Paid offline advertising
Back when I was studying marketing at university (which I’m shocked to now realise was actually in a previous millennium), websites were just a specialist niche that barely got a mention and social media was still an idea in the head of a young Mark Zuckerberg. Because of this, much of the study was focused on BIG advertising methods: billboards, TV campaigns, radio adverts, mail campaigns and newspaper and magazine advertising. It is surprising to see the lack of creativity in these mediums now. Usually, a billboard at the side of the road just features a frame from the company’s TV commercial; but when so many of us are no longer watching TV, or consume our programmes from Netflix and Amazon Prime that are advert-free, linking your billboard campaign to a TV advert can be lost on many people.
There is still a place for traditional advertising and, happily, vegan companies are the ones that are being the most disruptive in using them. Oatly have been the champions of high-impact outdoor advertising, to the point where they often go off the billboard and have their message painted in huge letters on the side of people’s buildings. Meatless Farm ran their ‘Now that’s an M… F… Burger’ campaign (the missing words are of course ‘meat-free’!) in a limited number of places, meaning you were far more likely to have seen their billboard shared on social media than you were to walk past one in the street. And this is the thing. You can pay for your adverts to be shown in a very local area, or even pay for just a single billboard. If you were a sneaky marketing ninja you could pose in front of that single billboard, send it out as a press release to the local news, share it on your social media and ask people if they have seen your new advertising campaign. Of course they won’t have, but the assumption (because no-one really understands how display advertising works) will be that you are running a national campaign and you are a wildly successful company.
You can also look for opportunities to go into partnership with local facilities, such as bus companies, sports clubs or anywhere you have identified your customers will spend time when you created your customer profiles. One of the most successful bits of advertising I did was when I was looking to connect with local business owners and executives. When I was researching the people I wanted to sell to, I discovered a large proportion of them belonged to the local squash and tennis club. So, I sponsored one of their courts to get a long sign mounted across the base of it. It wasn’t a subtle sign either! People had no choice but to spend 60 minutes staring directly at it as they played, and a lot of local executives who later became customers mentioned that’s where they first became familiar with the brand.
If you are selling directly to vegans, then you have some very targeted and affordable marketing options in print. You might not be able to afford to get yourself in BBC Good Food, but working with Vegan Food & Living Magazine for example, you will have options for advertising that can be in the hundreds of pounds rather than thousands. They have packages where your advert can also be included in their email newsletters and on their social media pages to further your reach for not much more money.
Customers need repetition for offline advertising to work though. That’s why the banner at the sports club worked so well, because people saw it week in week out. As we’ve already said, when someone first encounters your company out in the wild it might not be when they are ready to buy. I’ve known companies that have run the same advert, on the same page, in the same place in a magazine for years because people recognised it and then know where to flick to when they finally decide they need that product. Specialist publications (like Vegan Food & Living) know that they need to support their advertisers and have packages that grow with you as you grow. You might start out with a small quarter advert on day one, but then be taking their back cover a year down the line. But again, you need to know your figures. You need to be able to track that any spend is resulting in more customers. So, put a unique discount code in your advert so that you can see how many customers you are getting from it, or make a unique link so that you can track how much traffic their email newsletter is generating for your website.
