Month: February 2024
One of the biggest challenges facing everyone who wishes to own a dollar store is exactly how to build store sales without going broke in the process. While there are many fairly costly options, few low-cost options seem like they would be worth the time and expense to implement. After all, what good does it do to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing if the results dont grow dollar store profits beyond the costs involved? Well there are some proven ultra-low cost marketing options that do get results. If youd like to know more, then read on. In this article I present 5 proven low-cost marketing strategies when you own a dollar store.
Strategy #1 Join a local business group. If you own a dollar store youll discover networking with other local business owners and managers can provide rewards beyond your wildest dreams. Sure it takes time to attend meetings and you must be willing to mingle and get to know others, but the results can be remarkable. Join only one group to start. As you become familiar with that groups participants you might add another business group to the mix.
Strategy #2 Establish a marketing exchange with local businesses. Get out there and meet your neighboring business owners. Once again a little time is required. However as you introduce yourself and exchange business cards youll soon meet others who also desire to build their businesses. Work out an exchange where each business helps the other by providing flyers or other promotional materials. Youll gain new shoppers, sales and dollar store profits.
Strategy #3 Turn you employees into sign-holders during slow times. One of the biggest challenges for those who own a dollar store is staffing at the right levels. Why not add a marketing activity so employees can help you build sales and dollar store profits during slow times? Have an inexpensive sign made for your business and let an employee hold that sign so it can be seen by passing traffic. Youll quickly have a store filled with first-time shoppers. Be sure to check local ordinances to make sure this can be done in your locality before you start.
Strategy #4 Establish discount programs for near-by churches. This idea costs little more than time unless the churches choose to take advantage of the discount offer. For churches with food closets and other aid for those in-need, now is a time for most when theres huge demand and fewer contributions. Churches will likely be looking for grocery items and everyday consumables first. Imagine the traffic when your generosity is announced during a service.
Strategy #5 Add upcoming sale inserts into t-shirt bags used to package all sales. Save your advertising dollars by publicizing upcoming events on inserts you place in bags customers receive with their purchases. While some advertising and promotion is still advisable, this strategy can reduce your total cost and will still generate the traffic, sales and dollar store profits you seek when you own a dollar store.
To your dollar store success!
People are going to ballparks to enjoy baseball in record numbers these days, and as the fan bases continue to grow, so too do the advertising opportunities. Out-of-home advertising is thriving in the sports world, especially when it comes to baseball. With more home games than many other sports, your product or service gets unrivaled visibility in a number of unique strategies.
What Kind of Audience is Exposed to this form of OOH Advertising?
With each new game, your product or service is exposed to a varied audience. Fans look at the scoreboard many times per inning for a number of reasons, and with your digital advertisement on the screen next to a player’s name or set of statistics, those fans will be exposed to your brand numerous times.
That consistent exposure is one of the key aspects to this type of out-of-home advertising. Even in Minor League Baseball, the results are evident, as loyal fans see scoreboard advertisements on a regular basis and even associate them with the team itself.
Where to Find Digital Scoreboard Advertising Opportunities
An alternative media agency can help connect you with an asset owner in your desired DMA. Most alternative media asset owners have multiple assets available in numerous DMAs, so you are likely to find a digital scoreboard opportunity that is a good fit for your advertising message and target audience.
Alternative Advertising Strategies with a Minor League Baseball Jumbotron
One of the most enticing benefits of choosing to utilize digital scoreboard advertising is that your product does not have to be advertised in a traditional format. On a Minor League Baseball Jumbotron – and on scoreboards in all sports venues – you will certainly see traditional billboard and stationary advertising. However, certain alternative media strategies allow your brand a number of options when choosing to advertise at a sporting event.
These options include commercial spots and trailers before the game and between innings, sponsorship of trivia and other “between-innings” games, league highlights and scores, and more – all initiated by a public address announcer calling every fan’s attention to the scoreboard. At that point, your brand will be visible to nearly every person in the park.
With this form of digital advertising, you will be consistently expanding your brand’s presence to unique audiences. No game will be the same with this OOH advertising strategy, as your brand’s influence will be felt by a large and brand-new group of people each and every night.
Investing the money in an ad on a Minor League Baseball Jumbotron – whether it is a traditional ad or a sponsorship of a video, contest, or game on the scoreboard – allows your brand to be exposed to a varied audience, tapping into multiple demographics while being part of one of the fastest-growing out-of-home advertising strategies.
Thanks to the advancements and developments in our technologies, advertisers and marketers can create better advertising techniques and strategies wherein they have dozens of new opportunities and possibilities for reaching and communicating with the consumers better. Outdoor digital advertising provides advertisers with one of the most targeted and powerful ways of reaching consumers. It is able to extend the reach of TV and can serve as a middle media that drives consumers to a website or motivate mobile download, e- browsing, e- commerce and permission marketing. One of the benefits of this medium is that Digital Media such as LCD or plasma even Digital Bus Advertising are located where people shop, wait or travel wherein it can present the message to a targeted audience at a particular location and time.
Worldwide outdoor digital advertising will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 15.2 percent from 2011 2016 thus making it the third fastest growing media around the world for the next five years. Outdoor digital advertising will be able to drive the strong growth rate for other out of home advertising, such as billboards, and advertising in general. Revenues for outdoor digital advertising is also expected to double from $2.6 billion to $5.2 billion between the year 2011 and 2016 while out of home advertising revenues will increase by 46.8 percent from $28.3 billion in 2011 to $38.6 billion by the year 2016. Outdoor digital advertising revenues are also growing fastest in Asian countries. The increase of traditional out of home advertising such as billboards can be attributed to the proliferation of new advertising surfaces on the sides of buildings as well as more sophisticate management of Subway Advertising.
Advertisers, marketers and advertising agencies can achieve their branding, merchandising and awareness goals through outdoor digital advertising. 4.2 million Digital media will be installed by 2012 and 5.2 million by 2013 and 6.3 million by 2014 in North America alone.
Outdoor digital advertising also ranked highest among consumers who considered advertising interesting and attention grabbing. 53 percent think that digital media is interesting while 63 percent think its attention grabbing. These digital displays can also be found in a broad range of venues such as shopping malls, grocery stores, gas stations, movie theaters, airports, hospitals, offices, restaurants, clubs, elevators, and transit systems. Outdoor digital advertising spending also ranked 8 among all media segments which shows how much it matters to a lot of advertisers and marketers.
Outdoor digital advertising is becoming a more powerful medium because it gets proven branding, merchandising and call to action results. Its location is also an added advantage along with its measurability. It can provide demographic targeting and better time placement plus its cheaper than other mediums. There is an ease of flight planning and purchase plus a growing inventory if networks, locations and displays – which provides better advertising opportunities. It can also be used along with other digital marketing channels and it is able to effectively capture the consumers attention. Expect the future of outdoor digital advertising to be bright and vibrant.
The increasing popularity of the pay per click advertising model has led to a new challenge: click fraud. Click fraud is basically a way to make money by causing others to lose money. Click fraud, in essence, is any kind of fraud involving repeatedly clicking on advertising with a malicious intention. There are different types of click fraud, but this problem has driven up advertising costs and generally cost merchants hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they should be paying in click costs.
One example of click fraud is a way to cheat the competition. In this scheme, a company or individual will pay groups of people, usually foreigners, to click on certain ads all day for a set amount of money. This drives up advertising costs for the company whose ad is being clicked, thus harming their bottom line. None of the parties who are committing the click fraud intend to buy the products sold on the website whose ad they are clicking.
Another example of click fraud is dummy sites created for the sole purpose of creating phony clicks. By creating a site that posts pay per click advertising from publishers like Googles AdWords, creators of these dummy sites hope to drive up profits by increasing the number of clicks that appear on their sites. One way to do this is to click these links themselves, though most publishers have provisions in place to hopefully eliminate this kind of fraud. Another way would be to pay someone else, preferably someone overseas, to do the clicking.
There is simply not enough information to determine how common or how costly click fraud is because hard numbers are hard to obtain. Plus, determining which clicks are frauds and which are real can be a real problem for the publishers of advertising. Click fraud may constitute up to 20% of the PPC market, which drives up costs for advertisers. The problem is that PPC advertising works too well for some companies to give up on PPC as part of their marketing plan. While Google and Yahoo! both claim on to be vigilant in their search for click fraud, plenty of instances go unnoticed and slip through the cracks.
The potential for PPC fraud shouldnt be a deal breaker for most advertisers. The best way to keep from falling prey to PPC fraud is to be aware of the issue and exercise caution and vigilance. The following guidelines will help prevent PPC fraud from unnecessarily draining an advertising budget.
Use only search engine PPC providers. Search engine providers are particularly effective at identifying fraudulent activity, especially since these sites go to great lengths to monitor for and prevent click fraud.
Vigilance in tracking results can also help identify problems. Watch the numbers closely, especially at the beginning of the campaign, and notify the PPC provider immediately if the ad begins receiving an unusually high number of clicks especially clicks that do not lead to a sale.
Set a daily, weekly, or monthly ad budget with the PPC provider. When the budget is exhausted for that time period, the ad should be removed. This will prevent a websites entire operating budget from being drained by click fraud.
Aside from click fraud, other challenges to PPC advertising strategies include the cost and longevity of a PPC campaign. Some keywords are extremely popular and thus competitive. Competitive keywords tend to cost more per click and can quickly drive up advertising costs. Longevity is another issue. Unlike SEO techniques, which will improve a sites volume of traffic for years, a PPC campaign is only a viable source of traffic as long as the site continues to pay for the campaign. When a website decides to end a PPC campaign, the traffic from the campaign will stop.