M6 Marketing using texting as a marketing technique

“Clubs, bars, and any sort of business that is high volume
but low cost tends to really like this approach.”

–Mike Horne

Claudia MH Culmone

Mike Horne discovered texting in 2007. His company, Six-Shooter Productions, filmed commercials for local businesses which appear in movie theaters. “One day, I was sitting in the theater before a movie , and I noticed there were three things people were doing,” Horne says. “They were talking to each other, watching the ads on the screen, and texting.” He recognized the potential in text marketing. Horne talked to people in the Cell-phone industry and shifted the focus of his advertising company to mobile advertising. He renamed it to M6 Marketing. “The M is for mobile and the 6 is for Six-Shooter–a homage to our former focus.”
The switch took about three months. “We got lucky when we found the technology,” Horne says. “We created a system where people can text from their cell phone a word that is associated with a company or a product.” Initially, the advertiser displays a key word, an incentive to text, in an advertisement located in a traditional media: in–store ads, billboards, the Web, television, or radio, depending on the demographics you wish to reach. If what is in the ad attracts the viewer, a coupon or discount, the potential customer texts the key word to a previously designated short code, which is located in the software system living in an online database, where the person’s cell phone number is also recorded.
A simple example of this process would start with a store that offers a 30- percent- off coupon to text-receivers. They advertise or display an in-store message offering customers 30 percent off and a key word to a cell-phone number to receive a coupon for the discount. The customer sends a text to that number, receives the bounce-back message via text, which provides proof of the coupon or discount offered to the cashier. Radio stations and clubs also use this method to attract new clients.
“Clubs, bars, and any sort of business that is high volume but low cost tends to really like this approach,” Horne says. “It’s becoming more and more common. ” Thanks to American Idol, people are seeing texting more as a tool. “If you’re a store and you see another company texting marketing, you’re more likely to try it out.”
To make mobile advertising work, advertisers must first think about what offers are consistent with their branding goals and who they are trying to attract. (While some may think the audience is primarily young due to their romance with texting technology, mobile marketing actually appeals more to the 19-45 year olds.) Of course, if the advertisers text too often, the customers lose interest. M6 Marketing provides its client marketers with advance training to avoid the pitfalls of texting too much often.
While there were only fifty or sixty companies on the internet which offered similar services in 2007, today, Horne says thousands of companies exist and new competitors pop up every day. “We got into the business pretty early and had a little bit of a jumpstart against our competitors. We were one of the first companies in Utah.” M6 Marketing estimates it has 150 clients – 85% percent of them are in Utah with another 15% in surrounding states. On a daily basis, Horne’s company sends and receives over 10,000 text messages.
As one of the thousands of text marketing companies, M6 Marketing says competition is stressful. “Any sort of technology industry is fast-past,” Horne says. “You have to stay on your toes and stay on top of what is coming up and new products. You also have the danger of a large company, such as Google, offering the service for free, but you work through the challenges as they come up and hope the big guys don’t get into the ring and put you out of business.”
Horne says M6 Marketing just updated its system to keep it valuable to clients and continues to upgrade in order to stay in the competition. He adds that the company is thinking down the road. “Ten years from now, what are people going to be doing with their cell phones? Five years from now, what are people going to be doing with their cell phones? There are probably fifty other people with the same idea. How do we get the idea up and running before those other fifty? Our system does everything that Twitter does – why didn’t we think of that?”