John Wall: While digital ads get a lot of the attention—because you put up an ad, you get your results immediately, you can have a whole campaign run and done within a week—you really need to consider offline ads. Billboards, transit ads, posters, physical ad placement: basically anything that can get in front of your market. We’ve had some really interesting successes in the business-to-business world, as far as running digital signage in taxi cabs or airports. We talked in another video about geotargeting and focusing on smaller markets where you can test, and this idea of being able to run an ad, for example, only for people showing up for the Chicago National Restaurant Association for the week that they’re in Chicago. This gives you access to a group of people at a certain price point that you’d never get any other way.
John Wall: Also, look for anything that allows you to transpose your digital content onto the real world. So as we talked about with taxi ads or digital billboards, if you can run videos or images on there, that’s great. Then the other big one is QR codes. That’s really gained acceptance in the past five years; it is something that everybody has access to. Now, the idea is that you can put something out in the real world that can be scanned and go directly to a web property, and at the same time, that can be tracked. The URL that you use in that QR code can have information in it, as far as where it was or when that ad ran. It’s actually very affordable. For a few dollars, you can get a QR code generator for your phone, where you can put whatever URLs you want in there, send them over to your printing partner, or whoever’s doing the ad for you.
John Wall: Brochures, posters, whatever else you’re printing, it’s just a great way to get into markets that can be tremendously more affordable than even digital. We’ve got two other videos in this ad series. Be sure to check them out at the Massachusetts Founders Network, and good luck with your campaigns.
Check out the rest of our Go-To-Market Advertising Series to learn more!
How to Utilize Paid Search Engine Advertising
Placing Paid Advertisements
