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Home > Marketing > Promotional Tips
Here are a few tips about some of the most common methods of promoting your business:
- Retail Merchandising
- Advertising begins with the store and its windows. Rental costs depend on location and customer traffic so window displays have special value. One study by a trade publication allocated as much as 40 percent of the store’s rent to its window space. The giant stores in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles fully capitalize their window values - don’t waste yours.
- Newspaper and Magazine Advertising
- Don’t buy tiny ads, buy for page dominance: half-page, two-thirds page, and junior-page ads dominate a page without the full-page price. Two-thirds and junior page ads make it unlikely for another ad to be placed on “your” page.
- Use color! Visualize your company logo in bright purple, green or orange (or any other strong color) standing out from a page full of only black-and-white ads and editorial.
- Consider several ads in the same position on sequential pages - maybe the same ad over and over, or a series (like the old “Burma Shave” signs along the highway).
- Ask for special treatment in terms of placement, color, format. You might not get it, but ask anyway.
- Radio advertising
- Buy commute time. It’s more costly, but you have a captive audience.
- Buy time around the news, weather, sports and traffic reports. Take advantage of the attention people are already paying to the radio.
- Know who is listening to the radio. If your potential customer is not among the listening audience, then you are wasting you money.
- Television advertising
- Consider short (15 second) back-to-back spots. They cost more than one 30 second spot, but the repetition commands more attention too.
- Consider cable advertising, a relatively affordable way for the small business retailer to advertise to a defined geographic market.
- As with radio advertising, know the target audience of a particular show or station. Do not place your commercial where it will be overlooked or ignored.
- Outdoor advertising
- Go big, bold and unusual. Use 3-D effects, lots of color, unusual shapes - and very few words - to attract the attention and lodge in the memory of the traveling public.
- Check out some of the mobile billboard options, too: A-frame trailers that carry your message anywhere, colorful ads on the sides of 18-wheelers; recent computer painting techniques even make it possible for your delivery vehicle to become a traveling advertisement far more effective than the traditional “logo-on-the-door” treatment.
- Dot-com advertising
- If you have intenet access, you should have a web page incorporating your company name, products and services, complete address and contact information. Use as many keywords as you can think of. Set up links with related sites and local pages. Register with all of the reputable search engines.
If your business is brick-and-mortar, you will probably be too busy to spend a lot of time developing and tending a website. Just be sure that your web page is uncluttered and easy to read, loads quickly, and is accurate. When your information changes, your web page should change too.
- If e-commerce is an important part of your marketing strategy, be sure that your web administrator is knowledgeable about both technical and legal issues. And don’t ignore the other types of advertising: you need to get people to your website before it can work for you, and printed or broadcast advertising does that job nicely.
- The internet changes so rapidly that as soon as a rule of thumb is established, it’s obsolete. It’s a good idea to subscribe to one of the good e-commerce publications now on the market in order to identify the current trends for your type of business.
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