Is traditional advertising history now?

A surprising number of businesses today, still depend on traditional advertising as their only means of marketing their business

A few years ago all business, not just tourism business, had little option but to shell out big bucks for advertising in, newspapers, magazines, brochures etc. That was us! There was little choice - to succeed in business, we had to spend a large slice of turnover in order to generate a reasonable level of sales.

Tourism business lends itself above all others to internet marketing.

Tourism business - internet joy! instant advertising for free!

As a tourism business ourselves, for years before the digital revolution and before the Internet became our main marketing tool we spent many hours composing traditional adverts, taking photographs, developing, posting them off to printers, reading proofs, returning proofs, etc.

At the end of all that, on checking our very expensive advertisements which had finally reached the shelves, that sometimes the;

• Telephone number was wrong or missing.
• Postcode changed half way through the year.
• Advert in wrong area or section of the magazine.
• Wrong or faulty photo.

and so on, all of which was out of our control.

We spent hours making up and mailing brochures. Hundreds of trees per week were cut down just for our brochures!

We spent thousands of pounds every year at the printers, and now it is virtually all done on the desktop! and on the website for a fraction of the price, or should I say we get massively more expsure for the same or less cost.

To cut a long story short :

• We invested in a website.
• We invested in a digital camera
• We promoted our business through the world wide web.
• We invested in an online booking system.

Benefits:

• Spent dramatically less time emailing availabilities.
• Spent dramatically less money on printing, postage, advertising
• Photographs & copy, quickly & easily changed online.
• More business, more bookings, more profit, and lower costs.

We still do some traditional advertising, and always include our website address.

Some tourist business's depend upon traditional local advertising, even so we would advise all business to get a website and use your traditional advertising to promote your website. Remember, with a website you can show a lot more information than you can on brochures and magazine adverts.

Small business owners at the very least should monitor results from ads by dividing the number of actual sales by the cost of the advert to give an advert cost per sale. Then every year when reviewing your advertising budget, drop the advert with the highest advertising cost per sale, and invest in a new advert in a different publication. This way you will slowly improve the efficiency of your advertising budget. This also applies to internet adverts.

Want to talk ? Telephone 01456 486631