Business Advertising – Forget the Gloss and Go For Gold

Advertising your business offline can help to generate higher turnover but only if done wisely. There are several golden rules which are essential for any small business to follow, and having a clear understanding of these, is likely to have a big impact on the success of any advertising campaign.

One of the first rules to be aware of is repeat exposure. It is a well-established fact that it takes between five to seven viewings of an advert before a consumer takes it in, reads it, and acts upon it. Fewer than 5 appearances and your advert will quickly be forgotten. If you’ve paid a huge sum of money for a full-page advertisement in your local paper, having it line the hamster’s cage isn’t really going to do your business much good.

On this basis, it is plain to see that it is not necessarily size and quality that matters, but frequency. Clearly, there is a balance between the two, but it is often of more benefit to focus on getting your advert out there as often as possible rather than going all out for a single one-off assault. This also means that you will need to consider other ways of getting your business name out into the world for people to see and take on board. How you achieve this will partly depend upon your business, but rather than spending a fortune on a large-scale glossy advert, think about other offline advertising methods available to your business which cost relatively less, that you can do more often.

For example, in addition to small newspaper adverts, have you thought about sponsoring the local schools’ productions? For a relatively small donation you may be able to ensure that your business name and details are printed inside every single program handed to parents of children at the school. It is often unlikely that these programs will line hamster cages or be used in the next paper mache adventure – and if the parents in question have little darlings taking part in the production, you can be sure that the program will be kept very safe and admired regularly. This is a simple way to generate good exposure, and by sponsoring a school, you create a very positive brand image too.

If you have thought about having some glossy, very expensive business cards produced – have another think. If you’re about to pay a fortune for a pack of full colour, double sided, heavy duty business cards, think about how these will best work for you. How many will you part with? Will you be happy to throw them about almost carelessly? No – you’ll probably become quite protective of them, and give them out quite sparingly. If this is the case, consider printing much cheaper, reasonable quality ones that you give out freely.

Rather than having high quality fliers printed out, why not print out your own at home? With some high-grade paper and a colour printer, you’ll be able to create reasonably good fliers and be able to then hand these out far more freely. Perhaps drop them through letterboxes in a neighbourhood, leave a pile of them with a few local shops, pin them on notice boards, and even use them to write notes on for people. You can then change the fliers to suit your current message at will!

Printing off a couple of hundred fliers and leaving these under the windscreen wipers of all of the cars in a nearby supermarket parking lot is another example. By combining several of these methods you increase the chance that people will see, notice and remember your business name and details. By working on several different offline advertising methods, you increase the frequency with which people see your advert. By making sure that more people see your advert at least five times you are more likely to see a greater response than paying a huge sum of money for glossier, one off promotional placement.

If you drive a car, have you thought about having a magnetic door sign created, or a rear window banner? Think about how many people see your car each day, or are stuck behind it in traffic. That adds yet more numbers to the total number of exposures.

However, although each of these methods is unlikely to work alone, it is in the sum of the parts that the real power of advertising comes into play. By employing all of these offline tactics and more, you maximize exposure – which is what advertising in the real world is all about.

Seed Newsvine

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