When it comes to marketing your small business, you’re searching for a solution that guarantees big impact with minimal lift — and with social media and email marketing metrics rapidly dropping, you may be wondering how best to utilize your time and marketing spend. Text marketing is the newest and most effective solution, building thriving communities that center you in the conversation and drive sales.

Here’s how to make text marketing work for your business:

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1. Build authentic relationships with your customers

Email marketing and social media can be useful, but feel impersonal and inauthentic. Texting allows you to personalize your communication to the individual customer. Feeling close to your brand keeps customers engaged, and ensures loyalty as your business grows.

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2. Segment your audience

Your brand has many fans, but not all want to be reached with the same messages. Community’s text message marketing platform allows you to filter and organize your audience and texts by age, location, keyword, and more, so you can keep your message hyper-targeted — and hyper-effective.

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3. Pull real-time data

For small businesses, having the right insight into your audience, their habits, and their responses is all-important. With data features that provide insight on when your audience is reading your messages andhow they’re responding, text marketing allows you to pull data that’s accurate and timely — making it easy to reach the right customers at the right times.

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4. Drive sales directly from texts

Now that you’ve built a community of engaged and responsive customers, use texting to give back to them. With messages that feel personal, you can further engage your audience with exclusive content like voice notes and videos, or text-only discount codes and sales. Plus: integrations like Shopify allow you to track who in your audience is shopping with you, and how.

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5. Receive instant feedback

In a small business, small decisions have big impacts. Whether you’re torn on when to launch a new product or which colorway looks best, your text audience will provide you with real-time, useful feedback that works twofold, helping you run your business better and keeping your audience engaged.

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**This piece was cross-published in USA Today's December 2021 small business issue. We're honored to have been featured in a landmark publication, and we continue to emphasize our commitment to small businesses. Reach out to learn how Community can connect you with your audience instantly through conversational text messaging at scale.