They say the old ways are best, and in this case they’re spot on. I like to think of online marketing as an ever-evolving entity, constantly needing new forms of nourishment and rewarding those who feed it information in interesting ways. It was only a few decades ago that TV, leaflets, magazines and radio were the major contenders for advertising a product: now online advertising encompasses all of them.

Online vs Direct

This presents one major flaw: information is now easier to access than ever before. On almost every page on the web there’s an advert floating about trying to get your attention. Even on this page right now you are probably surrounded by adverts for things you probably don’t need. Now while Google tries to tailor these adverts on sites you’ve visited in the past, online ads still have to work hard to gain your attention, and it’s usually in a way that has little to do with the product/company. Direct Marketing is an old-fashioned method that is proving the test of time, with approximately 48% of residents responding to a leaflet through the door even by today’s standards. You can either spend your time designing an advert that will most likely never see the light of day due to Adblocker, or you can learn a thing or two from the leaflet pros.

Why Direct?

Direct Marketing uses the same kind of thought that goes into localized Google ads, but with much greater effect. A good leaflet distribution company like Direct Letterbox Marketing will plan a campaign by first identifying the area you want to target, and completing their rounds in a few short hours. You can find out more about the Direct Letterbox Marketing team and their services by clicking here. Identifying the nature of your target audience and then where they are most in abundance is a sure way to ensure you don’t waste time and money.

The Royal Mail states in their Market Reach blog here that you can keep track of your targeted audience and their responses more easily with direct marketing. Not only this, but you know that your ad has gone to the right people rather than jumping up and down and waving your arms about online.

Mail Man

Finally, direct marketing is the most cost-effective form of advertising today. This article from Marketing Week confirms that letterbox marketing is on the rise, all it takes is the dedication from you and your distribution team. Despite having fully interactive adverts online, they do very little to engage people at their computers. Answering the door to someone holding a leaflet leaves you no choice but to be engaged. It sounds just as bad, but if you’re a good salesperson you’ll only need those few seconds to make a good, personal impression on behalf of your company. Here’s a good example of a speedy sales-pitch:

Aside from the tongue-in-cheek ending, this ad from Communicology has it down. Direct marketing is a great way to kick-start your ad campaign, and while it’s crucial that you have an effective online campaign, it’s better to start on a more personal level with more traditional methods. The results speak for themselves; a bit of old-fashioned leg work may be just what your company is missing.

Game On

The entertainment industry’s dirty little secret is that gaming blows the competition out of the water. In 2012, it was estimated the UK gaming industry alone contributed £5.2bn to the economy, far outstripping the music and film industries. For gaming companies, that means getting your game marketed successfully can be a massive make-or-break moment in the life of the game and the studio. If you’re looking to get your game out there in this hyper-competitive, super-lucrative market, take a look at the guide below for some handy hints.

Online
The ubiquity of viral advertising coupled with the majority – if not all – games today possessing some form on online play, the need to market your game online is imperative. A lack of an online presence spells effective death for the modern game, so you need to think carefully about how to effectively promote your game. It’s worth casting an eye over www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2009/03/how-not-to-market-your-indie-game for some great starter tips to get abreast of some very important dos and don’ts. Most of you will realise the importance of social media in marketing your game; the use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all vital. However, there’s more to online marketing than just the big three, and the obvious interactivity of your product (it is meant to be played, after all) lends itself well to viral marketing. Companies like Wicked Web can help you with online promotion in a way that will get potential customers engaging with your product before it’s even been released! Check out www.wickedweb.co.uk/viral-games-videos/ to see exactly how they can help you.

Offline
Offline marketing isn’t as important to gaming as online, but nevertheless should not be ignored. Most big games these days come with a glorious CGI trailer or two, gorgeous TV spots in prime advertising slots reaching a mass audience. That’s where companies like Blur Studios come in. You can find them at www.blur.com offering their creative services in award winning visual effects, animation and design. You can read http://kotaku.com/5649504/meet-the-pixar-of-video-games on Kotaku to read why they’ve been called the ‘Pixar of Video Games’, or you can just watch the video below to see it for yourself.  Having a stunning TV trailer maximises your audience potential by delivering your content straight into thousands of homes up and down the country, so after online marketing it should be your next biggest outlet.

Launch
Launch day is the box-office weekend equivalent for games. Just as cinemas do midnight releases of the latest blockbusters, so too do games companies roll out their products as the clock strikes twelve on release day. Big, flagship titles have been doing this for a few years with incredible gains, generating huge buzz and profits around midnight launches, and turning them from simple late-night shopping trips into mammoth events. The sheer scale of these events can be staggering, just take a look at the video below for the launch event for Starcraft II to get an idea of the scale of these things. Launching, and launching well, then, can be a major boon to your game and business. Thankfully, help is at hand in the form of Skyline Whitespace. They were actually integral in the UK launch of Starcraft II at the Apollo, and you can find out more about securing their event solutions services yourself at www.skylinewhitespace.com/services/installation/event-solutions.

The gaming industry is going from strength to strength, which means there’s never been a better time to launch your game. The trade-off is that this makes the environment exceedingly competitive, so having a fantastic advertising campaign and launch can work wonders in making yourself stand out from the crowd.

Have you ever been given a ‘promotional pen’ to keep after completing a company survey or some such? No doubt your collection of variously used pens are sitting idly by the home phone, and I guarantee at least one of them will be promotional. They seem to last forever too; in fact a lot of promotional products either go missing instantly, or never seem to be able to disappear. You end up seeing it so often that the company name sticks in your mind. It’s a brilliant idea when you think about it, plaster your product name and image on an everyday item and sit back, relax, and let the customer’s subconscious register you as a reliable company.

Plug In

Of course, the trick behind it is putting your logo on something worth-while: an item that is almost invisible, but needed every day. Pens are out of fashion in this Information Age, people don’t write things down anymore: we type.

The question begs the masses, ‘are we too plugged in?’ But the question for a business mind may sound more like ‘how can we plug people in more?’ It may sound like a devilish scheme developed in the Underground Bunker for Evil Genii, and more specifically the question should be ‘what do people use whilst they’re plugged in?’, but you get the general idea. Promotional gifts should be subtle, but essential.

Forgetting Something?

Take for example the fact that most people now do their shopping online. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the effect of promotional mousemats on the consumer brain? How about a screen protector or a stress ball? Businesses are so caught up in e-commerce that some have forgotten how people go about logging on to their computers. First they boil the kettle, sit down, turn the screen on and wait. In that time between sitting down and getting online, a good promoter should know which everyday objects should be targeted for promotional gift ideas.

The Idea Finally Clicks

Not everyone will buy it of course, they’re consumers, not cattle: but they don’t need to care about the company, so long as the product is the right degree of practical, and expense. For 10 low cost promotional tips, follow this link and get even more ideas on marketing your company. Promotional pens are dead, a sad fact and no mistake. Every bit of marketing is done via TV or the internet now, so don’t forget to consider how people watch TV, or how they log on to the internet.

The latest addition to my office is a new Digital (DAB) radio. It really seems to have improved morale amongst the team in the office. I have been aware of digital radio for some time now but it hadn’t really interested me much. When I went out to get the radio from my local electrical store, I found that there was no real difference in price between digital radio’s and conventional ones, so I decided to give one a try.

We listen to a local radio station in the office because they have the broadest appeal. There are lots of niche radio stations amongst the digital station list but they’d only appeal to a small number of the staff at any one time. I didn’t make the connection immediately, but I have since realised that some of these new smaller niche radio stations might be the perfect advertising platform for my business.

Previously my advertising has been limited to leaflets distributed to the local community and occasional adverts in the local newspaper. Although I’m sure that these advertising campaigns have brought increased business my way, I’m never really sure just how effective they have been. Making a radio advert would be a long way from any of our fields of knowledge. I managed to find out some useful tips for making a radio advertisement from the wikihow.com website. I found these were helpful, but a long way from telling me how to get a radio advertisement campaign running. Even as a layman, I’m aware that there’s a mass of regulations for what can and can’t be said on a radio or TV advertisement. Looking at the regulations on the advertising standards agency website made me realise what a minefield of regulations there were. I decided to seek out specialist help.

I found a company online called All Response Media; they have some useful information on direct response marketing which takes many forms, including radio advertising. I have realised that should I go ahead with a radio advertising campaign, then I’ll need the services of a company like this.

I’m really excited to be trying a new avenue to bring in new business. I’ve mentioned the idea to my staff and they’ve been bouncing some ideas around – with some really promising ones coming forward. This process has revealed that our previous advertising attempts were very much ‘shots in the dark’ with almost no way of finding out how effective they were. In the future we will be spending more on advertising so it makes sense to put our investment in the hands of professionals that have the knowledge to get us the best possible result.

If you are a small business it can often be very expensive to create real world advertising campaigns, especially if you are just starting out. If you want to create awareness of your business for relatively low costs then you need to get yourself online and advertise to the millions of internet users. There are plenty of sites that are easy to use and will help your business, the biggest site that has the monopoly on advertising is Google as it is the biggest search engine and if a user wants to find something out about a business they will use Google to find it. Google Adwords allows you to create text and image based adverts that appear when someone searches a specific item, you will then have to bid for certain key phrases so that your advert appears.

Facebook and Twitter are obvious ones but both their sites get lots of traffic everyday and adverts on there are bound to get noticed. Both sites, especially Facebook, asks you to add lots of information about yourself, and you also end up liking different pages. Facebook and Twitter uses this information to know who to target your adverts to and mean that you get people who will be interested in your products not just random thoroughfare. Another social media site that can be very useful is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery which is a site that brings people to random sites that are linked to hobbies and things they like. You would pay StumbleUpon between 0.05 and 0.25 cents (£0.03 and £0.16) for every person who is brought to your site through StumbleUpon. Online directories like Yahoo Local and Yell.com can also help to advertise your website, it also means that people who have a good experience with your website can rate it and review it on these sites and can recommend it to other users.

All of these sites can help boost knowledge of your website and bring you customers who might not have found you otherwise, online advertising is necessary and means that your website can remain competitive in the digital age.

Promotional gifts can be used and interpreted in a variety of ways, so if you are thinking about giving a promotional gift then you should keep in mind who it is for, how appropriate it is, and how much you intend to spend on it. Normally the only people who use promotional gifts are from companies, businesses and organisations, so it would be rare that anyone else would have to give one except in particular circumstances.

Often the best types of promotional gift are the most useful. Practical items such as pens or mugs can be a great idea, because you know that they are always going to be used by whoever they are given to, especially if they are of a particularly attractive design or colour. If you are going to give a promotional gift to a certain number of people, which may be large, then it is probably in your best interests financially to give them something like this, because they do not cost a great deal in the first place and will be guaranteed of their practicality and use.

There are going to be some people that you cannot give such gifts to, because they may be of great importance to your company or represent interests that you are looking to expand upon in your business. These do not always need to be more expensive, but they do need a greater level of thought and care put in when you consider what to give them.

If you have a business then it can be assumed that you are good, or at least proficient, at what you do. You could be a great butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker, but unless everyone else know you’re great at what you do then you will not stay in business very long. You must promote your business.

You created you business because you are good at what you do and there is no reason why you should be any good a promoting your business. After all, it’s not what you do, but if you want to stay in business, then it is most definitely something you will have to learn to do, and do it very well. You can compare it to learning an instrument: if you want to play your instrument well enough to perform in public you will have to practice, practice and practice some more. If you want to run a successful business you will have to promote your business, promote it again, and promote some more.

You will have to be consistent in your promotion. It is not something you can do now and again as the mood takes you. Business promotion will have to be a regular part of your working day. You will certainly want to be busy working on whatever it is you business actually does to spend time working on business promotion, but unless you regularly spend the time on business promotion then no-one will know about your business and before long you will not have a business to promote.

Search Engine Optimisation has helped to make businesses more successful, music artists achieve more widespread recognition and page hits, and to bring more traffic to sites that need it most. When done correctly, and monitored properly, it can mean that search engine results are more relevant and effective, leaving the world better connected and the familiar frustration of being unable to find what you want behind. If it is not used correctly, or perhaps one should say morally, then essentially the reverse of this is true. Search engine results become less relevant, as random pages on website that have little or nothing to do with what you want could come up in search results more than what you actually wanted.

The reason for this is that search engine optimisation works by using keywords in the content of their web pages and websites. A keyword is something that people use when they are trying to find what they want through a search engine. If you were searching for an impressive holiday home in a European country, you might search for this by using ‘holiday home’ and perhaps a country which you are particularly interested in. SEO companies know that these are keywords, and can employ them within their web content so that their web page comes up in your search, and the more the keyword appears in the content, the higher it will appear on the page or search results. Depending on the SEO company’s policies, they may choose to use the keyword in the content usefully and comprehensibly, or not.

Advertising can be seen as part of a wider marketing campaign. Marketing is more about companies creating and maintaining interest among customers for products and services, and creating the strategy that underlines the selling of something. This includes how something is sold to how the company making a product is structured to effectively exploit its wares.

Marketing identifies the customer and keeps the customer by making the customer satisfied with what they are provided with. In an increasingly crowded environment, marketing is also about finding new markets for new and existing products. Finding a market for a new product is probably quite straight forward. As a new product there would not be a market in place for it. The marketing expert would research the product and identify appropriate markets for it. Finding a new market for an existing product can give a product a new lease of life and greatly extend its profitability.

Sometimes a product can find a completely unexpected market and take marketing experts by surprise. For example, mobile phones had the texting function added almost as an inconsequential add-on. Nobody saw texting as feature of mobile phones that people would want or be the defining feature of a phone. Unexpectedly, texting became very, very popular, especially amongst teenagers. As everybody knows, the teenage market is the holy grail of marketing. Capture this market with your product and you could make a fortune. Once this was recognised, the texting capabilities of mobile phone and carrier services became a feature of mobile phone marketing.

Advertising is often referred to as the second oldest profession. This is because something had to exist beforehand for advertising to advertise it. This suggests that advertising has been around for a long time. This is probably true but it probably was not considered a discreet profession until the twentieth century.

In centuries past advertising was probably just the act of making things more widely known, and things that needed to be know would probably only come from the government, be it the King or local dignitaries, or the church. In fact, some of the greatest works of art could be considered as advertising for the church in as much as they conveyed the message of the church to the masses that were largely illiterate anyway.

Things have changed a lot now of course. Advertising as a profession and multi-million pound industry is well established in modern society. The rise of advertising was hand in hand with the rise of the consumer society. As products became easier and cheaper to mass produce then there was a need for someone to sell their product to people in preference to people buying someone else’s product. There was probably nothing to choose between these two products, but effective advertising could mean the difference between one product selling and another not selling. Advertising can create an image for a product that makes is desirable for people to own. In effect, advertising is selling the image or a lifestyle associated with a product as much as the product itself.