How to Run a Text-to-Screen Campaign for Live Events and Text to Screen Applications

Text-to-Screen campaigns are becoming extremely popular. And why not as implementing text to screen, especially for live events, is an excellent way to engage your audience and gain a significant amount of opt-in subscribers to your sms mobile marketing in the process. The shear amount of people attending an event, whether it be a convention or trade show, a nightclub band session, a sporting event, or just a festival of any kind makes text-to-screen an essential part of a good effective sms text message marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works: marketers create a mobile keyword used specifically for a text-to-screen campaign, very similar to a keyword you may use to offer discount coupons to restaurants for instance. Then, the keyword is setup to allow for a user to text in a message after texting the keyword to a particular shortcode in the following format: “Text <KEYWORD> spacebar, <YOUR MESSAGE> to <SHORTCODE>”. At this point, a URL is created for display on anyone’s computer, screen, jumbotron, etc where all you need is internet access to make it work. As long as you’re connected to the internet, you can display the screen as if you’re calling the page up on any browser – and the browser then acts as your screen display. This screen can be displayed anywhere, such as bars, restaurants, lobbies, hotels, gas stations, sporting events, festivals, etc. The possibilities of text-to-screen are truly limitless. As soon as the user texts the keyword with their message, that message gets immediately posted to the screen for all to see in real time, instantaneously, which is the main reason text to screen campaigns work so well – they are incredibly addictive due to the immediate gratification aspect of the message display.

And everyone sees it. And everyone can respond to whatever’s being posted. Imagine walking into a sporting event where the jumbo-tron is displaying messages in real time from those that are in attendance. Or going to a seminar where the projector displays a text-to-screen URL for those to comment at the event. Many people who text into text-to-screen campaigns actually create lively conversations on these screens, which tend to entice others to text in as well with their own thoughts. What’s nice about text-to-screen is the ability to filter out phrases and words to avoid any form of profanity or those trying to “spam” the screen with junk.

We haven’t even mentioned the best part of text-to-screen mobile marketing: every time someone new posts their message on the displayed screen, that person becomes an opt-in subscriber to the SMS text message marketing campaign where you can market to them well past when the event is over. The biggest problem in text message marketing centers around the fact that it’s hard to develop significant number of opt-ins when everyone starts with a opt-in database of zero. Text-to-Screen solves this issue. With text-to-screen campaigns run at strategic events, you can develop a huge amount of subsribers in literally no time at all – something that’s completely impossible in all other forms of marketing. Your text-to-screen campaign opt-ins can number in the thousands … all targeted subscribers, and all of which are prospects you can market to later on with other offers and reminders.

Here’s an example of a text-to-screen targeted to beer lovers where they can text the keyword BEER followed by their message to 69302 and their message will be immediately displayed on the screen. Notice the two most important parts of text-to-screen: the customization of the background image, and the ability to control the start and end times of the campaign. This way, the certified text message marketer knows how to segment the database’s for each particular event so they can create different databases. In the beer example, you can create a campaign for a local weekend beer festival, capture all the opt-ins, then stop that campaign and create another one the next week (or day) at a different venue using the same strong keyword and not mix up the opt-in databases.

Which brings us to another extremely strong aspect of a text-to-screen campaign: the ability to sell advertising space on the screen to generate additional revenue from a variety of advertisers. This is huge in that you can have more than one advertiser if you rotate the banner ads associated with the promotion. Here’s an example of the same text to screen campaign for a beer application only with a rotating advertising banner at the bottom of the screen (best viewed in IE). As you can see, in addition to just the banner, why not add more mobile marketing components to your campaign such as QR Codes and 2D bar code scans where a user can scan the barcode and have whatever content you want delivered directly to their smart phones with a quick scan? The smart phone transforms the camera into a scanning device when you run the free downloadable scanning software where if the camera can see the barcode, it can scan it. Do you see how powerful this form of marketing is for both the advertiser, the marketer, and the end user can be now? (especially when you enlist the expertise of a certified mobile marketer to create and implement these text-to-screen campaigns for you). There are so many other options on how to incorporate ads onto the projected screen, such as Google Adsense in the above example as well or even create a Facebook fan page for those to “Like” whatever application you are targeting.

A very effective form of marketing is to mix the text-to-screen campaign keyword with a form of mobile marketing by sending a “Thank You” text message which directs the user to a mobile optimized squeeze page with a related offer. For example, after texting in the BEER keyword, a user may receive a message back on their mobile device saying “Thanks for your text. Take 20% off a Beer-of-the-Month Club membership here” (and direct them to a mobile optimized related affiliate offer). The point is that you get the subscriber (and all good marketers know the money is in the list), plus you have a very real chance at a conversion to a paying affiliate offer since you’re targeting such a specific demographic. Do this right and you can name your own price by approaching companies that can benefit from a subscriber list of thousands of targeted opt-ins and running similar marketing campaigns and text to screens for their particular application, whether it be beer, golf, jazz, food, you name it!

Are you starting to see why this is so powerful? Success is a four-step process:

1. Identify a high-volume event or venue to host your text-to-screen campaign screen. (Remember it can be a jumbo-tron, a projected image, or any computer/browser that has internet capability.
2. Talk to the organizer of that event regarding a text-to-screen campaign (highlight all the benefits mentioned in this article and you’ll hopefully get a “yes”)
3. Talk to potential advertisers who may want their brand associated on the Text-to-Screen. (Where else can they get thousands of people constantly looking directly at their brand while prospective customers exchange messages and comments?)
4. Implement the campaign and the opt-in text response thank you message to grow your subscriber base with your optional up-selling item (after all, at this point, they’re all YOUR customers when you get right down to it!)

Market to these opt-in subscribers with similar targeted offers in the future. Armed with a tremendous and constantly growing database, repeat steps 1-4 over and over again and you’ll have perhaps the most profitable mobile marketing advertising system you could possibly imagine. And there’s more good news – it’s very inexpensive to run these campaigns. Text-to-Screen functionality comes with a basic $24.95 account at GottaGoText here. The customizable nature of the text to screen, along with the ability to generate a large amount of opt-in subscribers relatively quickly, plus the addictive nature of the immediate text message display makes text-to-screen one of the best segments in the mobile marketing industry. It’s just really catching on and we’ve only scratched the surface on some of its applications. You’d be wise to incorporate text-to-screen into your next mobile marketing campaign and put your own spin on it for creative ways to increase revenue with this technology.

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