Today our choices are limitless to advertise. We can print a flyer, print an add in the paper, advertise on television, give out promotional products branded with your logo or message, place an add on the internet or email. Why is Print still the best?

Let's start with an add in the paper. Exposure is good but the cost is high and it is a hit or miss opportunity. Today less and less people read the paper from end to end due to a lack of time and a greater resource for capturing important information. Blink and your costly add goes right into the garbage. Unless youre willing to spend thousand for a full page color ads, youre probably not spending your marketing dollar wisely.

Email for a while was great. You could purchase a list and send a bulk email to thousands or millions in a few minutes. Unfortunately what seemed like a great idea turned into a great annoyance and soon legislators soon outlawed this method. Today you must get permission from the end user in order to send them email opportunities. While this can be good, usually youre preaching to the converted. If you want to tap into new markets, this probably isn't that effective.

Faxing or bulk faxing faces the same annoyance factor as emails are rarely get noticed. A lot of people receive these faxes on their computers and delete them before ever getting printed. Television again is an expensive medium usually reserved for large players or agencies. Today with TIVO and manic channel flipping, most people never see ads unless it's the super bowl. In order to be effective you must place many spots of the same add to get any retention.

Promotional Products are great and cost effective but need to be clever and usually are limited in scope. A good promotional product campaign together with a directed print campaign is usually the most effective. Printing used to be mass produced flyers dumped on a large area. A response rate of 1% was looked at as a success. Today with variable data we can identify potential customers are target only those on the list. Adding the customers name onto your piece can raise your response rate to 5 to 8% generally. If you really dig deeper into your potential customers and direct individual campaign, you can raise your response rate to 30 to 40%. An example of this is a suit store. Say a customer buys a suit. The week following you send this customer a thank you for buying the suit with a picture of it, and offer 2 coupons for a shirt and tie that would look great with it. Pictures really solidify your marketing material Also customers appreciate that you are genuinely interested in their specific needs.

If you need help or have questions, for your next campaign, feel free to email me at steve@solutionsink4u.com.

Good luck with your next successful campaign.