subject: Click To A Better Marketing Campaign [print this page] Marketing, in the past, was done by showy, hard to miss displays. Billboards, signs, TV advertisements and fliers, all of these are print materials, and all very dependent on targeting your market with information and perfect layout, good ink and local kids to deliver the fliers. Newspaper ads were more expensive and more restricted, but the market they reached was very wide.
Today, the market has changed. Sure, billboards get attention and TV ads are still blaring, but customers and consumers are disenchanted with pretty colors and flashing lights, large gimmicks and loud music; more and more, people want information.
The complexity of the issue is that too much information too fast is a bigger turn off than a strobe light or a quacking duck. Information has to be given in bite size pieces and in an order that makes sense. The easiest way to do this is a combination of print andonline marketing.
Print media, postcards, billboards and paper ads, will get a lot of initial attention, but it's not realistic to print 20 page pamphlets to distribute to every interested customer. In fact, the longer an advertisement, the more likely it is to get thrown out! So how, when people want to know more, do you give them more?
Send them online! There are still a fair number of people who won't use the internet to research, so don't shut the customer service call center down just yet. However, the majority of any customer base is comfortable using the internet, and expects to be able to find a website with more information. So the online marketing portion of a marketing plan requires a website.
A successful website is entirely subjective, but some basic rules of thumb are that the main page has little actual information, but has quick links to the answers for most common questions and the most current specials or ads; each subject page should have less than 5 paragraphs so the information doesn't look scary, but perhaps have the pages link to other pages, keeping information concise and manageable.
However, internet advertising is much more than this. There are hundreds of ways to advertise, such as Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, Google Ads and a blog that people can subscribe to is another popular method. However, perhaps the strongest point of all of these is word of mouth. By marketing online, people who like the company can share it with their friends and the news will always spread more quickly, because the internet reaches more than printed advertising ever did.
So, in summary, smaller print ads in more places, more information in bite size pieces online, and use social media, it's there to help you!
