As more and more advertising dollars move online, traditional marketing and advertising channels such as posters and direct mail are giving their users even better ROI. These channels aren’t as saturated as they once were before online marketing became popular. Customers are therefore responding positively to businesses that reach out to them using these methods.
If you run a business today, you should definitely take advantage of posters to generate sales. You need to do it right, though. Customers are smarter than ever and they won’t respond to generic or boring advertising. Below are some of the ways you can effectively use posters to generate sales for your business.
First, Get Attention
The currency you should be paying attention to today in the marketing world is attention. Some of the biggest companies in the world such as Google and Facebook make most of their money by trading their users’ attention for marketing dollars.
If you can’t grab attention, no one will care about your messaging. Luckily for you, it is not that hard to grab attention using posters. All you need to do is to be creative with your designs. An excellent design with great copy is enough to make a user give you their attention.
The essence of great copy is to make a user stop. You want to stop them in their tracks and make them give you all their attention. When driving on a busy highway, you will pass several billboards and not care for what they are saying. Nonetheless, there will always be that one billboard that draws you in and forces you to figure out what it is all about. You want your posters to have the same effect as those great attention-grabbing billboards.
Making Sales the Goal
Designing a poster with no specific goal in mind is a fool’s errand. Since generating sales is your goal, all the decisions you make about the design and copy on the poster should be trained at getting people into a sales funnel.
You don’t want a generic poster with no call to action. As a small business, you have the luxury of a limited product or service offering. Your products are also probably highly complementary so cross-selling and up-selling should be a breeze. Given this reality, it is much more effective to have a poster that is trained specifically at getting people into the sales funnel for one or few products and then worrying about other products later.
When making sales is your goal, it makes sense to track how effective your poster lead generation strategies are working so you can optimize your strategies with time. There are several ways to track this goal. You can have a dedicated cell number for your poster promotions so you know exactly how many inquiries are triggered by your posters. Also, you can have specific coupon codes you only use on certain posters.
Go Where Your Ideal Customers Congregate
As with any promotional campaign, targeting plays a huge role in the success or failure of the campaign. If you’ve taken the time to define your ideal customer, you already know where they spend their time, the products they buy, and the establishments they frequent.
Even for those people who sell products that are bought once every few years such as furniture, there are establishments where you can find your ideal customer. This is why it is very important that you define who your customer is and know the businesses and establishments they are likely to visit before they come to your store.
Off the top of my head, in the case of the furniture store, some of the people who are likely to buy furniture in the coming few days or weeks are probably talking to local real estate agents to buy or rent a property. They may have also hired the services of a moving company to help them relocate or they may be shopping for an interior decorator.
If you took the time to figure something like this out, you can have posters targeting customers in these establishments. You can only do this with the permission of the owners of these businesses, of course. They may require you to pay them or place their posters in your store as well.
Incorporate New Media
Upon seeing your poster, a potential buyer may want to know more about what your offers or products are about. If you are smart, you should make the process as painless as possible for them. This can be done by having the addresses to your online media accounts on the poster.
At the very least, you should have a website. If yours is a well known local brand and you are promoting a very specific product, listing the specific URL address (such as brand.com/specific-offer) where the offer or product can be found can be useful. You should also list the handles to your social media accounts on the poster.
If your poster will be placed where people can easily reach it, adding a QR code that users can scan using their phones is extremely valuable. The idea is to be creative and use every channel available to you to connect with your potential customers.
