How to promote your business – blog 1

In today’s blog, The Engravers Register sponsor WoodMarvels.com will provide the first of a series of tips and advice on how best to promote your business, and how they have maximised their promotional investment for their unique product offering. Dependent on your products and business, targeted marketing to specific audiences you know are relevant and much more likely to buy is normally better than communicating your product to the masses. Happy marketing!

Traditional ‘Above the Line’ Advertising

Traditional advertising refers to those mediums that were traditionally used to promote and advertise businesses and include TV, press (newspaper and magazine), direct mail, radio and signage. While these channels have rapidly changed with the advent of digital, online and social media, these mass communication channels are great to reach larger audiences.

Radio

Radio is a great and normally more cost effective way to advertise your business compared to the other channels, but with the growing popularity of mp3 players and iPods, and people able to forward through commercials, ad repetition and special promotions are normally best to achieve traction. The great thing about radio is it’s relatively large audience and can be targeted to your demographic or audience (for example if you’re a sports trophy store you could advertise during local sports final broadcasts to target your local sports teams). It can also get your message out quickly. Although most listeners can quickly change the dial, they will usually just listen to your ad and quickly forget it… that’s why repetition is key. One ingenious business booked just one radio spot booked every weekday just before the 8am news (which everyone listened to while they were in the car). Repetition of the message saw the business enquiry and brand awareness increase amazingly.

Press (including newspapers / inserts and magazines)

Like radio, the relevance of newspapers /inserts and magazines is rapidly diminishing in the online age, while their prices to advertise increase. However, they are still great for mass communication and getting your business word out and can usually be tied with an online promotion. Magazine advertising can be a lot more targeted to the audiences you are wanting to attract, and as such you can receive a lot more “bang for your buck”. For example, a business that specialises in personalised and engraved wedding gifts chould advertise in bridal magazines where they will have a captive market.

In further blogs we will focus on other mediums that increase enquiry to your business.