Whatever audience you’re appealing to, certain tricks of the trade will help your message cut through to your customers. Here are five of our favourite ways of making the most of your local media advertising:
Pain points are the problems your customers face that you can solve. If you provide the best solution to a particular problem in people’s lives, you already have your very own market niche that local media advertising can help you dominate.
As an example, a pain point for local foodies could be the lack of a decent Italian restaurant within a 20 mile radius. Now, if you were a brand new Italian restaurant that had just opened up in the area, you would immediately occupy a gap in the market. You could use local media advertising to pitch your arrival on the scene as a genuinely meaningful change in these customers’ lives, focusing on a pain point and resolving it.
Special offers are a time-honoured method of creating a buzz about your business and bringing in motivated customers, attracting immediate interest and incentivising people to finally make purchases they’ve been putting off. Special offers are also a great way of up-selling clients to a better value product.
Special offers can also help retain your present customers. If you give your customers promotions for themselves and their friends and family, then you are well on the way to creating new and repeat customers alike.
A key element of special offers and discounts is the urgency or scarcity factor. Placing a limitation or time constraint on your offers can motivate indecisive customers to close the deal. With online vouchers you can even add a ticking clock, and really pile on the pressure!
Marketing software company Hubspot wanted evidence of the power of urgency, so ran an experimental promotion, in which they created two landing pages where visitors could download a special report. The first landing page announced a limited two-day offer, while the other indicated no urgency. Unsurprisingly, the page featuring the time-limited offer achieved a 4.8% higher conversion rate than the one without, clearly demonstrating the benefits of adding a sense of urgency to your offers.
One way to build an emotional connection with your potential customers is to tap into their passion for where they live. People now place ever more importance in buying locally, so building a strong local association can reap real benefits.
There are various ways to do this. An obvious method is to invoke a famous local attraction in your marketing, such as a sports team, historic site or even a popular event like a race, a fair or a festival. Sponsoring a local event, such as a fun-run or sporting fixture can also work, and if you have a local celebrity you could approach them for a personal endorsement.
Location-specific marketing works to the primary strength of small businesses – their service to their community. Even if your efforts simply involve incorporating a local monument into your advertising, you may discover that this appeal to public pride pays dividends in attracting new custom that you can convert into regular clients.
Advertising methods are constantly being fine-tuned to grab the attention of readers and search engines. One of the most striking techniques available to you in local media advertising is a webpage takeover.
Webpage takeovers occupy all available banners on a webpage, and may include an animated element. This maximal use of space makes a much bigger impression on anyone even briefly visiting the site in question. Instead of a single banner ad, you’ll have a memorable and interactive spread of advertising presences displayed all across a trusted news site.
This degree of impact was once beyond the reach of most small businesses, but with the new horizons opened up to local media advertising by the internet, this persuasive and powerful technique is now yours to master.
If you’re looking to spread word of your business to the most useful nearby customers, remember these five points. When you’re ready to get your campaign up and running, speak to one of our local marketing experts who can advise you further on how to get the most out of your money.
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