Advertising is an essential component of modern business. Unsurprisingly, the practice isn’t new and dates back to roughly 12,000 years ago. As you can imagine, virtually everything related to advertising has changed since Chinese entrepreneurs began advertising sugary candy with bamboo flutes.
In today’s world of commerce, businesses have the opportunity to advertise through countless mediums. In such a way, they are sure they’re covered from all angles.
Let’s take a look at several innovative forms of advertising your business that often goes overlooked, despite the benefits they can bring if you use them correctly.
Content – Or Inbound – Marketing
Content marketing, also called inbound marketing, refers to content creation. You design this content to help readers live better lives without directly advertising your business, wares, and services. Although not advertising your organization’s likeness might seem counter-intuitive to success, inbound marketing is one of the market’s most popular forms of advertising.
The idea behind content marketing is that, although offering web users help without expecting them to purchase anything is unorthodox, giving potential customers help for free is likely to build the value of your brand in their eyes. This ultimately results in better performance and Internet exposure for your business.
Vehicles Are Great Opportunities To Advertise On
Research from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America indicates that an overwhelming 98% of US residents actively pay attention to advertisements and marketing directed towards people in automobiles. 29% of all polled Americans claimed they visited a business advertised within seven days of seeing one of the advertisements.
One of the most popular means of achieving advertising is applying customized vehicle wraps to your company’s vehicles. Whether you have one or 100 vehicles, services like The Vomela Companies will help wrap your business-use vehicles in wraps. This will include logos, slogans, social media handles, phone numbers, addresses, and everything a prospective customer might need to conduct business with whatever you’re advertising.
Further, the previous research found that vehicles driving just 15,000 miles each year pass a whopping nine million vehicles. Talk about affordable advertising!
Offer Branded Office Supplies To Other Businesses For Free
Office supplies aren’t free, though they’re not that expensive. However, organizations that aren’t cash-strapped would likely welcome free office supplies with open arms.
With the average annual cost of office supplies reaching roughly $228, your organization could absorb that relatively low cost – relative to most forms of advertising, that is – and have custom pens, erasers, mousepads, paperweights, and other office supplies and low-cost equipment created.
To ensure your supplies are distributed to as large an audience as possible, consider reaching out to local electric, water, and gas companies, city halls, and other highly-trafficked places of governance, public libraries, and laundromats. Anywhere with reasonably high consumer traffic and broad exposure to the public.
Distributing your custom office supplies to manufacturers that don’t typically welcome consumers would be a poor idea, as would handing them out to competitors.
Try Sponsoring A Reputable News Agency To Publish A Positive Story About Your Business
Although all sensible businesspeople recognize public relations efforts as necessary to deal with negative issues and promote general positivity not intended as damage control, many entrepreneurs don’t view public relations as advertising.
However, having a positive, warm-hearted story published about your business in a local – you may be forced to go local, depending on your organization’s budget – or the regional newspaper can effectively boost interim performance and long-term value.
The Bottom Line
Advertising is necessary for success unless you want to rely strictly on word-of-mouth communication. Unfortunately, like most things in business, advertising bills can rack up quickly.
By exploring unique, unorthodox advertising methods, you’ll be able to shrink your business’ expenses. Also, you will reach more potential customers than ever before.
