Marketing firm on course to smash growth targets

A Worcestershire SMS marketing firm plans to smash growth targets by sending out more than one billion opt-in messages to customers by the end of the year.

Textlocal, based at Malvern Science Park, was set up by Alastair Shortland in 2005 after he received a text message from a nightclub informing him of a forthcoming event.

Believing SMS would be the most effective form of marketing – considering the then predicted growth of mobile devices – Mr Shortland learned code and web development, and from there built the bespoke Textlocal SMS Marketing platform.

The platform has gone on to be used by more than 165,000 businesses looking to directly engage with their target audiences.

The firm’s growth has coincided with a growing awareness among firms of the need to revise their marketing approach.

This has resulted in Textlocal developing the platform by implementing new functionalities such as mobile ticketing, chat and campaign tracking.

These functionalities have helped the firm secure two national marketing awards, impressing judges in late 2016 with successful, high impact campaigns for retailer John Lewis and Lookers Motor Group, with the latter receiving an impressive return-on-investment of 4,000% for SMS Marketing spend.

Mr Shortland said: “Textlocal has grown significantly over the past 12 months alone, with UK staff numbers rising from 30 to 50, together with expansion overseas into India and Myanmar, with five other key locations firmly in sight for 2018.”

Despite the firm’s growth, Mr Shortland said he remained surprised by the number of firms still not using SMS marketing to engage with their customers, especially as research suggested there were almost 45 million mobile phone users who could be potential targets.