Social media marketing gets a lot of attention in the business world. With Facebook expanding to over a billion users and Pinterest traffic growing and growing it is easy to believe that all marketing is online these days. This is just not true.
When thinking about other forms of marketing to promote a business, it’s a good idea to consider what type of marketing suits the business best. Where are the potential customers hanging out? What do they read? What do they look at? Where do their interests lie? Position the business in the right locations and it doesn’t have to be too expensive once one gets creative.
Here are some ideas on how to use forms of marketing other than social media to promote a business:
Billboard Advertising
Advertising via an existing network of billboards doesn’t have to be as expensive as one would think. It is often possible to advertise on a single billboard in a location that is ideal to pick up local people going to work and coming home from work later on.
Traffic patterns and other considerations can be used to better target the billboards to select and the type of advertising that will be most effective for the local audience.
Direct Mail Campaign
Direct mail campaigns where a mailing is sent out to prospective customers in the hope that they’ll become interested in doing business with the company is an often-forgotten option. However, direct mail campaigns can be cost-effective and surprisingly profitable when the price-point of products or services is sufficient to offset the costs of running the mailing in the first place.
Become an Exhibitor at a Trade Show
Most small businesses lack visibility. They don’t have the marketing budgets to promote their business far and wide. For this reason, exhibitions and trade shows are great ways to look bigger than the business really is and get the brand into the public eye. Exhibition stands can be expertly created by specialists like Finesse Exhibitions which has been designing exhibition stands for decades.
Event Sponsorship
Whether your business has an existing connection to an event or not, local events organisers are often looking for extra funding in exchange for promoting the business brand for the sponsor. The UK Sponsorship Database can help connect up event managers wanting to find local sponsors. This represents a win-win for both parties.
Local Newspaper Advertising
Local newspapers are still thriving through revenues from paid advertising. Even newspapers that are available for free rather than sold in newsagents can be profit centres. For this reason, the advertising department of small newspapers are keen to talk with local businesses about how their advertising space can be used to connect local people to companies located nearby.
The good news is that because these are strictly local newspapers with a more limited distribution level, the cost of advertising is surprisingly affordable especially consider the impact that online advertising has had in splitting up the ad space market.
I hope this provides some food for thought on ways to use offline marketing methods to promote businesses effectively and keeping it affordable at the same time.
