Mobile Media Marketing is disrupting the way people engage with brands. Everything that can be done on a desktop computer is now available on a mobile device. From opening an email to visiting your website to reading your content, it’s all accessible through a small mobile screen.
As with any marketing effort, every brand and organization will develop a unique mobile strategy based on the industry and target audience. Mobile technology is all about customization and personalization, which means mobile marketing is, too.
Yet another way to carry out offline marketing through mobile is Outbound Dialing or OBD. Outbound Dialers are exact opposites to SMSs. So in SMS marketing, what happens that my users, a brand user from my database gave me a missed call. What happens in OBD is that if I am a brand, let’s say a Westside. My team calls each and every user from the database with a pre-recorded message talking about the latest sale which is on in certain Westside stores around them. This process is what we call OBD or outbound dialing and those pre-recorded messages are called Interactive Voice Responses or IVR.
An example of an OBD campaign could be a famous builder for eg. LODHA. Now say that LODHA is coming up with a new building project in Thane which has 1BHK and 2BHK in it. His target audience would essentially be bachelors or small families in or around Thane. For this, he contacts networks like Airtel and Vodafone to gather the entire database required basically their numbers. Then many at times if you live in or around Thane and say that you are travelling in the train or walking back home you get a call from an unknown number. When you pick it up you listen to a lady who speaks to you in an animated and yet robotic way and tell you a message by Lodha.
What happens when you press any number mentioned in the call is that inLodha’s backend you get categorized as –
1. Either a potential customer if you press 1 or if you press 2 in the not-so-interested category.
2. Lodha sets an auto-responder for all the people who have pressed 1. So as soon as you get the call gets disconnected for people who have pressed 1, they get a message saying, ‘Thank you for choosing this option. We shall get back to you with more details soon.’
3. Lodha then contacts publishers or network providers for essential information of the interested users and then the team calls each of the users personally to give them further details of the project.
What happens with this process is, that instead of reaching out to tons of people irrespective of their likes and interest, the brand plans to reach out to interested users who are more likely to be converted into customers. This saves a lot of time both for the brand and the users.
Also Read: SMS Marketing– Type of Mobile Media Marketing
SMS marketing and OBD can also be used in combination for marketing along with other online forms. Apart from the mentioned uses, one more thing both these things can be used for is to organize a Pledge Campaign. For eg., ICICI’s Pledge campaign. What ICICI did was that it organized a Pledge Campaign under the CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility and used both SMS marketing and OBD to reach out to the users. They called users using an IVR saying that if you want to take a pledge press 1 and if not press 2. Now automatically when the user pressed 1, his/her pledge would get registered. This is the best way to use OBD. It is simple as that.
Yet another thing they did was when they sent out bulk SMS with missed call numbers to users, every time a user gave a missed call on the number their pledge was registered. So this is how brands could reach out both in offline and online manner to their users via SMS and OBD.
Author: Ankita Mundhra