Print Advertising

Many companies view social media as another outlet to pump their marketing messages into, especially marketing companies that have had success in other areas of marketing such as SEO, PPC, email advertising, or traditional media marketing outlets like television advertising, radio advertising, or print advertising.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace accounts, Twitter streams, blogs, YouTube channels, Digg submissions, Flickr accounts, Wikis, even rating and review sites are all social media marketing tactics you see commonly touted as efforts companies should be doing. But have you ever stopped to ask why?

Why should your company have a Facebook fan page? Is it because everyone else does? Maybe your competition does?

While it may seem cool to be able to say that you have all of these different social media accounts, you have to ask yourself if these marketing tactics are what you need to be doing to be successful in social media?

This time I will talk about negotiating in a buyer's market and leveraging your business to get the most out of your ad dollars.

Since we are in a buyer's market right now, your business is in a great position to add as much value as possible. For television advertising this can mean that your business is mentioned more in intros and outros to commercial breaks. For radio advertising, this means a higher frequency of mentioning your business's name, or co-op advertising of a local event. For print advertising, this means bigger ads and more ad placement.

Finally, you should try to leverage any advertising package that is presented to you in order to get as many leads as possible.

Next time, I will talk about establishing a public relations campaign by being a contrarian.

Last time I talked about addressing your prospects' problems through relevant direct mail messaging. This time I will talk about using direct mail advertising and email advertising together to drive up response rates.

Because of the recession, some people have been discontinuing their direct mail campaigns because they think it is not cost effective enough. However, as an automotive ad agency, a retail advertising agency, and a professional services advertising agency, we like to think that we know what we're talking about. We know that the real metric we should be looking at is not just investment cost, but ROI. According to the experts, direct mail followed up by an email has a much higher ROI than either form of communication alone when running an integrated marketing campaign. Direct mail by itself also has a higher ROI with business-to-business when running a single faceted campaign.

The reasons for this are as follows. Most of the time, direct mail lists are alot cleaner than email advertising lists. Also, generally speaking, people are more accepting of unsolicited mail than they are of unsolicited email. After all, it's much more likely to open up an email and get a computer virus than it is to open up some mail and get an actual virus. Next, for business-to-business, direct mail is still delivered even if the prospect is no longer with the company. Email addresses, on the other hand, are usually turned off when a person leaves an organization. Think of all the people that got laid off in the recession and how many email addresses must have been turned off. Lastly, direct mail is subject to an infinite amount of creative possibilities, whereas something like print advertising, television advertising, or billboard advertising always has to follow a certain preset format. Even email advertising has to follow a specific template most of the time. But direct mail advertising is only limited by your own creativity.

Direct mail is a great way to increase your b-to-b clientele, especially as part of an integrated marketing campaign. And because of the recession, the cost for direct mail has actually gone down. Use direct mail to start a conversation with your prospects; follow up that conversation with an email; direct that prospect to your online assets; and finish the conversation with a sale.

In the last post I talked about using direct mail to start a conversation with prospective customers, a conversation for which the next step would be visiting your website/landing page. In this post I will talk about using direct mail advertising to obtain customers outside of the traditional office space. This is, obviously, directly relevant to business-to-business marketing.

Many professionals work outside of an office setting, including construction foremen and operations managers, health professionals, private tutors, or retail owners. Using direct mail as part of an integrated marketing campaign is essential when trying to reach these prospective clients and building relationships with them.

One way to integrate direct mail into your marketing campaign is to use it as a primer before or after an email or phone call. Doing this will enable your prospects to become familiar with your business and what it does, with you, and with your brand. This will make them more receptive to your other communications, such as email advertising, radio advertising, or print advertising.

It is also a good idea to integrate personalized landing pages/URLs in with your direct mail campaign. This will enable you to customize the call-to-action for each recipient, increasing the chance that the recipient will respond. The Direct Marketing Associations says that 33% of direct mail recipients go online to respond, and that increases by 20%-30% when personalized landing pages/URLs are used.

As said in the last post, you can capture prospects' information and build a database of qualified leads. That way you can also send follow-up emails or direct mails. Remember that direct mail is a great way to introduce your online assets to people, such as professionals outside of the traditional office space, who wouldn't normally be in front of a computer. Start that conversation with mail, drive it to your website, and end it with a sale.

Global advertising fell more than expected in the first half of the year but the downturn could be bottoming out, a leading media agency said on Monday.

ZenithOptimedia said global ad expenditure in 2009 would drop 9.9 percent following the poor first half, compared with a predicted fall of 8.5 percent made in July.

"However, this downgrade almost entirely relates to first-half activity," the agency said in a report. "Since then improvements in economic confidence have been accompanied by positive signals from media owners that the downturn is bottoming out.

"We are still confident that the second half of the year will be much less painful for the ad market than the first half, and expect the market to hit bottom before the end of 2009."

Another media network, Carat AEGS.L, said in October it also expected global ad spend to fall almost 10 percent in 2009 before a return to slight growth in 2010.

Zenith said it now forecast a recovery in 2010 of 0.5 percent, down from its earlier forecast of 1.6 percent growth, with developing markets leading the way with 7.8 percent growth.

Developed markets, which are defined as North America, Western Europe and Japan, are forecast to shrink another 2.9 percent.

For 2011, Zenith expects 4.3 percent global growth, with developed markets showing a 1.5 percent recovery and developing markets growing 9.8 percent.

Of the different platforms, the Internet is the only medium expected to expand, with 9.2 percent growth forecast for 2009, while all other traditional media is set to shrink.

The report said print advertising, such as newspapers and magazines were in steep decline, with newspaper ad expenditure set to fall 17 percent this year, and magazine spend down 20 percent.

"By 2011 we forecast newspaper ad expenditure to be 25 percent below its 2007 peak, while magazine ad expenditure is 28 percent below its own peak," the report said.

"Prospects for other traditional media are more encouraging: we expect television advertising, cinema and outdoor advertising to return to growth in 2010, followed by radio in 2011."

--Source:  Reuters

In the last post, I wrote about optimizing your website to tell Google and your visitors where you are and what you do. But another important online place where it's absolutely critical to clearly identify where you are and what you do is your local business profile on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Your Categories

In Google Maps, you can categorize your business in up to 5 categories. They may be standard categories that are provided by Google Maps or those that you can create yourself. Use 1-2 of the standard Google Maps categories that best fit your business, and then create 3-4 that contain your best keyword terms plus the geography terms for which you want to be found.

For example, as a New Jersey marketing company, we classify ourselves in the already established categories of Advertising, and Marketing. For our other four categories we use the top keyword phrases for which we want to be found, such as cable advertising, outdoor advertising, radio advertising, print advertising, traditional media advertising, or automotive ad agency.

The categories you choose may be based on any criteria that are important to you. Some suggestions are your most profitable procedures or the categories in which your strongest competitors have categorized themselves. The categories may also be based on some other criteria known only to you.

Use geographic terms in your categories in order to make it completely clear to Google where you do business. Using the names of nearby areas may also help your site rank better for those searches. For example, our office is in Westfield, NJ, but most searchers use "New Jersey" or "NJ" in their queries, so we use New Jersey terms in our categories instead of Westfield terms.

However, Yahoo Local and Bing Local do not allow you to create your own categories. So you must choose as many categories as you are allowed, picking the most appropriate and most important first.

Your Descriptions

Also use geography terms within the description area of your profiles, where you have complete control of what is written. These descriptions are crawled and indexed by the local spiders, so make certain they find your most important geographic terms within them.

Your Attributes

Attributes (only in Google Maps) allow you to go crazy with terms to tell spiders and humans what you do and where you do it. You can, in essence, create and name a field whatever you want and then populate it with terms describing that property.

Almost every business pulls people from both its immediate location and surrounding areas. So, you could create a field named Locations Served and list the towns and neighborhoods near you and from which your business typically draws customers.

Some business, like plumbing, carpet cleaning, lawn care, and pet sitting go to the customer instead of customers coming to them. For a business like this, you could title a field Service Areas and list the places where you are willing to travel to provide your services.

You can also include attributes that allow you to use keyword terms that contain geographic modifiers. For example, if you have an advertising agency in New Jersey, you could create a field titled New Jersey Marketing Services and populate it with terms like "New Jersey marketing", "traditional media in NJ", "best ad agency NJ", "online marketing consultants NJ", "public relations NJ", and "New jersey retail advertising agency". This is an effective way to help you rank for long-tail terms that apply to where you are and what you do.

Your Coupons

Although not every business type has been traditionally associated with coupons, creative entrepreneurs are finding ways to use them to their benefit. Nearly every business can offer some sort of discount or value-added coupon for its goods or services. For inspiration you can look around to see what your competitors are doing with coupons. Then, when you create your coupons, include your best keyword terms plus your location in the offers.

It's highly likely that attributes from Google Maps Local Business Listings and coupons from all of the platforms are pushed out to other places on the Web, such as Google Base and coupon Web sites, so the impact can be very far-ranging.

Local business listings are designed to help searchers find businesses in particular geographic locations. Make it easy for Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local to tell where you are and what you do to increase the odds they will find your business when a relevant search is made.

Online marketing slipped 5% in Q2 as the recession extended the first decline in online marketing since 2002.

This marked the second consecutive quarterly decline in online advertising since the dot-com bust at the start of the decade. That decline resulted in eight consecutive quarters of falling online ad sales.

In the first half of 2009, online advertising totaled $10.9 billion, down 5% from the same period of 2008. Almost 50% of that money has been spent on search engine marketing with Google, making Google the controller of 2/3 of the U.S. search market. In fact, Google's ad revenue for the first half of the year increased by 4%.

Online marketing consultants predict that revenue will pick up as the U.S. economy recovers and advertisers increase their efforts to connect with consumers who are going to the Internet for information and entertainment.

The Internet's advertising prices are also lower than those offered in traditional media. As a result, these advertising trends are the primary cause of traditional media suffering much steeper advertising declines than the Internet.

For example, print advertising has been falling for the past three years, including a 29% drop in Q2. Marketing analysts doubt that all the advertising dollars that have migrated away from traditional media will return, even after the economy recovers.

--Source:  The Associated Press 10/05/09

The new trend in television advertising is consumer specidic targeting. Advertisers can now gather viewer information such as time, date, and location from set-top boxes in order to show the right commercial at the right time in the right place.  The idea behind this new type of targeted television advertising is that a senior does not have to watch the same commercials as a college student.

The newly developed software allows advertisers to be more efficient.  It enables them to be more relevant to the consumer based on income, gender, or even home owner status. Soon, the targeting precision of internet advertising will be the norm in television advertising.

This, along with the new and more interactive form of television advertising I wrote about before, will enable this form of traditional media to make a comeback, just as print advertising is poised to make a comeback.  You can expect traditional marketing revenues to be on the rise in the upcoming years.

Many US state governments, and even governments of other countries, are now labeling outdoor advertising as "visual pollution".  The latest government to ban outdoor advertising based on this label is the city of Chennai in India.  However, the city also acknowledged the fact that outdoor advertising plays a vital role in its own income tax revenue and employment rate.

Other governments that have banned outdoor advertising based on the notion that it is "visual pollution" are the state of Maine, the cities of of Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles, which recently upheld its ban in a courtroom decision against a media group.  Auckland, New Zealand, and parts of South Africa are also following suit and are pursuing bans on outdoor advertising.

Outdoor advertising, and more specifically billboard advertising, are integral parts of media for many advertisers.  Billboard advertising is also vital in supporting the print advertising part of the industry.

While it is completely understandable that a local government would want to ban the potential alcohol or cigarette billboard near a school, it is also necesarry to understand that billboard advertising can serve positive social endeavors, such as aiding in finding missing persons.  Everything has a pro and con, and outdoor advertising is no different.

But legislators are increasingly siding with the cons side of the argument.  And once digital billboard advertising becomes the norm, legislators may lead an outright crusade against outdoor advertising, labeling it not only as "visual pollution", but also as a "traffic distraction".

The bans on outdoor advertising will have profound consequences for the advertising industry.  Revenue streams will drop, which of course will cause unemployment to increase.  Let's just hope that legislators don't take an extremist stance on the issue and make unemployment worse than it already is.

Just when you thought that print advertising was down for the count, it comes back swinging hard.  With new and innovative forms of interactive advertising, print advertising will be the unlikely competitor of the Internet.  As new technologies emerge, traditional media advertising will merge with online advertising in creative and engaging ways.

Technology, such as mobile phones, is taking print advertising off the page and into the realm of interactivity.  One such example is how consumers can now use their camera phones to take pictures of print ads and text them in return for promos, such as coupons or video clips.  An advertising campaing like this was used to market this summer's film "X-Men Origins:  Wolverine".

Another form of interactive print advertising is Microsoft's upcoming ad campaign with Ford to market the new Ford Taurus SHO.  Microsoft will allow consumers to scan certain tags with embedded codes, and the codes will link consumers to certain microsites.

The new level of interactivity in print advertising will immerse and engage consumers in a much more profound way, not to mention a much longer time-span as well.  Print publishers who have been losing the fight to online publishers will now be able to compete for their share of the market.  Maybe this is a cue for other forms of traditional media advertising to update their techniques as well.  Instead of competing with online marketing, they can be complementary to it.

If you decided to go with your own in-house online marketing department instead of an advertising agency, then another helpful suggestion for your online marketing campaign is to position your online department as an entirely separate business.

The biggest advantage of your online marketing department operating on its own is that it will leverage most, if not all, of your existing expenses of your brick and mortar business.  How is this possible?  Well, the return from an internet marketing strategy can be exponentially greater than any other traditional media marketing strategy.  Why?  Because the realm of online advertising is global, not to mention the fact that a lot more people use the internet than any other traditional media, such as reading print advertising, i.e. a newspaper (which is slowly dying) or looking at television advertising (most people change the channel or get up to do something else during a commercial break).  Relatively speaking then, the cost of an online department (if run properly) is much cheaper than a traditional media department since the return is much greater (cost includes risk here).

Why is data analytics important? Well, have you ever tried to manage something that you haven't measured? You could throw yourself into the deep end of a pool, but if you don't know how to swim then you're going to drown. So how do you stay afloat?  You need to invest in measuring and tracking services for all of your web site traffic.  Any good full service ad agency with competent online marketing consultants should offer data analytics as a service.

First of all, you need to be able to measure your sheer traffic volume.  Traffic volume is the general number of visitors to your website, whether they were online conversions or not.  This can give you a clear picture of how many web surfers are even reaching your website, from anywhere on the web.  This number is also important because it gives you something to measure everything else against.

Secondly, you need to measure traffic quality.  What is the bounce rate of your website?  How much time are your visitors spending on your website?  These things are important to measure in order to gauge how well your website keeps the attention of its visitors.  By measuring this against the traffic volume, you can see what percentage of your visitors is actually staying on your website, versus just looking at it for a couple of seconds and then hitting the back button (or any other way to get off a website so quickly).

Thirdly, you need to determine your traffic sources and measure how many visitors you are getting from each one of those sources.  This allows you to see where you are getting your visitors from and enables you to allocate more resources to those traffic sources.  You can measure this against traffic quality to see where the most interested visitors are coming from (from which website or link they are being redirected).  You can also measure this against traffic volume in order to determine the percentage of visitors from each source.

Fourthly, you need to measure your traffic conversions.  Making that sale, i.e. getting that conversion, is the goal of your business.  By measuring traffic conversions, you can see how well you are doing in each category.  By measuring traffic conversions against all of the above mentioned kinds of data, you can determine where most of your online conversions are coming from, how long each conversion spends on your website, and the percentage of total visitors that become online conversions.

Lastly, you need to determine how often you should analyze these data points.  This depends entirely on your business and your industry.  It also depends simply on your preference.  Some people like to have daily numbers, some like weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or even annually.  The point is that you need to figure out how often you need the data reports in order to be on top of your game.  But that is entirely up to you. If you hire an advertising agency, it should give you the option of how frequently you would like to receive your data reports.  The best ad agency will analyze your reports for you and tell you how you can improve.  But this is of course true not just for internet marketing, but also for traditional media marketing such as television advertising, radio advertising, print advertising, or any outdoor advertising.

Again, these numbers individually won’t mean much.  A number by itself is just a number; but together, these numbers will paint a very clear picture of the health of your business.  With all of this knowledge, you’ll be able to do everything that is necessary in order for your business to thrive.  If you know how to swim, into the deep end you go.

Co-op advertising has been around since there has been print advertising, and it remains strong even in today’s world of television advertising and online marketing.  Co-op advertising is a common advertising practice used by manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers and distributors.  It enables products/services to be highlighted in regional and local advertising. 

Think of amusement parks, like Six Flags here in New Jersey.  They always have some sort of promotion through Coca-Cola, such as "buy one get one free" or "half-price tickets" with a coke can.  Coca-Cola enjoys the endorsement of its products by Six Flags, while Six Flags get extra special pricing on product purchases. More importantly, since the advertising specifically mentions both Six Flags and Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola will help offset the cost of the co-op advertising campaign by jointly paying for the co-op advertising with Six Flags.

As traditional media marketers and online marketing consultants, we run both traditional and online co-op advertising campaigns.  Don't have the capital or resources to advertise the way you want to?  Sign up for our mutually beneficial co-op advertising program.  We'll offset your advertising costs while also advertising your business.

For more info on co-op advertising, click here.

Call us at 877-876-2995!  Or visit our website or our other blog.

We consider ourselves one of the best, if not the best ad agency in New Jersey.  This is because we are able to utilize our tried and true methods that have been around for a long time while still adapting to the changes brought about with the onset of the future.  One of our tried and true marketing campaigns is print advertising.  How many people read newspapers/magazines/periodicals each and every day?  You guessed it, a whole lot. 

Print media is the oldest form of communications technology and as such it is also the oldest medium for advertising.  Through print advertising the targeting of your customers becomes incredibly easy.  All we have to do is place your ads in any print medium which your customers specifically read, or any industry specific magazines such as Car and Driver (for car nuts) or Game Informer (for video game jocks).  And our in house artists can create any advertisements that are to your liking.

Want your business to be advertised in a print medium?  Call us at 877-876-2995!

BOC Partners, Inc. is a privately held advertising agency located at 1030 South Ave West, Westfield, NJ.  For the most part, we act as an aggressive retail advertising agency and provide marketing solutions to the most demanding of advertisers. One of our areas of expertise is the automotive sector as we work with many large retail automotive dealerships. For 25 years BOC Partners has been winning over the likes of this category of business, which provides BOC the resources to handle just about any advertiser for any industry. The volume of work and demands of "turn on a dime" deadlines gives BOC Partners the skill set to handle almost any task.

In the past 3 years BOC Partners has been called upon to provide its experience to other retail markets including professional services, consumer electronics, home improvement and real estate, financial institutions, as well as B to B (business to business) accounts. We specialize in both traditional media (print media, direct-mail advertising, broadcast communications, etc.) and online marketing (search engine optimization and marketing, email advertising, web site design, traffic analysis, etc.).  Both our internet marketing campaigns and traditional marketing campaigns serve one end goal, increasing our clients’ sales; because as we all know, at the end of the day, sales are the only thing that matter (well, to businesses anyway).

Need assistance with your advertising strategy?  Call us 877-876-2995!

Welcome to BOC Partners, Inc.  A unique advertising agency that specializes in both traditional media and online marketing. We consider the term “Ad Agency” a little outdated …like a description used 10 to 20 years ago (think Daren Steven in Bewitched). Our focus is on building traffic, be it showroom traffic, phone traffic, or online traffic. But traffic is only the beginning. We not only practice the art of traffic building, but also the art of increasing conversions while focusing on quality. Located right in the middle of New York City and Philadelphia, we are sitting in two of the top markets in the country, but our great ideas and the best tracking techniques will work anywhere. 

Our agency principles have been around for 25 years and that kind of tenure brings the tried and true type of experience that your business can benefit from.  We’re not like most marketing companies; we’re more like a consulting firm.  We don’t advertise in all arenas just because we can.  We’ll figure out what’s best for you, where you can reach the most potential customers, and attack any target marketplace for maximum return.  We’re like the military of the marketing world.  Research, strategy, planning, and execution…mission accomplished.

BOC Partners provides marketing management, creative design, media buying, SEO, and a lot of other proprietary cool things to make your business successful.  We focus on all the primary advertising verticals such as outdoor advertising, print advertising, radio advertising, and television advertising.  We're even online marketing consultants.  Best of all, all of our solutions are measurable and chances are they out perform 4 of the 5 techniques that you are currently using.  We don’t like tooting our own horn (as you can tell by this paragraph), but we are the best at what we do.  Everybody seems to be blogging these days, so we figured we’d start too.  Besides, we think we have a lot to share with the world, well at least the business world anyway.  If you would like to consult with us, call us at 877-876-2995.