Effective Postcard Marketing For Small Businesses

 

Postcard marketing – is it worth all the trouble, especially for small businesses? It's a question perhaps best answered by the current economic situation. After all, shouldn’t we do what we can to ensure that our businesses thrive and, in so doing, that the national economy gets back on track? Postcard marketing is perhaps not the only marketing strategy available to small businesses everywhere to ensure good exposure, but in trying times where costs tend to soar it might be the small business proprietor’s best hope. And for those with little or no expertise in this area, a couple of helpful tips might be just the thing to get the postcard marketing ball rolling.

The Basics of Postcard Marketing

The key to successful postcard marketing is to understand the core principle behind it, which states that you are attempting to sell – not so much your products, but your business – to people. After all, when someone receives a postcard in the mail their first reaction is to check who it’s from. It is in that one second where they decide to keep reading or throw it away with the rest of the junk mail. So what to do?

Your answer here is of course the big 'C', otherwise known as copywriting. It is an art in itself and differs from any other form of writing. It’s aim is to capture the attention of the reader and hold it during that one vital second. This in itself should supply you with an inkling about the type of content for your postcard marketing strategy: short, sharp and effective.

Postcard Marketing Design

We’d like to take the time and caution you about an over-zealous design. Yes we all want our businesses to look like something from the future with the best and the newest items on sale (even when they're not). But consider the recipient – unless you're selling them food or something illicit they’ll probably not even give it a second glance. Remember, they’ve seen it all!

That being said, the solution here is to ensure that the copy of your postcard marketing campaign and the design itself work together as two intertwining halves of the same thing. The one should complement the other, that is to say your words should indicate the product and the product should lead to more words. See what we’re getting at? When you’ve got that pat then the only thing that remains doing is to figure out how you’ll grab the attention of the reader in the first couple of words, which obviously depend on the business and the product.

Postcard marketing, like any other form of direct mail marketing is a collaborative effort between the printer, the designer (if not the printer) and of course their client, you. For those new to the industry, the modus operandi states: Get as much as possible for as little as possible. This means shop around for prices and see where you can get better deals. The postcard printing business is big with different companies offering different options to different clients. We’ve always found that a referral from an existing client at a printing company works best to get those prices to succumb to gravity.

 

Article created on 3/9/2009

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