their customers with messaging.

With a wide array of subscriber opt-in points, such as after a review is left or a payment is received, the team was able to quickly build a robust text marketing subscriber list in a short period time–over 11,400 customers subscribed in under 12 months.

And the results were faster than the team expected:

FAQ

What is the difference between a marketing campaign and an advertising campaign?

Final Thoughts

Mom-and-pop and small businesses continue to hold a special place in local communities. In order to compete with changes in consumer expectations, an increasingly competitive marketplace, and big-box competitors, local businesses need to find new ways to connect with customers and make sure that every marketing campaign packs a punch. 

By selecting the right marketing channels, thoroughly understanding who you’re marketing to, and creating an airtight execution plan that takes timing, resources, and relevancy into account, you can create a marketing campaign that will hit all the right notes. 

Let Podium help you make your next text marketing campaign a home run by clicking this link.