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Diverse Local Advertising Methods Reach Wider Audience

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by Liz Jones

For small business, advertising is the key to drawing in customers. There are several different ways to go about it. Using only one form of advertising is not always effective. Using multiple types of advertising venues reaches a broader audience, and therefore, more potential customers.

Demographics

Knowing some demographics about clientele is helpful in discovering what types of advertising will reach the. There are several ways to find out preference and background on present customers.

Conduct surveys with cards at cashiers counter or send them out with the mail on delivery orders. There are several online programs that can calculate demographics of those visiting a business’ website. These statistics can be used to streamline marketing and advertising strategies.

A business can cater marketing strategies towards its clients. If most of them are married adults without children, for example, a buy-one-get- one free coupon online might be successful. A local radio spot might also be efficient. Radio stations know their demographics, so, statistics can be mated to certain stations and commercial air times.

Format

Where and how a customer conducts business is key to reaching them in marketing strategies. If they rarely go online, the best pay-per-click advertising campaign is not going to reach them. If they never read the newspaper, classified ads will not help. Using both methods of advertising, however, will reach both clientele.

Methods

The type of online advertising used affects how a potential customer discovers a business, especially a small local one. If a business does not have a website it will be difficult for people to find them online. These businesses must use advertising online though social media websites or piggyback off of other websites such as the local Chamber of Commerce or a review site. Small businesses that are offline may also need to cater to an audience that is offline. Strategies might include flyer distribution, newspaper advertising, radio and television campaigns, direct mail and outdoor billboards.

Cost

The least expensive advertising with the greatest return on investment is always the best strategy. Some forms of local advertising cost very little. For example, writing a company blog is one way to advertise online at a cost of paying a professional or doing it in-house. Running coupons and flyers costs little and the method of distribution could also be low. However, if no one pays attention the cost won’t matter. If spending $3,000 on advertising online or through a radio campaign brings in $6,000 in customer sales, it is probably worth the investment.

About the Author

Author writes about a variety of topics. If you would like to learn more about local advertising, visit http://www.local-advertising.com/.

Referral Marketing

How to Find and Acquire the Ideal Customer – The Customer That Brings Dozens of Ideal Customers

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By Alan Boyer

I was just reading through some other articles on EzineArticles about “attracting” the ideal customer.

I’m going to deal with two aspects of that.

Our job in marketing should be more about “finding and acquiring” customers instead of “attracting” customers. The difference is passive versus active. “Attracting” sort of implies that if we do all of the right things we’ll attract them to us while we set here. Marketing, done right, however, means that we identify who our ideal customer is then we “go get ’em.” That’s an active step. And THEN if we say the right things to the right people they will literally JUMP into our shopping cart.
The second part of that is about THE IDEAL customer. And most small business owners either have no ideal who their ideal customer is, or they may have identified a much less than ideal customer.I guess we could define ideal, and the really ideal.

There is a lot of ways we could define an ideal customer, and not all of these are this AND this, they are more like this OR this..

Easy to get
The individual customer buys a LOT (they are the super customers. When some clients buy $10, these are the ones that buy $1,000, or even $10,000 each time they come along).
Or, as a group, they buy more. In other words, I had a client who was selling a $5,000 program and having trouble selling them. When asked what an Ideal client would look like she started talking about larger companies who would buy $10,000 to $15,000 of the same program from her. But when we looked at options she was hesitant to even look at we lowered her price to $250 and sold hundreds a month, in other words, $25,000 a month and for only 4 hours of her time, about $6,000/hour. The $5,000 program was taking 8-15 hours a month to produce, and many more hours than that to sell it, and she wasn’t selling them.
Or even a company that could refer LOTS of companies.So, there could be several different ways to define ideal. All of the way from easy to sell, to making the most money, to making the most money with the less time, or a customer or a prospect who’d refer tons of new customers while reducing your time doing it, the last being one of the best, but still, your definition may be different.

Now, let’s take that even further, as I said above “THE REALLY IDEAL.”

The Ideal Customer… The Golden Egg

Let’s call the ideal customer we defined above as “the golden egg.” But now we want to find “the golden goose.” The golden goose is the one that lays dozens of “golden eggs.”

So, once you define a golden egg, who they are, and where we’d find them, then we start looking for “the golden goose” that lays those particular golden eggs.

The Golden Goose… The Customer That Lays Dozens of the Golden Eggs

Creston, one of my clients, who owns a sign company, was talking with me about how to find his golden eggs. At first we were defining the golden eggs as companies in malls. They are frequently moving in and out and needing his signs. He had been doing a lot of really small yard signs such as realtor signs. They were $24 each and were taking up a lot of his time to sell individual signs.

So, as we talked about the potential Golden Geese each of those turned into a different form of Golden Goose.

The mall shops turned into him working with large scale property managers. Those that managed the malls. He made a deal with them. He’d cover the empty shops with signs and help them get that shop filled quicker. Then they’d recommend him to the new shop owners that came in. So, instead of selling a sign here and there to the shops, now he gets almost every shop as a customer both every time it goes empty and every time it has a new shop owner. And, on top of that, some of these shops are franchises, so he gets referrals to other shops around town that are in the same franchise. In fact, he offers a discount to the shop owner who gives him a referral that is sold to another shop owner.

He also built his marketing message to target mall managers instead of shop owners. Now he says that the average mall or property manager makes another $30,000 a year from partnering with him due to the fast turnaround and high occupancy rates. BINGO. Now he gets lots of Golden Goose mall managers. And, that’s at a time when malls are actually downsizing… they really need him. He’s their answer, and they are providing him a nice answer as well.

That was when his sales exploded.

We also looked at how to find the Golden Goose for the real estate signs. He did develop a program for real estate agencies that would recommend his signs to all of their real estate agents, another one for mortgage brokers, and another one for the city wide association of realtors. That certainly kicked his sales of $24 signs up several notches. But they just didn’t compare to the large thousand dollar signs in the malls. The difference was that the small real estate signs weren’t really golden eggs. So, he had developed a goose, but not a golden goose that was laying a lot of golden eggs. Yes, he was getting a lot of eggs, but just not golden ones from this program.

So, where are your golden eggs, and how could you find your big golden geese?

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/