This post is about your printed media for local marketing. I shall post about printed media produced by others in a couple of weeks’ time. So, how can you use printed media to promote your business?
Printed media is a key way to drive traffic to your website. If you can persuade visitors to subscribe to your site, you have a way to keep in touch with your local contacts. If you are mainly concerned about local marketing, this can be the best way to build your contact list. It can work faster than SEO if you get it right.
Printed media works for marketing beyond the local of course but it depends on circumstance. If you travel a lot, for example, printed media can be a good way to promote your services beyond the local. However, most businesses marketing beyond the local, would support in-person approaches with online methods such as SEO and ads.
The Value of Printed Media
Building your list is as important to local marketing as it is to any other approach. Printed media is a key element of your approach and assists you in other ways. Printed media
- is an excellent short-term aide memoire. It presents useful information and saves you having to dictate complex contact details and your contact does not have to write them down. It is easy to lose printed media, though. This does not necessarily mean dropping it somewhere. Business cards accumulate and finding a particular card becomes increasingly difficult. Persuade contacts to sign up to your email list because it’s a good way to maintain contact a long time after they forget your printed media.
- can include information about your business. This might range from a sentence on the back of a business card to a full colour brochure. All these can link to your website in various ways. The advantage of such media is its physical presence for a short time, allowing a contact to relax and read about your business at their leisure.
- well-designed, assists branding. It can tell your story and help contacts become familiar with your logo or house style.
- can reach large numbers of people who would not search for your services online. Hand it to people in busy places, or post it through letter boxes.
- can provide support for talks and presentations. It can point to follow-up online information, contacts can get in exchange for their email address, for example.
Types of Printed Media
Here are some basic types of printed media, available for use in local marketing:
- Business cards are an essential means to establish contact
- Use leaflets to tell the public about your offer
- Use more elaborate brochures are to help prospects decide between your offers or to pitch for support from established businesses
- Information leaflets, can be left around in your shop, for example
- Notes following a presentation
- Books can also be a valuable source of information, although they may be a tall order for a small business
Essential Features of Printed Media
Whatever printed medium you use, make sure it includes these basics:
- Your name and business name should be clearly visible
- Your website url – on a business card this will be your call to action
- More than one way to contact you. You might prefer people to call you on your mobile. If they are reading your documentation late at night they are more likely to choose email and not risk disturbing you by phone or forgetting to call you next day. Don’t forget social media!
- If necessary, a brief explanation of what you offer. Depends on space.
- A call to action, which might normally be to visit your website and sign up for something. It could take the form of an invitation or opportunity to buy something.
The more you think of your printed media as an extension to your website, the better. This should include branding, so that when someone transitions from paper to online, they know they have found the right place. Bear in mind, it is better to provide a url that takes the contact to the right page on your website. If you are making a particular offer, the url should take inquirers to a page about that offer. Don’t offer them the home page and hope they can navigate to the correct page. Also, you have to print out the url in full on printed media and so if the page is deeply embedded on your site, you may find the url is very long. This increases mistakes either in your printed media or when the contact copies it into your browser.
Mistakes in Printed Media
Finally, mistakes … Get your printed media proof-read. You may be able to proof-read a business card on your own but anything else, at least ask a few people to read it and look out for errors. There are professional proof-readers who will help you get everything correct. Get people to copy any urls into browsers and check they work! We’re used to the ease of correcting web pages and the full force of a disastrous error in printed media perhaps doesn’t occur to us until we experience it.
How have you experienced effective use of printed media?