By guest author Eric Brown.
 | Eric Brown is a founding partner of Urbane Apartments in Royal Oak, Michigan. Each month Eric contributes a guest article on guerrilla marketing ideas. Urbane Apartments website Eric Brown on LinkedIn |
Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) announced his vice presidential nominee, then Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), at a morning rally in Pittsburgh. My, how times change.
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| Photo Credit: Flickr photo by brownpau |
In preparation for this election’s Democrat VP announcement, the Barack Obama campaign sent a cell phone text message to subscribers that was quickly followed by an e-mail linking to a new page on the campaign website -- my.barackobama.com/vp. The message said: "Barack will announce his VP candidate choice through txt message between now & the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP to 62262 to be the first to know! Please forward."
The Text Message Formula
Note three things: the casual reference to the candidate ("Barack"); the call to "forward" the text (to friends, relatives, etc.); the perceived personal appeal of being "the first to know"; and the timing -- the text was sent two weeks before the Democratic National Convention kicks off. That gives plenty of time for the text to be passed around. Whether you are a Republican, Libertarian or a Democrat, this was just plain smart on the part of the Obama team. Now we all know who Obama’s choice of running mate is, and he may have made a huge Branding Blunder by his choice, but he definitely Extended his Customer Reach with the use Text Messaging in Guerrilla Marketing Style, and you can too.
Local Text Messaging
Our small business, Urbane Apartments implemented a Text Messaging System, organized by property, allowing us to distribute a group text message from a laptop. We use this system to alert our residents of a maintenance problem and what we’re doing about it, or when something new has been added to their specific community. Our Residents tell us they feel better if they receive a text or message alerting them of the problem. Often,we send the message before our Urbane Apartment residents discover the problem, and then another update when the problem is handled.
Recently, we had a hot water outage at one of our communities on a holiday weekend. We used the text messaging system and sent a text message to each resident of the affected building before most of them woke up. We received this message back from one of them: “No big deal. I do not get frustrated. I am grateful to have water coming out of a faucet! Even if it is cold! Thanks so much.”
The point here is, this stuff works, and we got a Thank You from someone who had no hot water that morning! This could be viewed as customer service, but all great customer service is great marketing wrapped differently.
Guerrilla Marketing texting tactics work for Barack Obama, they work for Urbane Apartments and they can work for you. The program we use to send our messages is Data Doctor Group Text Messaging and can be found at http://www.sendgroupsms.com/ for a cost of under $100, which is in the trenches Guerrilla Marketing! Let us know what has worked for your business!
Related information on Guerrilla Marketing:
Guerrilla Marketing Ideas: Building a brand with guerrilla packaging.
Guerrilla Marketing Ideas
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