In our competitive market, getting your share of customers is the most important part of what we do. Without those customers, you don’t have a business to advertise. How do we go about choosing the right method to get the attention of our customers today?
Well, with the customer base becoming younger and more tech savvy, your old ways of doing a mail drop just won’t work anymore. That method ends up being very expensive with little return on the investment. However, there are a few avenues that you can go down that might just get you the bang for the buck that you are looking for.
Airwaves
This is a very inexpensive way to get to your customers. How many of you are listening to the radio or SiriusXM while you are going to and from? Nearly all of us are! So are your customers.
Reach out to local stations to inquire about the costs of doing a few ads a day, sponsoring a show or a sporting event. You will be surprised at how little this will cost. I sponsor a local rock station drive home show, the college football team’s pregame and postgame show and advertise on three different stations daily. The cost for all of that is only about $800 a week. If you were to go aggressive like I did, you would only really need to gain eight to 10 customers to pay for it. Knowing your customer base is important here too. If you are in a college town, hit up your rock and top hits stations, for example.
Google Search
This one can get a bit costly if you do not put a limit on it. However, getting front and center on a customer’s cell phone or computer screen when they are searching for a service can pay off big time. There are many companies out there that can set this up and monitor for you monthly. When you use this method, come up with a distinct coupon code so that you can track the traffic that it is bringing to your service centers.
Take note that on this method, you are not the only one that will be doing this. Your competition may spend more than you and poof, they are above you on the search. A little trick to gaining market share on google is to keep up with your scores. If you are at 4.0 or higher out of 5.0 on their scale, you will pop up on the map in searching. This could be an easy way to just get it out there, as well.
Digital Advertising
This is very similar to the airwaves. People are on their devices and their computers daily. We have all spent five minutes looking up a vacation spot or that amazon deal. Get your logo on sites or in the adaptive marketing sector. For example, when the blue F app is listening to you talk to your friends about needing tires, you see those ads for the next five days, right? You can pay social media platforms for ads like this. It's not as bad as you think price-wise, but you must be smart like on searches and set a limit.
Point of View
Although they may be going the way of the dinosaur now, billboards are a large catch of the eye. Really what you pay for in this method is the artwork design. If your corporate entity (like a franchise) has artwork available, this can be a great cost-cutter. The new way that I have started noticing in our area is the moving billboard. You have all seen one. It’s that big truck with a billboard attached to it driving all around town in a loop. Although it may be a little more expensive than the standard billboard, you will be hitting more potential customers as it hits the streets. Again, set a special coupon code so that you know how it's performing.
As you can see above, for a little bit of cost, you have various methods to gain that market share from your competition. The standard mail drop or email blast will not always be effective any longer as most people bypass that with a flick of the wrist to the trash or that handy delete button. Think outside the box and look at ways that you can take it another step in your markets.
Any advertising is better than no advertising!
