Advertising
While creating and maintaining a digital marketing infrastructure is paramount to your success, there are several reasons why traditional advertising – including newspaper, magazine, TV and radio – can be a viable part of your strategy. Successful businesses that utilize traditional advertising solutions do it strategically, just as they do with all aspects of their marketing.
Before asking yourself, is traditional advertising dead?, here are a few reasons you might consider it:
- Your ideal audience is of the age or lifestyle where they will see that ad, whether in print, on TV or hear it on the radio.
- There’s a specific campaign or promotion that makes sense for this part of the strategy.
- An event is coming up, and you want to reach a certain audience.
Hammer or Screwdriver?
It’s important to understand how to use all of the different tools in your traditional marketing toolbox. Each of them can accomplish a different outcome, just like your actual toolbox. You don’t place a nail with your screwdriver, right? You don’t screw in a screw with a hammer (we hope). Traditional advertising solutions use visibility, awareness and branding as building blocks.
Sprinkling in some bits of humor into content will further engage your audience with entertainment. (We’re guilty of that on this website. Honk honk!) While humor can help users identify with you and your business and invite them to come onboard, it must be done in a measured and appropriate way for your audience and your business.
As with all content in traditional and digital marketing, good writing is key. No matter what form of traditional advertising content you’re developing, you are telling a story, and that story needs to be clear and focused, which is why strong writing skills are key to success with your efforts.
Print ain’t dead yet
You might be thinking that advertising in your community newspaper would be a waste, but not so. A recent Scarborough Research survey found that 56% of Millennials read a newspaper in print or online on a regular basis. Many print publications offer discounted rates when you advertise both in print and their websites.
Here’s a free tip, though. Media sales people are tenacious and typically good at what they do; otherwise they wouldn’t have a job. And it’s their job to sell ad space, whether that space is a good fit or not for your business. (Pro tip: the sales rep will always think it’s good for your business.) Let Savoir Faire help you find the most appropriate and effective outlets for your traditional ad dollar.
B2B companies may consider print ads in their trade or industry publications. If the audience making purchase decisions about your products and services is reading those trade pubs (along with complementary websites and social media), that may be a good fit for your ads.
If you are in the hospitality business, a weekly events calendar listing or the arts section of a paper could be a good fit. There are some businesses that even still benefit from a presence in the Yellow Pages. It’s all about the audience looking for that business.
Don’t you dare be the one to kill print!
Even if you just want to place an ad in the playbill of your nephew’s junior high production of “Cats,” or the program book of the nonprofit you support, you don’t want it to look like garbage. That reflects poorly on your company.
If you don’t have the software necessary to create the ad, don’t you even dare think about doing it in Microsoft Word! (Or Publisher for that matter.) You might as well just fling the money you paid for that ad straight out the window. Those files won’t adhere to printer specifications and they aren’t going to reproduce well, leaving you unhappy with the final, fuzzy, yucky ad.
The other side of that coin is this: just because you have a subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud does not mean you should be creating ads. Professional designers have a great deal of training (not to mention experience) in what makes a good-looking and effective ad. They know the visual rules and guidelines that make it stand out as well as what colors and fonts will work best. They also know how to design an ad that’s consistent with the rest of your company’s branding and your existing campaigns.
Our design and content creation team will work with you to produce thoughtful, meaningful, strategic and high-quality ads, no matter their placement. Above all, we want you to use your marketing investment well.