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Local magazine advertising
how does it work
and what’s best for my business?
Local magazine advertising is generally good news for most businesses that are aiming at the general public.
Remember all businesses local and national are ultimately aiming at the same base customer so whilst the national companies are paying millions of pounds to get to many communities at the same time the SMEs (small to medium enterprises) are aiming at just a few communities in their surrounding area.
It is very important to work out where your target area is, for example: If you are a plumber and your jobs are coming from 50 miles away, half your time is then spent travelling which costs time and money that you can’t pass on to the customer and may mean that what started out as a good job becomes uneconomical and may lead to little or no profit.
Drawing a radius around your base is probably the first place to start. Once you have established your target area you can find out what media is available that covers this and which areas you may need to find other methods of promoting your business.
Which Media is best?
There are a number of different media currently available:
Newspapers Daily/Weekly
Newspapers are generally a good way of advertising when looking for an instant response but can be very expensive and short lived. Due to the nature of newspapers
They are generally read as soon as they come out but are discarded along with your advert as soon as the next issue comes out.
Community Based Magazines
These are a generally good way of advertising as long as the content is of reasonable quality and has a good variety of information about the local area. They are usually delivered door to door and have a longer shelf life than most other publications as people will keep them for the whole month and refer back to them.
Ad mags
These can be good and usually have high quality colour adverts inside. They do however have to rely on very high distribution as they are essentially a book of leaflets. People may refer back to them when looking for a trader.
The thing to remember when choosing the right media for your business is that distribution numbers isn’t everything. The common question asked by business owners
is “What’s the distribution” This is largely unimportant because if you advertise in a
magazine that distributes 100 magazines that 100 people read you are more likely to get business from that than advertising in a magazine that distributes 10,000 magazines that nobody reads.
So the moral to this is concentrate on media with a base readership whether that’s community based, school based, football or anything the readers are likely to be interested in.
A good website to locate local magazines
Advertising Budgeting
When embarking on an advertising campaign it is a good idea to budget for a series of adverts rather than trying a ‘one off and see if it works’ approach. If you do this, it generally won’t.
One off advertising rarely works unless it is for a sale or an event happening close to the time of advert. In this case Newspapers are probably the thing to try. Normal business advertising rarely gets instant results unless someone just happens to see the advert at the precise moment they require that service. This is why large companies do national leaflet and telesales campaigns hoping to catch that moment. How local advertising does work is that people will remember where they saw the advert and refer back to it when they do need it.