FirstComm Press Release

The Growth of SMS Marketing Muscle!

Fontera, in conjunction with FirstComm, has just completed a highly successful SMS competition in Swaziland, Mozambique, Lesotho and Botswana for SA Tourism. Probably the first time an SMS competition of this nature has been rolled out in these territories, it succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations.

FirstComm, SA Tourism’s advertising agency, recruited Fontera to assist with the SMS technology aspect of the project, which needed to be flexible enough to roll out over the four territories. Competitions where held in each of the four countries, the campaign was regionally supported with an extensive radio, newspaper, magazine and street-pole poster campaigns to drive traffic.

The program succeeded well beyond expectation with over 60 000 entries received over the two months. “What these figures prove beyond any doubt, is that SMS as a marketing and feedback mechanism is just getting more and more powerful in Africa,” remarked Simon Leps, Marketing Director of Fontera, “Skeptics have claimed in the past that it is a barrier to entry, but this competition has show that, if the incentive and price is right, SMS is an easy to use and practical solution for competitions and the market research that it can provide.”

Once the SMS entries from all the regions were finalized, national winners were then selected from each of these four competitions and the winners then competed against each other in a game-show style finale to see who won the main prize – a 7 day trip to South Africa. All National winners were sent their tickets to the event using Fontera’s BarcodeTXT SMS barcode technology.

The project was an enormous success for SA Tourism, FirstComm and Fontera as the figures achieved proved that such a concept can and does work in Africa, and that mobile telephony is still one of the fastest growing communications technologies on the continent. “To say we were pleased with the results would be an understatement,” concluded Leps, “These entry figures show that in all mobile phone markets, the Fontera SMS platform is flexible enough to meet all conditions and can really deliver for clients.”