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Huge Advertising ArticlesAdvertising On A Budget -- Exploitation Print To Driving Traffic Onli
by:
Michele Pariza Wacek
I distinct to try thing
a little several and illustrate the marketing challenges of a small business. I'm exploitation one of my clients, PrescottWeddings.com.
PWC is an online resource manual for couples planning their weddings. On
with a ton of information for brides and grooms, the site includes a resource manual wherever
local businesses can advertise their products and services.
We launched PWC in Gregorian calendar month 2001. Like galore start-up businesses, PWC didn't have more money for marketing. Yet we had two major challenges (three count the limited budget):
1. PWC had to attract two kinds of target markets to the site -- advertisers and couples -- basically at the same time. And if that wasn't bad enough, we had to appeal to each group even as although one was dependent on the another -- advertisers wanted brides and grooms activity onto the site, and brides and grooms wanted a complete resource center.
2. Some bridal print publications had move and gone in Town
-- and had burned their advertisers piece sport out of town. Businesses were intelligibly hesitant simply about sinking their money into another bridal venture.
Armed with those challenges, we went to work. Now, simply over two years later, PWC enjoys well over 40,000 hits a month and has accrued its advertising base by over 600%. On top of that, PWC is well on its way to establishing a reliable brand in not simply Town
but throughout Yavapai County.
So how did we do it? A great Web site with great content plus three main marketing strategies:
1) Exploitation print to driving traffic online
2) Thinking small
3) Frequency, frequency, frequency
I'll cover number two and three in the next two articles. Now we'll talk simply about number one: Exploitation print to driving 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 first-class select for galore businesses -- from small to large. In fact, it's not uncommon for small and medium-sized businesses to build their advertising program about print.
The strength of print advertising is its flexibility. Print publications move in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can appeal to a broad audience
or a narrow one. They can be promulgated every day or once a year. This variety gives you a lot of flexibility in fitting print advertising into your campaigns.
You can besides track print to a certain extent (coupons in newspapers for example). Print is physical, allowing your customers to carry thing
about with them.
However, print's weakness is besides its strength. It's a visual medium only, so it requires more effort and interaction from your audience to do an impact (they need to finish and see it).
In the case of PWC, we chose monthly advertising in the local paper as the foundation of our marketing program. We distinct upon the local newspaper because it has the broadest reach. Town
isn't big enough to have its own evening television news, so the newspaper is the better 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 life style journal, or possibly a regionalized newspaper. In Phoenix for instance, the Arizona Republic is the main newspaper, but all the cities about Phoenix, like Scottsdale and Tempe, besides have their own papers.
Because PWC is a Web site, there's an assumption we should be exploitation only online methods to advertise. Online methods are good, and PWC makes use them, but they only take you so far. Print is a part of the "real world" -- thing
you can touch and pick up, not virtual like a Web site. Print has besides been about a lot longer, and carries more trust with it. We found by exploitation print, several of that trust and "real world" essence rubbed off, devising PWC seem less anonymous and more like a "bricks and mortar" business (a business with a store front).
Also, since we were trying to driving local traffic to the site, it ready-made sense to advertise topically
rather than attracting folk from all over the world. But even as with our local advertising, we still have a substantial number of visitors from about the state, including Phoenix and Tucson, as well as all over the globe.
The point of our marketing program was to advertise on a regular basis
so we could several build the PWC brand and driving traffic to the Web site. Yet it was essential to support our price down. So we leveraged our monthly newspaper advertising to stretch our marketing dollar as far as we could. Much on that and how we "thought small" in the next article.
Just simply about the author:
Michele Pariza Wacek owns Creative Concepts and Copywriting, a writing, marketing and creativeness agency. She offers two free e-newsletters that help subscribers combine their creativeness with hard-hitting marketing and copywriting principles to become more booming at attracting new clients, merchandising products and services and boosting business. She can be reached at http://www.writingusa.comCopyright 2005 Michele Pariza Wacek
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