How Can You Market Your Small Business With Print Marketing?

As a small business owner, you are always looking for cost-effective ways to communicate with your target audience. According to recent research by TrueImpact, if you are looking for better brand recall among your customers, you may want to consider print marketing. This may be counter to all the advice you hear that says digital marketing is the future, but print marketing isn’t dead! Hundreds of companies across the country have noticed that print media is actually an affordable small business advertising option. To be competitive in the market place you need to consider adding it to your marketing mix in order to boost your bottom line. If you don’t know where to start, we have five affordable small business advertising that you can easily implement today.

1. Update Your Business Card
Your business card speaks volumes about you and is your first impression. Business cards may seem like ‘old school’ business tools, but they are still the most important way to communicate with the people you meet. Almost everyone will ask you for a business card in a professional setting, and if you don’t have one, you seem unprepared. Here are some ways that you can easily upgrade your business card to create a positive, professional first impression.

• • Incorporate your brand identity
    • You should already have a brand identity with style guidelines like brand colors and fonts. Ensuring that your business card applies those style guides is will ensure that your customer gets a consistent experience when every they interact with your brand
  • Use heavy cardstock
    • Using have cardstock on your business card will impress the people that you meet and leave a lasting impression. It may be tempting to go with a cheap paper but using easily bent paper will make you and your brand look cheap. You don’t have to splurge on the most expensive paper but avoiding the cheap stuff will do your brand good.
  • Add your social media profiles or icons
    • Let the people that you meet know where to find you online. You should add your social media handles and hashtag that your business uses to physical interactions into online traffic.

2. Try Out Newspaper Advertising
When people think about affordable small business advertising, they rarely think about newspaper advertising. Even if you think that advertising in the paper is expensive, you may be surprised to hear that it can provide significant ROI. To get newspaper ads to work for your business, make sure that you choose a publication that your target market reads. If you are advertising to an older population in a small town, you may notice that you get a significant amount of leads for running an advertisement with excellent creative. Be sure to include your website, phone number, and a strong call-to-action in all your newspaper advertisements to make sure that your ad spend translates into sales.

3. Consider Information Pamphlets
The best aspect of print advertising is that you can provide a lot of information in a small amount of space. If you are a business to business company, consider creating a guide with the pain-points that you solve for your customers. The nice thing about guides is that you can include stunning visuals to aid in strengthening your brand and story. Consider your guide as a useful tool for your customers to use to solve a problem they have. If they feel like your company is knowledgeable about the problem and can provide a solution, you will see leads and sales coming through the door. If you sell B2C, you can consider creating a pamphlet to send using direct mail. Use your pamphlet as a way to generate instant sales by including a strong call to action and a discount.

4. Utilize Magazines
The key to magazine advertising is to use an effective ad in a highly targeted publication. The reach that magazines have is typically higher and more targeted to a niche than any other form of traditional advertising. The other advantage of a magazine is that people rarely throw magazines away, so your advertisement continues to be evergreen months or years after the magazine is sold. If you have a highly visual brand, magazines are a great way to tell your brand story and improve brand recall. Make sure that you are utilizing high-resolution photographs in order to stop the reader immediately.

5. Send Your Customers Postcards
It is so much easier to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. After your customer has purchased your product or used your service follow up with a series of postcards to keep your business top of mind. As with your business cards, make sure that your postcards use your brand guidelines. Don’t be afraid to personalize your postcard with your customer’s first name and by adding your signature. There are several services that will print postcards with a realistic signature at the bottom. If you are looking for repeat business use a discount code or a free gift with purchase offer to keep your best customers coming back.

In this digital age, traditional advertising is being ignored by many small business owners. Now that you know what type of affordable small business advertising options are available to you, you can use this knowledge to create the perfect mix online and offline advertising to bring your business to new heights!