I decided to try something a little different and illustrate the marketing challenges of a small business. I’m using one of my clients, PrescottWeddings.com.
PWC is an online resource guide for couples planning their weddings. Along with a ton of information for brides and grooms, the site includes a resource guide where local businesses can advertise their products and services.
We launched PWC in November 2001. Like many start-up businesses, PWC didn’t have much money for marketing. Yet we had two major challenges (three counting the limited budget):
1. PWC had to attract two kinds of target markets to the site — advertisers and couples — essentially at the same time. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had to appeal to each group even though one was dependent on the other — advertisers wanted brides and grooms logging onto the site, and brides and grooms wanted a complete resource center.
2. Several bridal print publications had come and gone in Prescott — and had burned their advertisers while racing out of town. Businesses were understandably hesitant about sinking their money into another bridal venture.
Armed with those challenges, we went to work. Now, just over two years later, PWC enjoys well over 40,000 hits a month and has increased its advertising base by over 600%. On top of that, PWC is well on its way to establishing a reliable brand in not just Prescott but throughout Yavapai County.
So how did we do it? A great Web site with great content plus three main marketing strategies:
1) Using print to drive traffic online
2) Thinking small
3) Frequency, frequency, frequency
I’ll cover number two and three in the next two articles. Today we’ll talk about number one: Using print to drive traffic online.
The cornerstone of PWC’s marketing program has been print advertising, more specifically monthly advertising in the local newspaper. Print advertising is an excellent choice for many businesses — from small to large. In fact, it’s not uncommon for small and medium-sized businesses to build their advertising program around print.
The strength of print advertising is its flexibility. Print publications come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can appeal to a broad readership or a narrow one. They can be published every day or once a year. This variety gives you a lot of flexibility in fitting print advertising into your campaigns.
You can also track print to a certain extent (coupons in newspapers for example). Print is physical, allowing your customers to carry something around with them.
However, print’s weakness is also its strength. It’s a visual medium only, so it requires more effort and interaction from your audience to make an impact (they need to stop and read it).
In the case of PWC, we chose monthly advertising in the local paper as the foundation of our marketing program. We decided upon the local newspaper because it has the broadest reach. Prescott isn’t big enough to have its own evening television news, so the newspaper is the best vehicle for local news.
If you live in a big city, the local newspaper may not be practical because of cost. In that case, you may want to try a niche newspaper or magazine, like a business or lifestyle journal, or maybe a regionalized newspaper. In Phoenix for instance, the Arizona Republic is the main newspaper, but all the cities around Phoenix, like Scottsdale and Tempe, also have their own papers.
Because PWC is a Web site, there’s an assumption we should be using only online methods to advertise. Online methods are good, and PWC does use them, but they only take you so far. Print is a part of the “real world” — something you can touch and pick up, not virtual like a Web site. Print has also been around a lot longer, and carries more trust with it. We found by using print, some of that trust and “real world” essence rubbed off, making PWC seems less anonymous and more like a “bricks and mortar” business (a business with a store front).
Also, since we were trying to drive local traffic to the site, it made sense to advertise locally rather than attracting people from all over the world. But even with our local advertising, we still have a substantial number of visitors from around the state, including Phoenix and Tucson, as well as all over the globe.
The point of our marketing program was to advertise regularly so we could both build the PWC brand and drive traffic to the Web site. Yet it was essential to keep our costs down. So we leveraged our monthly newspaper advertising to stretch our marketing dollar as far as we could. More on that and how we “thought small” in the next article
Advertising
Advertising is a non-personal form of promotion that is delivered through selected media outlets that, under most circumstances, require the marketer to pay for message placement. Advertising has long been viewed as a method of mass promotion in that a single message can reach a large number of people. But, this mass promotion approach presents problems since many exposed to an advertising message may not be within the marketer’s target market, and thus, may be an inefficient use of promotional funds. However, this is changing as new advertising technologies and the emergence of new media outlets offer more options for targeted advertising.
Advertising also has a history of being considered a one-way form of marketing communication where the message receiver (i.e., target market) is not in position to immediately respond to the message (e.g., seek more information). This too is changing. For example, in the next few years technologies will be readily available to enable a television viewer to click a button to request more details on a product seen on their favorite TV program. In fact, it is expected that over the next 10-20 years advertising will move away from a one-way communication model and become one that is highly interactive.
Another characteristic that may change as advertising evolves is the view that advertising does not stimulate immediate demand for the product advertised. That is, customers cannot quickly purchase a product they see advertised. But as more media outlets allow customers to interact with the messages being delivered the ability of advertising to quickly stimulate demand will improve.
Advertising
With the amount of people from home buying online expanding to now the billions and purchasing computers for their home, advertising online has grown to be one of the most cost effective forms of advertising. Stats show that the amount of users on the internet is growing at such a rapid rate that it is predicted that in five years time, eighty percent of the population in the United Kingdom alone, will have a computer in their home that is connected to the internet. With this in mind one can only imagine how crucial it is to prepare yourself now in the advertising world online for that period when the web will be the number one place to get people buying from your company. Advertising online is predicted to be the most cost effective form of advertising. Have a look at the way the world is evolving where the consumer does not have to leave their home to buy anything. All forms of advertising are crucial if you are out to corner your market in the business place.
Could either make or break your business. There are various forms of advertising such as magazine advertising, newspaper advertising, internet advertising and advertising via mail order just to mention a few. Advertising via magazines or newspapers are affective but extremely costly. Companies invest large amounts for advertising in the anticipation of large rewards and therefore far greater risks. It is obvious that companies are willing to spend large amounts on advertising if the advertising that they are paying for makes them a profit. To find the advertising that is right for you can be a troublesome period of test and trial. Most importantly you need to find the form of advertising that brings profits to the business in the form of sales to balance out cost paid for the initial payment on your advertising campaign.
For More information log on to http://www.indiabizclub.com or http://advertising.indiabizclub.com/
Within this article on creating online advertising business opportunities, we’ll look at ways that you are able to build your online business through online advertising. There are many different ways that you can go around this so we will look at a couple of very good and low-cost ways to do this.
One of the best ways that you’re able to market online at a low cost is through giveaways. You can do this in many different ways but one the best ways is to go to free forums and post that you have free giveaways at your website. You will want your giveaway item to be very low cost. By keeping costs low, you can post to these forums on a regular basis and receive steady traffic which can help you build your website. You’ll be generating a great deal of traffic for yourself at a very low cost. There are many different ways to run a sweepstakes or a giveaways contest but many websites will have giveaways pursuant upon the fact that you sign up for their newsletter. Make sure that the people who sign up are ones that you want to target because your newsletter can be your greatest source of advertising.
Another great way that you can bring about more traffic to your website is through Adwords. Adwords is a form of advertising that is run by Google where you are allowed to bid on certain keywords that people search for. You can run your advertising using a budget and you’ll know that you’re getting the target audience that you want towards your website. One of the ways that you can work at saving and maintaining a budget using Adwords is to log into your Google account every day to see how much it is costing you to use your keywords. By looking at how much it costs for keywords, you can make sure that your advertising budget is right on track with what you should be. You can also get an idea as to trends developing with the costs of Adwords.
Hopefully this article on creating online advertising business opportunities will help you out. The first part of this article focused on online advertising business opportunities and how to build your business. A different angle on creating online advertising business opportunities is spotlighted now. There is a great deal of unused advertising out there which could be bought up at discounts on what online advertising firms normally charge. If you were able to find a great deal of this unused advertising and buy it at a discount, you could resell it to other companies looking to put more of their advertising out online and charge them a higher price. This is often known as advertising arbitrage where you buy the ad spots at a discount and then resell them at a slightly higher price but making sure that the people who ultimately by your ads are getting a very good discount. All parties win in this particular engagement. This gives you something to think about the next time that you see empty spaces on a website’s home page.