Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog

Advertising isn’t what it used to be and all the rules seem to have changed recently. In fact, many advertising-agents and marketing-specialists say that it is an entirely new game. Perhaps, you need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to your advertising-strategy. Small business people can no longer just throw money at things that do not work. And often, cable television and radio especially in the larger markets is completely out of the question; the costs are just too high.

Online advertising works for many types of businesses, and small businesses can actually buy keywords for the products or services they sell along with (+) the name of the city that their location is in. There are ways to take advantage of the Internet even if you own a small business location and do not actually have to sell anything online to make it profitable. Yes, the advertising rules have changed, and you need to change along with them if you are to survive the recession and outlast year competition.

Just like in negotiating with foreign rogue nations, you should leave “all your options” on the table when it comes to your marketing methods and advertising strategies. Not long ago, a laid-off advertising executive from Los Angeles told me that he had bought airtime and was running ads on paid programming.

He was allowing businesses to sign up for having super sales, or offering steep discounts and their “show” and interviewers would go over and interview the business owner who would walk around the store and tell them of all the great bargains. Like, I said everything has changed including the rules. Please consider all this and adopt an innovative advertising-strategy today.

Lance Winslow - Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve worked hard saving your money to purchase that dream of owning your own business. After years squirreling away the capital necessary to start, the day arrives when you’re ready to open your doors to the public.

Of course, if your business is in a highly visible location along a fairly well-travelled road with great access to your car park, the public will see you easily. This is especially true if you take advantage of that high roadside visibility by placing messages about your grand opening soon to take place. I know my interest gets peeked passing by a soon-to-open business with all the colourful signs announcing the big opening. Big beautifully decorated signs, colourful balloons, and even people waving signs or carrying hand-held billboards can grab the attention of passer-bys.

But, how do you get your message out to people who don’t travel this road or what if your business location is not on the main drag? It would be a fairly unwise business decision to rely on just passing traffic as your only source for customers. Plus, as any successful business entrepreneur will tell you, successfully getting the word out about your business - your goods and or services - will be the key to your success.

There are many ways you can investigate to promote your business from the extremely expensive to merely depending on word of mouth. However, one of the best and oldest methods for any business to promote itself remains to this day through newspaper advertising.

“Why Is Newspaper Advertising Still Effective?”

Well, despite all the hyped up gloom recently about the demise of the newspaper industry, your local paper isn’t going anywhere. Today, newspaper strength drawing readers and potential consumers for businesses placing advertisements still makes the medium a cost-effective marketing tool.Read the rest of this entry »

Custom brochures are already not, what they once were. Nowadays custom brochure printing is synonymous with customizing a set of mass produced templates rather than doing an original design.

If you have been doing this kind of custom brochure printing all the time, then this is your wake up call. Truly customized brochures are unique works of printed material that come right from your own imagination. You will not get anything as special from templates, so it is actually not recommended to use templates unless you are really starved for time.

To help you start out in the road to original and custom brochures, here are a few steps that you should follow.

1. Dump your templates - Of course, the first logical step is to dump your templates. Using them will only limit your originality and make your custom brochures look very boring and “common”. This is something really that you must actively avoid since your real goal is to make a custom brochure right? So tell your templates goodbye. You can look at them for inspiration for a few times, but you should not use it, and definitely, you must not imitate them.

2. Build things from the ground up - Next, with your limitations eliminated, you can now get to work creating your custom brochure design. You should aim to build everything from the ground up. This not only teaches you the basics of brochure designs, you can also get the fundamental concepts on why brochures are needed to be designed a certain way because if the folds. Build each major element and panel from scratch and see how it goes first before comparing it with others. In time, you should find your own unique style that is the perfect foundation for a custom brochure.

3. Add elements that are unique to your project - Also, since you are making a custom brochure, you must always have a few custom elements that Read the rest of this entry »