advertising

First, who is this Plain City Auction we speak of? Well, for short, they're one of our clients and great friends of ours. We've been working with them for years. But, in more detail, they're an auction house located in Plain City, Ohio, which is just outside of Columbus. They usually sell antiques furniture and other various antiques.

What is a preferred partner? Well, we're still not sure either. Infact, we kind of wonder if they even know yet. All we really know about it at this point is that they're essentially looking to cross-promote other local vendors goods and services. They always have a large turnout at their auctions, so it's actually a surprise that this didn't happen sooner. But our understanding is that they're looking for other local or related businesses that would like to promote their company to a large number of people for little cost.

We've heard that they're having large-format print adverting produced for their preferred partners that they'll have prominently on display at the auctions. Since we do their website hosting, they've already approached us about providing similar online advertisements through their website and their auction newsletter emails. We're pretty sure that they'll also be printing advertisements in their snail-mail auction newsletter and that they're open to other suggestions if you're interested in becoming one of their preferred partners.

If this sounds like an advertising outlet you'd like to pursue, please visit http://plaincityauction.com/contact/ to get in touch with the auction's owners

We've been working with several clients in Greenville, NC who wanted us to design an advertising campaign for them using a different concept. Loosely, here's how it works...

Traditionally, companies have spent thousands on advertising. The concept, specifically, that we're twisting is mobile billboard advertising - big billboard advertisements that drive in circles all day around town hoping that potential customers will see the big billboard driving around and have enough time and coordination to write down the phone number or website that just passed them. While this concept is kool, it's ineffective and ridiculously expensive.

We took the neat idea and adapted it and have created a website dedicated strictly to our mobile marketing services. Our plan is to, not have one large moving billboard, but rather, have smaller advertisements affixed to tons of cars. We've built a network of college students who commute to and from classes each day, drive back and forth to student activities and club meetings, and scurry around town running errands. Our concept was to utilize inexpensive car door magnets, affix a couple to a car, have tons of cars with the advertisements, driving around all throughout the day.

Our concept saves our clients money because 1) we use reasonably sized car door magnets that are inexpensive to produce compared to the large billboard prints used elsewhere and 2) we utilize cars that are already driving on the road instead of paying for a driver and all the gas to circulate around town all day. Our strategy also reaches more of our client's potential customers because 1) their ads are on tons of cars at once and 2) their potential customers are more likely to see the ads multiple times in a day.

Our advertising materials arrived the other day! We make use of VistaPrint printing services and made out.

VistaPrint is always sending out free offers to its members. You can get tons of high quality printing for free! After doing the math, in the end, it seems to work out that we were essentially able to get everything buy one get one free. So we ordered tons of materials - letterhead, postcards, business cards, magnets, etc. This photo is of some of the magnets we ordered - we got all of them for "free"!

Well, long story short, when it all arrived, we went crazy! We ended up posting tons of postcards, a slew of business cards, and a bunch of brochures all over the Ohio State campus. We hit pretty much every bulletin board we could find. This probably outdid our mass direct mailing campaign we did in January to hand selected potential customers.

This week we mailed out hundreds and hundreds of letters and hundreds and hundreds of postcards to potential customers. We hand selected small businesses around the Columbus area to whom we wanted to provide website design and hosting services.

We usually order our printed materials through VistaPrint because of their high quality, fast turn around, and you can always count on them having free offers. So we ordered a bunch of letterhead and postcards, both buy one get one free style.

After hand signing, folding, and putting all of the letters into the envelopes; applying all of the address and return address labels to the envelopes; and applying postage to all of the pieces, we delivered a huge stack of mail to the post office and hope for the little ROI (about 1%) that direct mail offers.