Old School Marketing is Still the Best Form of Advertising!

[David_ Bowie]

Greetings everyone, old fashioned marketing is still the best way to get the word out about your services or products. It is also reliable and cost effective. Below is a small list of offline advertising that can be done at very little cost.

I did this last year and the returns were huge! Please list your ideas.

1. Hire a couple of youths to pass out flyers to area businesses and make sure they collect a business card from every business they visit. The cost to hire two youths is about 8/hr. each. You also get to build a contact list from the business cards they collect.

2. Sponsor a carnival day in your neighborhood and ask local businesses to participate. I did this lat year and had to turn away several businesses because the response was so great.

3. Host a Blood drive. Blood drives are huge and your local blood bank will put out a press release on your behalf for free.

5. Donuts! Everyone loves donuts. I was able to secure a deal with Krispy Kreme and paid $3.00 per dozen through their donation program.

OK, I went brain dead. I know of other tactics and will ad to this thread, once my brain comes alive again. Back for more coffee.

[Harold Whisker]

These are nice tips. There's another thread, I think, on marketing, which I've read, and it mentions handing out flyers with a site's url on it. If the reader is interested, he really would go online and visit the site. This is probably better than paying for ads that get dismissed on sites, since we're all basically ad blind these days.

[MaineCopywriter]

Send out *real* press releases to the actual *press* (local radio, TV and newspapers)

Sponsor a local 10K run or other local sporting event.

Sponsor a local little league team --or other school sports team.

Donate goods or services to auctions (public TV usually has one at least once a year)

Participate in your local chamber of commerce

Send out postcards to your current customers and give them a discount for bringing in a friend.

[~CReed]

Provide some branded "thank-you" gifts for your local community radio station annual membership drives. The more gifts you donate, the more on-air mentions of your company or web site.

[joebuilder]

while traditional marketing is good, I'm not going to say its better than emarketing. Depends on the business.

[marina]

All the idears are totally for local business. So what if the market is the whole country?

[howinfo]

Everybody working for our website are driving around with magnetic signs on their car doors, It is hard to estimate the traffic from this as it does not show up on Google analytics.

[MaineCopywriter]

Originally Posted by marina

All the idears are totally for local business. So what if the market is the whole country?

Direct mail, post cards, radio/tv advertising...

[Cricket]

Word of mouth is extremely powerful, which means getting out there and getting known, both on and offline. Here is an article I wrote a while back that may trigger a few ideas.

Offline Marketing Techniques
http://www.website-development-train...ine-marketing/

[David_ Bowie]

Nice tips Cricket! Very nice article and I like the layout of GNC Web Creations.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by marina

All the idears are totally for local business. So what if the market is the whole country?

Include a postcard or other promotional piece with your out of town shipments then when the receiver is asked where they got the item they can refer to the promotional piece for the contact info or just give it to the person who asked.

When networking you are supposed to give out your business cards 3 at a time. One for them to keep, the other 2 to give away. Don't see why this wouldn't work for promotional postcard or such in a parcel as well.