How to Advertise Your Business Offline in 2019

Advertising is an important aspect to skyrocket your sales and boost the ROI of your commercial efforts.

Today, thanks to the evolution of the internet and technology, you get a ton of options to promote your venture through platforms like social media, website, PPC, email marketing, SMS, push notifications.

You can reach to reach to your target customers and improve the conversions in different ways.

However, old school platforms are still relevant and help businesses improve their sales. Mainstream sales and marketing platforms are incredibly crucial in giving your organization the edge to generate more conversions.

Today, we will discuss how to advertise your business offline in 2019.

1. Create a Brand Image

To advertise your business, create an image of your company to be instantly identified in the offline market. A catchy and relevant business name would be a good start.

If you are local vendors and your ideal prospects are local citizens, you can also name your business in the local language. Remember, the name of your business will be the first step to establish a connection with the people.

2. Start With Affordable Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads can attract new customers at your store by creating a buzz in the local market. As per a fact by NAA, 8 out of 10 customers took action after seeing a newspaper ad in 30 days.

The above statistic clearly shows that people also read promotional content on the newspaper while looking for the news. They can be pursued through newspaper if the ad is relevant and brand is offering genuine and right services.

Since the newspaper ads are effective, you cannot go ahead and keep posting your ad in the newspaper. If you increase the frequency of your newspaper advertisements, your ad would start annoying readers and may hold them to take action.

So, plan and wait for the right time to publish an ad and bring more conversions for your business.

Furthermore, it would help if you determine which newspapers are renowned and what newspapers do your targeted customers read daily.

For local businesses, they can go for regional newspapers and follow a local printing press to publish the ad on the special edition of the newspaper.

3. Insert Pamphlets and Flyers with The Newspaper

You can also collaborate or request newspaper vendors to insert your printable material inside the newspaper.

You can also ask them to print the pamphlets for you and then insert in every newspaper, or you can go for any 3rd party printing services to get your print your material.

If you can afford, try to go for color flyers instead of black and white paper. Colors would attract more eyes to your advertisement and give you better results.

You can include vouchers and discount coupons inside the newspapers and mention a condition that tells people they have to bring the coupon they received in the newspaper to avail the discount.

This way, people would take your flyers seriously, visit your store and purchase the goods to avail the discounts.

This way, as an owner, you will get the idea of how effective the flyers were for your business and how much new customers you have got through the activity.

You could also request the customers to give their contact number or email address to keep receiving coupon codes.

Hence, you can serve the customers by providing value to them, and they would happily share their details to get exclusive discounts.

4. Attend Local Meetups

Meetups or conferences are a great way to increase your professional network by meeting like-minded people.

If your city has a group that organizes weekly meetups where entrepreneurs meet once in a week for brunch, you must become a part of that group.

Although you may have to pay the membership fee, the returns and value that you would get from the regular meetings will give you high returns in the long run.

While attending local meetups, you can also request the organizer to allow you to give flyers to the attendees. Someone from your team would stand at the doorstep to share the flyers of your business whenever someone exists or enters the venue.

Ensure that you have enough business cards with you while attending the local meetups because when people interact with each other in the professional environment, they ask for business cards from each other.

Your business card will have all the details, including mail address, email address, phone number, and designation.

5. Share Your Stories

Media publications are always looking for inspiring and exciting stories to share with their readers to help, educate, and entertain the readers.

If you have a unique journey and you think your hard work can inspire the other people to pursue their dreams and create something meaningful with their lives, you must share your stories with the publication house, or magazine, or local newspapers.

You can contact local magazines and publication agencies to ask if they can share your story. Most probably, if your story provides value to readers, you can get it published for free and get media coverage without paying a single penny to anyone.

This way, you can not only advertise your brand but inspire a generation by sharing your journey. You can share the “Why” of your life, and that would establish a strong connection between you and your audience.

You can share the initial days of your startup and also mention “how to advertise your business” to young entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, people may search for your company and you on the internet. So, you may observe more traffic on your website, more page likes and more social media followers on your business page and personal profile.

6. Broadcast Your Advertisement on Live Radio

Contact the radio channels of your city to host a promotional campaign with them where your audio would play for a few seconds to advertise your products and services to the listeners.

Today, so many people listen to the radio to spend a good time with themselves while traveling, driving, or walking. 

Many offices and commercial places also stream radio channels for a few hours at their premises. So, people who work and visit the place also get to listen to songs and radio content for some time of the day.

You can leverage this platform to execute event-based marketing campaigns.

Suppose you are organizing an open event for the local citizens and you wish to invite them to your place, or you are giving flat discounts at your store till Christmas.

This way, you can instantly create awareness for your brand and make immediate sales by promoting your company through radio and find the answer of how to advertise your business.

7. Host a Contest

You can publish an advertisement to create awareness about the new content. Where people can send their entries to your shop and after a few weeks, the winner will get a prize from your store.

This way, you can bring more people to your store and create brand awareness for your venture. Since the winners will use your products in due time, you may attract more customers at your store if the winners like your product and they wish to buy more from you.

8. Organize A Meetup

Meetups can solve your problems of how to advertise your business.

As already discussed, meetup is a great tool to network and connect with like-minded people and get to know about their business and eventually help the community evolve.

If you own an office, you can invite people of your industry for a networking event followed by lunch.

This way, you get a chance to showcase yourself as an organizer and owner of a company.

Furthermore, since you get to invite with all the attendees, you are getting a chance to build a lasting impression and lay a foundation of the profound professional relationship with others.

9. Attend Trade Shows

Trade shows are an event where companies and entrepreneurs have their stall to showcase their brand and promote their business in front of visitors.

These trade shows can put you in the limelight and attract more local people to try your products and services.

Every other mainstream marketing and advertising activities can give you results. However, most of them provide you one-to-one communication channel where only you, as a brand, get to speak and convey your message.

The exciting thing is, you may never know what intentions your users have, what they felt after seeing your advertisement, and what are their questions unless they contact you or visit your store. So, other channels give you less opportunity to convince your readers and local citizens to purchase your products.

On the other hand, events like trade shows will bring your company face-to-face with your audience with whom you can communicate with all your creative and analytical intelligence to represent your venture.

These trade shows can not only allow you to connect with users but also provide media coverage, immediate sales, and connect with other businesses.

Because it might happen, a few people would like to buy your products form the trade show only. Furthermore, the trade show would have other businesses from different industries too so you can connect with them and increase your network.

10. Try Cross Promotions

As you teamed up with the newspapers to host a giveaway, you can also collaborate with other local brands and design a combination of products to give it for free to each other’s customers.

In other words, when people purchase goods from another brand, they will give your merchandises for free, and you do the same at your store and give that other brand’s products for free when people buy your stuff.

This creates a win-win situation because customers are getting free products; they are tempted to buy them since they would get more value for paying only for one. Brands are also in profit because, in the end, they both will have a significant boost in sales.

You can also promote this joint advertising campaign in newspapers, radio or TV commercials so that more people would come to your place to buy their favorite products.

11. Go for TV Commercials

This could be one of the expensive offline advertising platforms to promote your business. However, it could help your brand reach to thousands and even millions of people at the same time.

If you don’t have funds, you can go with local news channels to promote your services. You can showcase the testimonials, client feedbacks or tell a story to let people know how your brand can help people solve their problems.

12. Become a Sponsor at Cultural Events

This is another flamboyant option but gives you robust media coverage and recognition among people.

You can sponsor an event on the local news channel, a local newspaper, or local radio channels where you can sponsor gifts for the winners.

These platforms are always looking for companies and brands who would sponsor gifts for their contests. You can offer free products to the organizers and request a free advertisement for your business in return.

It is a win-win situation as the organizer gets free presents for winners and you get the free promotion.

You can connect with event planners and local organizers to let them know that you are looking to sponsor an entire event so they can revert to you whenever they organize a relevant activity.

You can give merchandise to contestants, winners, or even organizers as a gesture of gratitude. This small interactions with your audience lay the foundation of bringing new customers and build loyal relationships.

13. Send Direct Mails

You can send your products in a courier directly to people’s address. This can initiate a relationship, build trust, and expand your engagement in a particular city.

Moreover, if you can find and send your stuff to a local influencer or the owner of a particular company, the owner may contact you for collaboration, or post a helpful review in his next magazine edition, or can even share experience on social media.

A single mail can have significant impacts on your brand image.

Conclusion

You have got to try and experiment creative ways in advertising your business offline to see what works and what brings you results.

Based on your available resources and budget, you can decide either of the platforms to advertise your business offline. That said, you need to research, plan, and execute your campaigns smartly to get the maximum ROI boost for your organization.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments about these ideas of how to advertise your business online.