Traditional Offline Advertising Methods
When most business owners realize that they need to do something to bring in more customers, they usually first think of the traditional advertising outlets; Newspaper, Radio, TV and the Yellow Pages.
While we like to direct our clients to implementing more innovative and cost effective marketing approaches through the internet, we also realize that with many businesses, traditional advertising media still holds an important place in the marketing arsenal.
Placing ads in these more traditional outlets tends to require a much bigger outlay of marketing dollars, usually with little or no guarantee of response.
If you’re looking to improve your results with Newspaper, Radio, TV or the Yellow Pages, then please continue reading.
What You Need To Know About Newspaper Ads
It’s unfortunate for small business owners that the information given on writing newspaper ads is usually not very good. Newspaper ad reps are trained in selling advertising space, not writing an effective ad.
There are little-known secrets to effective ad writing though, and writing an effective ad can blow away your competition and put big profits in your bank account.
If you’d like more information on how to write more profitable ads, or need ad copywriting services, please contact us.
What You Need To Know About Yellow Page Advertising
A very frequently asked question is “With everything moving online, do I still need to run a Yellow Pages ad?” It is a good question. While more and more people are looking up businesses on their computers or through their mobile phones, there is still a segment of the population that will turn to the Yellow Pages first.
The real answer to this question is what is YOUR target market’s search habits. This can be discovered through some in depth market research. If your target customers are still going to the Yellow Pages, then the answer is YES, you need to be spending some marketing dollars there. However, if the market research shows that your target customer primarily uses the internet, then your marketing dollars would be wiser spent on SEO, local search, etc.
If you do find yourself in need of a kick-butt Yellow Page ad though, here are some things to consider:
- Your ad will be sandwiched in between all of your competition, so it needs a strong headline to grab attention.
- Your Yellow Page ad runs for an entire year and you are locked in at a fixed price. If your ad is awful, you have no way to change it.
- Before you run a Yellow Page ad you should make sure that the ad is very good and you always get a good response from it.
- Test your proposed ad first in your customer newsletter. If existing customers don’t respond to it, there’s a good chance nobody else will either.
- If it tests well with your existing customer base, then test that same ad in the newspaper.
- Repeat this process until you find an ad that generates the response you need to make that add cost effective.
If you have any questions on this process of testing, or need help writing an ad for the Yellow Pages, please contact us.
