B2B SMS marketing; leading the way to success
There are two fundamental types of business, one that is business to client (B2C) and the other is B2B. B2C only occurs at the end of a supply chain and has a large market base allowing for marketing to be hit or miss. B2B however feeds an offering into supply chains from businesses upstream of a B2C business. Most B2B’s have a limited number of businesses that they service making marketing and sales preparation vital to the success of the business.
B2B SMS marketing enables a business to make or extend contact with a project champion within the target organization. The aim is to provide professional and concise actionable content to recipients enabling them to be filtered during the sales funneling process correctly. This process works by allowing the user to not know whether there is a person behind the B2B SMS marketing they are receiving or not. If they think it is a person, then as a professional courtesy they will reply. Conversely if the recipient believes it is an automated system, they may respond to it without consideration or fear of a formal engagement. Both the former and latter are useful for extracting key information and engaging the potential client after a few messages.

B2B SMS marketing technology
B2B SMS services work through the integration of an API into the company’s CRM system. If a startup does not have a CRM system, then this will also be required to help ensure the sales team and support interacts with the client correctly with all interactions recorded in the CRM for reference. This entire process only takes a few lines of code and the generation of a few automated templates with the providers toolkit. This technology is important for scenarios when meetings with the client have been arranged to ensure the engagement can be pre positioned correctly and based upon any support calls that are presently open with the client. Along with CRM B2B SMS services are just as important to set up as soon as possible, providing a powerful way to engage with every targeted business. A B2B company should have created a list of target businesses at the start of the business and work from the low caps to the high caps using each business as a reference to get more of the market share. The SMS service can use the list of businesses and potential project champions in specific campaigns using filtering tools and grouping to accelerate onboarding of each new company.
While conducting onboarding an SMS service can help not only to reach out to potential contacts but also feedback valuable sales information to validate a sale before a sales team member is needed to actively reach out and complete the sales funnel process.

An SMS service is not just important for making contact it is vital for retaining the client. A business-to-business enterprise will likely have competitors and unless there is a substantial moat such as intellectual property governing who clients buy from, it is likely that brand loyalty will need to be continually cultivated.

Summary
B2B SMS services are the key for engagements and continued brand loyalty management. Ideally B2B SMS services should be integrated into the businesses CRM system to allow quick access to a company’s integration to the sales and support teams. Also, this helps to quickly create and organize marketing campaigns allowing sales and PR teams to direct content and calls to action quickly and effectively. This automation is key to reducing workloads on inside sales teams while helping to ensure that an offering can be positioned to clients onsite with knowledge of how to position it and stopping teams walking into an unknown situation.

OTT communication; Onboarding users
When a user creates an account for practically anything these days, they normally have to enter their mobile number and confirm the creation of the account. These days many are working in non-traditional circumstances and may not have instant access to emails or have data limits that cause them challenges. An omnichannel messaging service enables a user to create an account from a mobile phone using an application. This means that the user no longer needs to enter additional information that the app cannot collect automatically, making it easier than ever to onboard users. There are a few different suppliers of this technology however Message Whiz’s OTT communication is the best for service and offerings and have been delivering solutions for many years.

Messaging within the application
The omnichannel messaging service is a great way to also provide a two-form authentication route that is integrated into the software used and because it is used on a mobile phone everything is much more convenient for the user. Additionally, GPS telemetry could be used with the application for verification the user is where they should be. For example, most banks these days require users to notify them of travel dates to different countries to stop their system from blocking a credit card during that period. With GPS telemetry consented the OTT communication process can report this back to help confirm the user credentials.

Secure connections
OTT communication can be used to generate one-time passwords to access systems and OTT communication works worldwide. They are exceptionally useful for remote access to organizational networks and used already in many secure VPN services for corporations that need military level remote connection security. Another use is in eCommerce purchase authentication, with one of the interesting uses being in cryptocurrency purchases and transfers where a dissimilar currency transaction takes place through a broker or third party. As the number of cryptocurrency users has doubled over the past year and currently around 1-2 percent of the financial marketplace it is expected that applications using this technology will accelerate significantly over the next 5 to 10 years as countries continue to acknowledge it as legal tender.
A large part of a company’s IP has become decentralized and hosted on cloud solutions with secure access to cloud services being a key requirement to business success. In the early days of cloud usage there were many breaches that this OTT communication technology helps to reduce.
The gaming sector has changed considerably over the past decade, with many users livestreaming content and it becoming their income source. Digital assets have a financial worth as does the time to gain such assets, and a perfect reason to integrate omnichannel messaging services into applications. By doing so games and associated software will gain better adoption in a saturated marketplace thanks to the peace of mind omnichannel messaging services help provide.

Passwords and sensitive data
These days with hundreds of passwords being created for each site or application it can be very difficult to recall which password is for each site. As such it makes sense to use OTT communication for the recovery process as well as during the onboarding process.
Some data is sensitive such as healthcare data that also can be protected through using an OTT communication system in any solution. In the unlikely event of data being viewed by others the liability is reduced by the company offering a secure system.
The future of your company
No matter what industry you are in, when you have new or existing users accessing your system you need them and their data to be safe. By ensuring good security to the user, you improve the image of the company while making the onboarding and governance of users far easier. This allows you to focus on growing the business.

Targeted SMS Messaging
Getting the right person and the right time enables you to sell to them; at any other time, they are useless to you. Funneling potential leads is not to add to your call list for the day, but remove the outliers to stop you from wasting your time. At some point in time everyone can be sold to, however is that now, and is it worth the time to call them? Engage with customers through application-to-person (A2P) SMS messaging. SMS smart messages that use chatbots enable users to be either directed to the right support content, automate workflows such appointments, and funnel and filter through an automated validation process.

Optimized Messages
A2P SMS messaging providers get SMS specialists optimize messages and personalize content. Personalized domain URLs can be used. Multimedia messaging service (MMS) can allow you to have up to 40 seconds of video or equivalent media content added to a message, including audio. Images can be used in slideshows to show a user a product quickly.

A2P verses P2P
There are two main ways to send SMS messages to an individual; A2P and P2P (person-to-person) messaging. Due to A2P allowing for a high degree of automation it is regulated or restricted in many countries such as India and France. As such best practice is to use one of many A2P messaging providers and Ideally one that offers specialist creation of messages to not just aid the sale of the offering in the best light it can be, but also get around any potential regulatory challenges a non-experienced team may face. Restrictions that you could face may include message filtering by recipient carriers or delayed message delivery.
Typically, along with A2P, a messaging provider may also provide P2P SMS messaging as a service. This is a two-way SMS messaging conversation between two humans. As you can tell this method is another effective way of working and most companies using these will have predefined scripts and responses that can be used by staff. The only challenge with it is that it takes relatively a lot of staff to run it effectively, or a reduced throughput.
So, what can you do to make life easier for your staff? Well, combine your approach; first use A2P where you can without loss of response quality, automatically feed responses to CRM and then follow up on validated potential clients through P2P before taking things further. Better yet get the a2p SMS messaging provider to do the heavy lifting and follow up once a potential lead has been validated.

Administration
Users can manage and monitor campaigns through an accessible user interface. Straight away you are aware of the money you have spent and adjust accordingly. The great thing about A2P SMS is that the A2P messaging providers is that they specialize in optimization and may be able to help improve the yield of campaigns and worth talking to prior to adjustment.
What numbers or senders should I focus on?
In the US you can send to long phone codes, short phone codes, and toll-free phone numbers. For non-US countries you may wish to look into using short codes or alphanumeric sender IDs to help your campaigns. If you use P2P messaging, you should use custom numbers from the same country as your client list to ensure two-way SMS messaging functionality works correctly.

Summary
A2P messaging providers allow you a whole new world of SMS messaging that can be either used by itself or better yet together with P2P for an optimized approach with users. No matter your business SMS smart messaging solutions can generate sells quickly with little investment from corporate staff.