In this day and age it’s very easy to get caught up in the spectacular. That is, we focus so much on the outstanding that we overlook or under-value what is none-the-less good.

And so it is with some advertising. A lot of business advertisers only tend to advertise with big results in mind when there are great gains to be made with smaller initiatives as well.

Keep in mind what I’ve said repeatedly in one form or another, that is the name of the game is essentially to keep your existing customers happy and coming back while gradually adding new ones along the way. Determine to grow your overall customer base gradually and you’ll grow your business.

One cost effective and useful way to do this, for a lot of businesses at least, is to regularly use the classifieds in your local newspaper. I call it the dripping tap approach. If you leave a tap dripping for long enough, you’ll end up with a lot of water.

Classifieds are still a very effective and cheap way to advertise but best results are gained when you use them regularly. Often your local newspaper will negotiate very attractive low rates for a regular booking so don’t be afraid to negotiate hard for a good deal.

I’ll let you fill in the blanks but below I have included a series of different classified ads for a variety of business types that will give you some ideas. These are only examples of course but each is designed to interest your existing customers and at the same time snare some new customers. Like with all advertising, make sure you say something worth hearing about and don’t be afraid to try different things to determined what types of offers work best.

Consumers have become pretty savvy with many of the advertising and marketing techniques that businesses have used over the years, but there’s still one that seems to work fairly well.

For the sake of a better name, let’s call it packaging.

Packaging is when you put together a number of products together and sell as a pack of some sort.

Typical examples are meal deals like 2 large pizza, garlic bread and 1.25ltr drink from a pizza shop for what appears to be a good price. Another could be a family dinner of a BBQ Chicken, large serve of chips and a salad, again for what appears to be a good price. In these two examples, the garlic bread and the chips provide shops with room to move. Some time back a pizza shop I helped sold garlic bread for $2.50, yet they purchased it ready to simply stick in a microwave or an oven for 40 cents. The cost of chips too is quite small compared to what they sell for. Basically what I’m saying here is, if you sell pizzas, rather than discount your pizzas, you can bundle them up in a pack with say garlic bread or soft drink and sell the pack for what appears a good discounted price. By doing this, you may discount or even include your garlic bread and/or drink at cost price but you still get full price for your pizzas. Your individual sale value also will be higher. It’s the same with the BBQ Chicken, instead of discounting your chickens, bundle them with chips and a salad or drink to give the illusion of a good saving and your overall sales turnover will go up. This method could be described as dazzling consumers with science but hey, much bigger and better businesses than yours have been doing this, in one form or another, for a long time.

Here’s a few brief examples of “packaging” that I’ve helped clients with over the years. Some of these go back a while but the principles used still apply. Read them think about them and then see if any of the methods could be used to advantage in your particular business. Although it appeared impossible at the time but they brought Apollo 13 back from space safely, simply by ‘working the problem’. It’s amazing what people can do when they actually sit down and “work the problem”.

Thrift Box
This was for a butcher who was trying to attract people on a budget. The idea was to use cheap cuts of meat but throw in something a bit special as well.

The Thrift Box contained 1kg Roast Beef, 1 Kg Forequarter chops, 1Kg mince, 1kg sausages and 500gms of tasty bacon. Back then it sold for $15 and the butcher made up a tray and stuck it on a turntable in his front window. He sold hundreds within a few weeks.

Package deals by butchers are quite common these days but when we did this one, no one else was doing them. The trick then and now is to package up something that sounds great but is also something a lot of people would want to buy.

You choos’em 3 pack

This concept was created for a Chinese restaurant who had earlier offered customers options of a couple of packs with set dishes in them. Many Asian restaurants still offer set packs today but more often than not, the lack of variety wears off. The You choos’em 3 pack gave them options and proved to be very successful.

Basically, customers were given two lists of about 8 different dishes. They could choose one dish from each list plus a large or boiled fried rice, all for the one set price. Both lists consisted of popular dishes but were split up depending on the profit potential for each dish. At the time chicken and pork dishes gave the shop the most profit, while beef and certainly seafood dishes offered less profit. Like garlic bread, chips and drink did in the packages mentioned early, rice too is very inexpensive to produce and enabled this shop to discount the rice while getting full price for the main dishes.

A big board was installed behind the counter and people could easily choose what they wanted. It proved to be a huge success and continued for several years. Interestingly, I have never seen another Asian Restaurant use this concept but maybe they have never had a marketing consultant like me help them.

Buy 3 albums for $20

Again, this goes back a long way but the strategy is worth noting.

A client owned a popular record shop back when record albums were all the go but one of the problems he faced was always ending up with a whole lot of the less popular albums among his stock. It wasn’t a case of him knowingly buying bad stock but rather him buying what appeared to be good stock only to discover that the albums didn’t reach the heights that they were meant to. Such was the record business in those days and no doubt it’s the same for music and video shops along with bookshops today.

When he spoke to me he had hundreds of these records and he couldn’t give them away. So what to do?

I came up with an idea which saw him successfully ‘give away’ hundreds of these dead stock albums while at the same time selling hundreds of more popular albums.

We called in Buy 3 Albums for $20 and at the time the latest albums sold for about $12.

We set up three stands and in the first stand we put a big selection of the latest albums. We put a blue sticker on all these.

In the second stand we put a selection of still popular albums, but mainly those that were on the way down sales-wise and in many cases would end up a more dead stock at some point. We put a blue sticker on all these.

In the third stand we put all the dead stock or albums that we couldn’t give away. We put a green sticker on all these.

We advertised the deal and people could choose 3 albums, one with a blue sticker, one with a red sticker and one with a green sticker.

The sale was a roaring success and turnover went through the roof.

When you have a business like a coffee shop, cafe or food outlet, spending a lot of money on advertising may not be very practical. After all you’d have to sell a lot of coffee to new customers to justify a spend of even just a few hundred dollars. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be worth it but it would depend on what you’re trying to achieve and how you went about it.

Over the years a number of coffee shops have sought my advice and one simply idea that I have given them is to “work the locals”. That is, most coffee shops are generally located in a place where they have a ready-made clientele within walking distance of their shop. This could represent 200-300 businesses or offices with 1000 or more potential customers for the business. Of course, there could well be a number of other coffee shops in the same vicinity all vying for the same business.

Many of these people would likely be among your loyal customers but many may not and one of the purposes of advertising is to try and introduce new customers to your business or to put it more bluntly, to steal them away from your competitors.

One way to do this is to produce a small flyer and every so often, drop a flyer into all the businesses within walking distance of your business. Flyer don’t need to be fancy and 200 – 300 or so can be photo copied very cheaply. What you put on the flyer is up to you but my advice is to include an offer of some sort that will tease a number of people into taking up your offer. The main things to remember when doing this are –

The idea is not to just give your product(s) away. The main outcome you’re after is to introduce new customers and hopefully to keep them. Although in the short term it could be worth just breaking even or even absorbing a small cost, the long term benefits of introducing several new regular customers could be worth it.

Be creative and make sure that your flyer says something that people will want to respond to. On that note, people will generally be interested in either something new or something cheap.

There are any number of things you could do but here’s a typical example –

Try this once at least and then evaluate the outcome but remember, the offer is most important and will have a bearing on the outcome. A less than favourable response could well be the result of a making a wrong offer. Sometimes it requires a few tries to discover what hits people’s hot buttons. Apart from a bit of time and effort, this is a very cheap and worthwhile way to “work the locals”.