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.

smart messaging; automating your workflows
Reaching customers is becoming increasingly difficult these days due to everyone utilizing the same technologies to sell a product or offering to the end recipient, as such you need the most direct way possible to cut through the digital noise. One way to achieve this is through a smart messaging platform that can get your message to the customer directly through their phone. This is a device closer to the user than any others and has no automated blocking for SMS. An SMS is around 184% more likely to be actually read than an email that may end up in a spam folder or deleted at a glance; worse yet is the user unsubscribing the email address.

These days many companies use smart messaging to achieve a deeper level of interaction and automation for repetitive workflows. For example if you need to qualify a potential sales lead then you can use smart messaging to achieve this through artificial intelligence (AI) that is integrated into a chatbot. Now this has some benefits due to the means of communication. For example there are people thinking that the message was sent by a real person and others that know otherwise, and in either case this is useful. For example, the user that thinks it is a message from a real person will likely respond to a short and concise message due to the obligation and the small size of an SMS, making the user think that there is nothing further after the first reply. For the user that thinks it is a chatbot, they may still respond to it for the exact opposite in terms of obligation, they may not see it as a starting point for a marketing funnel. Again, in both cases the first call to action (CTA) is achieved.

Once the first message has been answered it is likely that a user will wish to complete consecutive messages from the basic idea that once they have started something they need to finish it, and so long as the smart messaging replies are not too long in number of responses it is likely that all information will be gathered successfully. Here it is important to know how fast smart messaging should operate, if too fast in replying it will feel to the user as an irritation while if left too long the original incentive to complete the task is lost and the process stopped by the user. To optimize the smart messaging platform some form of testing is required on a smaller portion of the call list demographic.

A smart messaging platform can be integrated into existing enterprise solutions such as the client requirement management CRM system through convenient APIs. These can be set up in a few minutes and allows an existing CRM system which contains all customer contacts to be filtered for SMS contact lists for a marketing campaign much more easily than trying to do it manually and enables the smart messaging platform to use the list to quickly make contact with the details provided in the CRM but also to return information back to the CRM later. Interestingly a smart messaging platform can be used to take users through the process and assess if they qualify for a follow-up by a member of the sales team, reducing many hours of wasted staff time chasing contacts through the equivalent of cold calling. If you are not using the system for sales you may be using it to schedule and confirm appointments with SMS using the same type of process making smart messaging platforms a highly effective customer management tool for many sectors from healthcare to logistics.

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.