What advertising works for you?

Simple question that can field a huge array of emotive responses.

99% of businesses have to advertise, the question is, what advertising mediums work for you?

Do you take the DIY approach and search out free advertising online, print off your own leaflets and push them through doors, or do you allocate a budget and have a preffered list of advertising providers, such as the superpages etc.

Have you had any success with TV or Radio? Maybe you outsource it all to an agency?

Be interested to hear any responses, horror stories or reccomendations.

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I have shifted virtually my whole budget over to Adwords now, the great thing with adwords is when you step on the gas you can see the sales take off.

That said I have been in business now for nearly 25 years so over that time I have had chance to experiment with a lot of different mediums (mainly before the advent of the www) and one of my most successful advertising campaigns was in Newsagents windows.... I don't know if you have that over here, but back in Blighty Newsagents sell Postcard size advertisements in their windows, tried one as an experiment, was amazed by the response, ended up covering as many newsagents windows as I possibly could.

yep, must agree that adwords is a powerful and very effective advertising tool. We are big users of it ourselves.

Interesting approach with cards in a shopwindow, just shows simple ideas can be the most effective!

Other than adwords, we currently use the likes of the yahoo directory, BOTW, joeant and a few others, plus a few article directories and the like.

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cheers Steve
Forum Admin - teaboy and general gofer...

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Thats an interesting question, i think the answer is different for differing types of market.

In my experience, having been in business for a while, the first point would be to ensure you have correctly identified your target audience. Different advertising mediums work for different demographics.

Adwords works well because you can target specific keywords and phrases, so your advertising is focused on keywords that relate to your business product or service.

In my experience, paper advertising has had its day, it targets a whole spectrum of the population, many of which may not be looking for your product. Its a case of blanket marketing in that case.

IP_ 's comment about newsagents windows is a case in point, he obviously identified that his product or service would appeal to the individual who frequents newsagents and tried it out.

IMO you need to start by knowing your propective clientele, then work out which medium will be best suited to target that particular audience.

Newsagents windows! Guess what we are targetting this week, design a few trusty posters, print and get dropping them around the locale, new design e-shop being built so could be the best thing for me, as my local competition are nuts, the websites of my neighbouring competitors are a joke!

On It, nice one IP!

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