Print Campaigns, Successes and Failures over 25 Years
Before starting our company over a quarter of a century ago, I talked with several Forestry consultants to gain all the advice I could get before starting. One of the tips that they all had mentioned was that in this profession advertising does not work. What we do is so fantastic that our future customers need to hear it from a previous customer or a trusted friend.
Being young and over confident, I went ahead and spent some of my hard earned startup capital on print advertising. Thinking, in addition to my degree in Forest Administration, I also have a degree in Communications/Advertising-Public Relations, I could do a better job than those other foresters.
Well, the old pros were right; the only success I found in my campaign was in wasting money. I did find that during this time, I got most of my early clients through referrals from DNR Foresters, UW Extension Agents, friends and relatives.
These referrals would probably have been enough if it were just for myself, but I had plans of expansion. My next attempt at print advertising was direct mail. Our direct mail campaigns were generally geared towards encouraging other professionals to refer us, such as letters to insurance adjusters, letters to government foresters, letters to real estate agents, etc.
We also had good results sending targeted letters to groups of landowners we knew needed our services. The landowner campaign often involved letters to people in the DNR MFL Program, letters to neighbors of our current clients, and less targeted letters to landowners over a specific acreage within a targeted area.
In the early days our direct mailings included a letter, a brochure, and a roll-a-dex card or business card. More recently, over the past six years we have reduced the size of our mailings to compensate for the fact that our customers are more computer literate and too busy to delve into a multi-part advertisement. Now we are sending out a custom made post card, which gives a small amount of information and suggests that they visit our webpage, email us or call us for more information.
We found that direct mail campaigns can be wildly successful, and the main determinant in how successful they are, is how quickly we follow-up with a phone call.
Another type of print advertising in which we have had sporadic success with is press releases. Over the years, I have found that when I have the time to write an article for the newspaper, my phone will generally ring.
Now that I have been blogging for a year, I think I have developed enough material to start sending these off to the newspapers again. Until all newspapers have been replaced by blogs this should work out well.
In conclusion, print advertising can be wildly successful if done right. In my experience, the less personal the campaign is, the less successful, whereas personalized letters are far more successfulthan any type of newspaper or magazine ads.
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this is an entry for the Print Campaigns contest
http://activerain.com/blogsview/3720897/print-campaigns-an-ar-contest
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