In an ever-evolving digital business ecosystem, staying on track with innovative tools of the trade can be tasking. Fresher, smarter, and more efficient tools and tricks for reaching marketing goals are created all the time. Feedback has become very vital in marketing. Getting useful information or criticism about prior action or trends of behaviors helps to improve and enhance marketing communication and the general decision making process. Marketing is no longer a one-way communication but a constant dialogue between brands, customers, influencers and other stakeholders.
With these growing needs came the emergence of inbound marketing. This marketing model has in the last decade sparked an Inbound versus Outbound efficiency debate in the marketing world. Which delivers more ROI (Return on Investment)? Which delivers the most business value? Which is best for driving leads and sales? Which provides more brand awareness? These and several other questions have fueled this debate among experts. For some organizations, outbound alone might be the best strategy. While for others it might be inbound alone. In other cases, it might be best to combine both. It all depends on what’s best for the organization.
Outbound marketing on the one hand, seeks to obstruct potential customers with activities such as trade shows, seminar series and cold calling. On the other hand, inbound marketing draws customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Fundamentally, both inbound and outbound could play a vital role in accelerating the growth of businesses when used strategically across appropriate channels.
A critical channel for marketing professional in this new era, is the mobile phone. Mobile technology has disrupted the way people engage with brands. About 5 billion people worldwide own a mobile phone. More than 2 billion of them have smartphones. That’s about 63 percent mobile phone penetration globally. With more and more potential buyers or customers relying on their digital devices to get information about products and services, mobile phones are an essential factor in audience engagement.
It is therefore important that businesses maximize tools and platforms that utilize mobile technology to deploy their marketing strategy. One of such platform is the Kirusa Konnect Portal, a Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offering for enterprises. It deploys cloud technology that allows enterprises create, test, launch a flash call campaign, using its embedded communication features. Some of the tools within Kirusa Konnect Portal are SnapCall, IVR inbound SMS and Inbound SMS for inbound marketing; OBD (Outbound dialer), Voice SMS, and SMS Tagging, for outbound marketing. These tools are built to reach the audience via mobile technology.
Inbound Tools
SnapCall is a platform which uses free missed calls to conduct polls, surveys, place request, or gather customer feedback. It can be deployed during campaigns to collect user feedback or response from target audience via mobile phones. For every campaign, a flash number is assigned and then advertised. Customers leave a missed call on the number to vote, request information, indicate interest, etc. With SnapCall a company can reach their target audience, get the required feedback, collate the data and make informed decisions.
IVR Inbound tool allows customers to listen to an audio content and leave feedback in their own voice. IVR (Interactive voice response) is an automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipient. Kirusa’s IVR Inbound SMS encourages target audience to leave a voice message for support queries, feedback, sales assistance or product information. People who leave feedback receive an acknowledgement message as SMS. A technology company for instance, which is looking to get information about its latest app for a new customer base would find IVR rather invaluable for customer feedback.
Inbound SMS gives customers a platform to register a vote, receive a call back or request more information by sending an SMS to a given number. Inbound SMS is a great way for messaging technology companies to give information to customers and turn them from leads to customers.
Outbound Tools
OBD (Outbound Dialer) allows companies to broadcast messages. It can be deployed by large enterprises as an audio note from the company to customers; in schools for sending out a robo-call announcements to parents; a social or political appeal recorded in the voice of a popular leader to engage the citizens; or other broadcast needs that corporate outfits may want to carry out.
Voice SMS is a tool that allows companies send out a customized SMS informing and prompting customers to listen to the recorded voice at a time of their choice.
SMS Tagging utilizes or “tags” the whitespace of a transactional SMS with an additional message. Companies can tag promotional messages along with a transactional SMS. For instance, a promotional messages like “Need Extra for a Vacation? Call ABC transport today on +298136774383 to get great travel discounts” are tagged below a transactional text message, for example airtime account balance message.
The Konnect Portal is a sustainable tool for lead generation and an efficient platform for feedback, data collection and analysis. To reach out to a strategically cut-out audience demographic, it would require a tool that gets them via their most patent information channel. With about 63 percent of the world population spending an average of eight hours on their cell phones daily, the mobile phone is a viable channel. Businesses looking to stay ahead of the ever competitive curve and remain on top of the game require an effective lead generation and feedback mechanism for marketing strategy. Kirusa offers round the clock service, a wide reach, high readership deliverability, no DND filter, an untapped market, and high visibility.
The Konnect portal is indeed a real platform to accelerate business growth, as it aids businesses to enhance their campaigns innovatively with guaranteed results.
