So you’re a small business just about to set foot in the market. What’s the first thing you’d be looking at? Our first guess is branding yourself. Why is it important? Until your target audience has your brand name embedded deep in their minds, how would you be able to convert them into your loyal future customers?
And how do you achieve this? Brand advertising through an advertising agency is perhaps your best buy here – focusing more on the brand per se and not on the specific product/service, or maybe, on both! And when the mention of brand advertising comes up, we think of print media as the best possible bet. Simple focused, and most importantly, cost-effective, it’s the ideal medium you could choose for bringing your brand to the limelight. Here’s all about brand advertising in newspapers and how an advertising agency can help small brands like you with tight budgets.
What is Brand Advertising?
First things first- before we go harping on the importance of brand advertising for small brand owners, let’s understand what it really means. It’s essentially a type of promotion technique that primarily focuses on establishing a strong and long-term connect with your potential customers.
Now, this would involve several steps – registering your brand name in their minds and creating a unique identity for your brand which your audience can instantly connect with anytime, anywhere. Once this is achieved, your brand presence would actually go a long way in promising brand loyalty for your targets, new as well as the existing ones.
Before we move on to how advertisement in newspapers can work wonders for small businesses like you, let’s look at the prime hurdles on your way to making it big in the marketing world.
Advertising Challenges Faced by Small Brands
- Tight budget
- Lack of necessary resources to increase visibility and generate quality leads
- Short on staff to carry out continual marketing campaigns and promotion activities
- Hard to keep pace with the latest technological trends because of the shortage of financial and other resources
These are just some of the top few hurdles we’ve tried to list down here. We understand that each business enterprise has its own set of roadblocks and the journey is different for each brand, small or big. The path may be different, but the end objective remains the same for all. To make a home in the hearts and minds of the customers. How to get there? Let’s read on.
Benefits of Advertising in Newspaper
Social media promotional campaigns may be ruling the online world, but our good ol’ print ad hasn’t lost its charm yet. Newspaper advertising still remains one of the best options especially for small business brands.
- It better targets your audience: You said visibility was your prime issue, right? What better way than newspapers to make your presence felt? We all receive dailies at our doorstep every morning. Newspapers have the power to reach specific demographic regions more effectively than electronic or online media. Through newspapers, you can hope your brand reach every nook and corner of the geographical region you’re targeting!
- It’s more affordable: Compared to any other medium like radio, TV, or digital, advertising in newspapers is more cost-effective. Besides, the best advertising agencies in the town work in tandem with the newspaper staff to create the right classified and advertorial for you at no added cost. You can even opt for discounts for bigger ad coverage and increased frequency.
- It boosts online advertising: Remember the famous Oreo tagline in print ads, “You can still dunk in the dark”, which earned a whopping 40,000 retweets and Facebook likes in 2013? This is how brand advertising can help your brand garner well-deserved attention in other mediums as well.
Brand Advertising in Newspapers: Its Changing Faces
Remember how newspaper advertising was only about plain ads and classifieds back in the day? Then, there were the advertorials– a combination of advertisement and editorial. They were considered to be an innovative approach to blend promotional content with the rest of the information that the newspaper intended to deliver.
The result: your brand effectively reached your audience, providing the right amount of information about your product, without sounding too “sales.” Slowly, the focus on print ads shifted to special features i.e., classifieds created especially to mark a special occasion. An exclusive ad page dedicated to a specific event/occasion lent an exclusive opportunity for personal branding. If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because you saw the classified ad page creatively named What’s on Special Feature or World Day Special Feature in last Sunday’s edition of The Telegraph t2.
Today, newspaper ads have moved to introduce an innovative trend in the form of thematic advertisements. Such ads are theme-based, as the name suggests, bringing to light a brief profile of each brand owner or the brand, along with their published interviews. What better way to introduce yourself to your audience and connect with them? Advertising is all around us. We just need to know which one to pick to make a quick and effective impact. Brand advertising in newspapers has some obvious advantages in terms of long-term memory retention. To learn more, click here.