Difficulties when starting SMS service

In the notorious book "Rework: Business without prejudice" was a sarcastic statement that an effective business is built in limited resources. As an example, they put a person who, in defending in great need, found himself in a delicate situation. Without toilet paper. And he, using a sharp mind and natural resourcefulness, was able to emerge victorious from the situation.

This article is about how with limited resources we were able to reach a certain level of sales and achieve results. And all this thanks to the correct positioning, competent work with consumers and the prediction of consumer expectations.

Something about business

At each time there are branches of business that have a fairly low entry threshold, but at the same time, the profit is substantial. In general, the dream of any entrepreneur: invested a little, and got a lot.
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Assessing the environment, their skills and abilities, it was decided to create a service for the automatic sending of SMS messages, as we could do this without attracting any investments and loans, and experience in similar structures gave an accurate financial assessment. Not bread with caviar and pink Cadillacs, but quite a decent income.

We want to say at once that we understand that this is a rather intrusive advertisement that is perceived by consumers with irritation. But how not cool - it is quite an effective way to promote their services. And if this business is not done by us, then this service will be offered by others.

Competitive fight

Looking ahead a bit, we can say that there is a lot of competition in this industry. For each commercial request, a line of 20 offers of contextual advertising. In a search engine, the number of firms exceeds 100. Firms spend huge amounts of money on SEO promotion, their call center and various marketing tricks.

According to our data, each of the top-3 companies spends about 400-500 thousand rubles a month on SEO-promotion only. In this industry, this is decent money that far from everyone can afford.

But we learned this in the course of working on errors and analyzing the situation. Initially, everything was much naive.

Mistake number 1: Creation

Initially, we planned to work exclusively with corporate clients who integrate the services of our service into their software. For this reason, we created a good personal account and competent APIs, and decided not to waste our time and energy on the appearance of the service. More precisely, we made it on the knee, and the result left much to be desired.

We launched the service, made the primary advertising campaign to attract the first interested people and earned exactly 0 rubles in the first two weeks of work! None of the clients agreed to enter into an agreement to work with us. No matter how hard our sales managers tried, all calls to the customer base were unsuccessful.

Our mistake was that we considered that all people are sufficiently knowledgeable in the field of VAS services, and that they have time to compare our offer with those of competitors, after which it would become obvious to them that in terms of technical solutions and general cost, cooperation with us would be more profitable.

But this turned out to be completely wrong. In response to all our suggestions, there were questions that were obvious to us, which we did not even expect to hear. As a result, we decided to pay attention to the information component of our service in order to make it more customer-oriented.

Conclusion: No matter how cool the service for the IT person is, the decision on cooperation is made by the manager, marketer, and sometimes even the secretary. And they understand absolutely nothing in the intricacies of VAS technologies. So you need to work hard to get the right offer in the person making the decision on cooperation.

Namely:

• Work with the internal content of the site;
• Predicting customer issues and bottlenecks in cooperation;
• Creation of a positive information sphere;
• Promotion in the search engine.

Literate move number 1: Positioning

Running through the eyes of its main competitors, we noticed one simple thing. They were all convenient services for sending cheap SMS messages that can be sent directly from the site interface.

Those. This is the most ideal variant of the service: “One button - the solution of the task”. This is convenient and simple for the average user, but too trivial for a corporate client. It did not feel that customer value. And all too obviously put on the conveyor.

For this reason, we decided to create a service more for corporate clients. For this purpose, we developed a cooperation agreement, made a two-stage account confirmation with a call from the manager of our company. And this gave us a huge advantage in working with legal entities. People were pleasantly surprised when we called back and clarified questions on cooperation, explained difficult moments.

But most importantly: we received additional protection from advertising spam, which is contrary to such laws as: the law “On Communications”, “On Personal Data Protection” and “On Advertising”. Is it able to provide the usual SMS service? Hardly.

Conclusion: It is necessary to clearly understand who you will serve and for whom, you do it all. If you try to please everyone, you will not do anything sensible.

Error number 2: Promotion

We decided for ourselves that a true professional who knows how to attract the target audience should be engaged in competent website promotion. We ourselves didn’t understand much about it, so it wasn’t terrible to spend money for the company and hire a professional.

He uploaded articles to our site, purchased a reference mass, and began to assure us that everything would be fine and people would go. In general, everything seemed obvious and understandable.

But as time passed, the client stream mainly consisted of customers whom we found thanks to sales managers. Those. The site’s conversion rate was zero, the bounce rate was almost 100%. Each of our "landing page" broke the lead. It was terrible.
As a result, we decided to refuse the services of a person whose actions defy logic, and later were able to figure out what stopped us.

Conclusion: Once again we are faced with the fact that the search for professional staff in the IT field is a difficult process. There are a large number of incompetent people who skillfully create the entourage of a real pro. And this is a great difficulty.

Literacy move number 2: Website optimization for corporate clients

After experimenting with the optimizer, we decided to independently answer a number of questions that were supposed to help us promote our service.

Who visits the site. We initially positioned our service as a business tool for corporate clients. But after a certain time, it became clear that large enterprises and companies either work with cellular communication operators directly or create their own services by their own specialists, similar to ours.
Our main stream of customers is small and medium business. As well as media intermediaries who work with us to conduct one-time advertising campaigns.

Those. Our client is a person who has a need for solving marketing problems, is rather superficially versed in VAS services, but is quite competent in business organization issues.
For this reason, we have redirected our USP from ambitious goals to quite practical and inexpensive solutions for medium-sized businesses. And it gave a significant result.

As we had. Our valiant optimizer uploaded articles from our site to our site, and the pages themselves were a reference to mobile marketing, not landing pages for converting traffic. You would cooperate with the company, if at the request of “SMS-sending for cinemas”, you were given this:

“Promotion of goods and services via SMS is gaining momentum every day. However, the successful sending of messages to mobile phones is the one that attracts the client with prestige, convenience and uniqueness, therefore, its formation must be approached responsibly. Distribution should be carried out for a certain number of days in order for the potential consumer to plan his pastime. It needs analysis, because the cinema should plan the expected number of visitors and exclude situations where the number of applicants will be greater than the number of tickets. ”

As can be seen from this, the potential client will not understand anything at all from this text. He will not even understand that we are the very service that provides SMS messaging services. Therefore, it was decided to modify the landing pages and do everything according to the mind.

How much our competitors spend. We turned to a fairly well-known Moscow company, which provided us with data on our competitors. In general terms, you can say this: "We have six months trying to knock down the position of competitors, throwing balloons."
Those. our marketing costs didn’t actually bring any profit. As a result, we decided to abandon SEO infusions and focus on quality customer service, rather than spending all our money on the race for mythical positions.

Competent move number 3: Competent Marketing

Texts. Using the good old AIDA, we have compiled texts that could be explained by examples to customers:

• who we are;
• What do we offer;
• how it looks;
• how it can be applied in your business;
• offer of cooperation.

This content optimization has not increased our traffic, but the conversion from the incoming stream has increased significantly. People began to look more pages, began to register and call our managers. In the end, it affected our profit.

Positive informational sphere. We began to cooperate with leading bloggers, regional information portals and thematic resources. We agreed with them about the placement of reviews of our server, and also asked to publish a review of the successful cooperation with us.

As a result, the number of requests directly by the name of our company increased by 17 times! And these are people who carefully reviewed our site and willingly agreed to hold at least the first test newsletter.

Work in social networks. Working in social networks showed us the advantage of working in our client-oriented way, when every client is important and necessary. All our leads from social networks have a simple view: "In that company, we were treated with cold and did not answer questions, and you answered us so well, we want to work with you." In other words: it is easier to make a dissatisfied customer satisfied than to turn an ordinary person into a customer.

Conclusion: Obviously, even with modest budgets for promotion, you can find ways by which it is possible to work effectively in the market. It is only necessary to offer the client a service in an appropriate way.

I wish everyone to find their niche and build a profitable business.