Getting More Customers – Using Print, Radio and Other Offline Advertising

Aug 03, 2017 Getting More Customers – Using Print, Radio and Other Offline Advertising

Today, advertisers spend more on offline advertising than online advertising.  It works for lots of companies but not for all companies.  There a lots of types including Radio, TV, magazines, newspapers and direct mail.

The demographics of each advertising medium are the single most important thing to consider when using offline advertising.  That is, where is the audience, what is their age, income, occupation, gender, race, etc. and how does it map to your target audience.  All the companies that sell advertising can tell you this.

How do you figure out where to advertise?  A good place to start is to ask your customers and go from there.

The biggest factor in the cost of advertising is the reach – how many people see the ad.  To be successful you need reach and frequency.  Your potential customers need to see your ad as many as six times before they even reach out and engage you.  If you are in a hurry, you need to have your potential customers see you every day, every week or even multiple times a day.

One of the biggest problems with offline ads is that the results are harder to track than online ads that mostly have good tracking mechanisms built in.  So you will need to be creative and try using special offer codes, tracking websites, special phone numbers, etc.

Print advertising has so many options, it can be used by most businesses.  In many cases, it offers precise targeting of an audience that might be one of your key target audiences.  For this to work you need great ads.  A compelling ad will have a great attention grabbing headline, an eye-catching picture or graphic and a crisp tagline or description of the benefits of your product or service.  It also needs something that gets your customer to do something now!, that is a call to action.

Direct mail can take many forms – letters, cards or even catalogs.  These can work but again you need to be smart about it.

For small business, radio advertising can be very effective though TV advertising is usually too costly to produce and show.

With all the ways to get more customers, I recommend that you find inexpensive ways to test out the method and increase effort and spending on what works.