Growing your business in this day and age can be tough with all of the new marketing and branding strategies that have come along in the past twenty years. There’s personalized marketing, on-demand printing, the direct mailing service, direct mailers and plenty of other things you can do to grow your own business on your own time. But it can be hard to pick one you want to use to best grow your brand. Back in the day, in the mid and late twentieth century, it was somewhat simpler. As a rule, there was only analog advertisements and those tended to be a lot simpler in size and scope. An ad company in the seventies might only need to ask you about your product, your budget and talk to you about a few different ways to reach your target demographic. If you were selling microwaves in the late seventies, back then a very new invention, the ad company would need to know a few things before they started marketing your specific product. First, they would need to know who you are selling to in terms of demo and income. If you were selling microwaves back then, the answer to that was probably middle income families who had a fair amount of disposable cash to burn. Mostly urban dwellers as well, or suburban, as those concentrations were the ones who were upwardly mobile back then. Once they squared away who your demographic was, then they needed to talk to you about how much money you have and where you want it to be spent. In the late seventies, there was no internet to advertise on. There were only a few categories of ads, all of which were a little more disparate and hard to reach. Billboards were a good choice as people could see them from the road they would only take a short time for people to get what product you were selling, microwaves, and whether they could afford them. Billboards have a limited scope, however, and can’t reach as wide an audience as television. Direct mailers were another way for you to advertise but you can only mail so much and they might get lost. Television was an absolute boon to advertisers back then but getting air time was very expensive and putting together a commercial took a very long time. Though the options were much simpler back then, they were very limited. Let’s take a look at what we have today.
Direct Mailers, Email and the New Century
Today one of the most common forms of advertising are internet ads which make up a huge portion of revenue dollars for a lot of businesses. Some of the largest companies in the world now run on mostly ad based revenue and the trend does not seem like it’s going anywhere anytime soon. Internet ads can get lost in the shuffle, however, and many tend to scroll right past them or skip them so they aren’t always effective. Direct mailers are still a great way to reach people and they do wonders for letting people know about your product or service. Not all the old ways have died and some are still going very strong to this day. Billboards fall into this category as well and with the rise of digital billboards it is easier than ever to have multiple advertisements running at once, sometimes for different products that belong to the same business. Television commercials have taken a bit of a nose dive in recent years with the rise of cord cutting but there are still many advertisements on televised streaming sites that can do a good job getting your business out there. One of the best ways to advertise nowadays, however, is still through analog means, whether it be post cards or signs on the street. Signs are a bit smaller than billboards and people tend to have a more visceral reaction to them. Most people like a sense of fast gratification and having a sign that says a certain product is nearby will bring in a lot of foot traffic. Times might have changed but the process of advertising is still the same, more or less. Know your product and know your demographic.
