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What Thanksgiving Can Teach Us about Newspaper Advertising

By Jenna Bruce on Tue, Nov 17, 2015 @ 11:00 AM |

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The holidays are just upon us and soon millions of Americans will find themselves traveling hundreds of miles on Thanksgiving to spend it with people who force them to come. Thanksgiving is a special day, not just because that’s when we watch the Macy’s Day Parade and football with a bunch of people we like on varying levels, but because it’s a holiday that can teach us an awful lot about newspaper advertising.

Just go with it, okay.

 

Planning is Critical

What happens when you don’t think ahead about who should bring what to Thanksgiving dinner? You wind up with nine pounds of candied yams and no rolls. Just as careful planning is necessary for a successful meal replete with myriad side dishes plus rolls, campaign development is necessary to ensure the right message gets in front of the right people at the right time.

Take some time to determine which channels will be the most effective to reach your target demographic and craft compelling copy. Plan out all of your calls to action as well as determine which metrics you will use to determine your campaigns success.

 

Print and Digital are a Match Made in Heaven

Print and Digital Advertising Go TogetherAnother important facet of planning a successful Thanksgiving dinner is deciding on who will sit next to whom. You can either eat your meal in relative peace or choke down the overly-dry turkey as your cousin and brother-in-law argue about whose hybrid gets the best mileage. To eat in peace you must understand which personalities play nicely.

To completely leverage the power of newspaper advertising you must forget about the concept of “print OR digital” and understand that print and digital are the perfect pairing. Print ads support your digital campaigns and drive traffic to your landing pages. If more marketers understood this they would, without hesitation, add print to their marketing mix.

 

Less is More

Generally, Thanksgiving is a day to stuff our faces without abandon until we find ourselves unbuttoning our pants at four o’clock in the afternoon in someone else’s living room. The less food we eat, the less our stomachs overwhelm our pants.

Less is also more when it comes to the layout and design of your newspaper ad. Busy ads that use too many fonts and cram too much information will overwhelm your readers and make them move on. Keep your ads clean and streamlined to draw and hold attention.

 

Monitor

Monitor your AdvertisingIf you’ve ever been in charge of cooking the bird you know firsthand how important it is to monitor its progress throughout the day. There’s the basting and the poking with temperature gauge (unless you employ the pop-up thermometer) and the removing of foil at just the right time to get the skin golden and crisp.

You won’t know how your campaign is doing unless you employ metrics to track its progress. Have you seen an increase of visitors to your landing page or through your door? Have more people signed up for your free home estimate? If your ad is not performing as well as you hoped, analyze what night be the problem and adjust accordingly.

 

Be Convincing

And speaking of that bird, you and your family will be eating turkey sandwiches, turkey tacos, turkey soup and turkey hash for the next week and a half. If you have kids, you know by day three they are pretty much over the turkey and want pizza and Spaghetti-o’s instead. It is your job to convince your children that old, chewy turkey is delicious and a privilege to eat.

It is also your job to convince the reader that they MUST take you up on your offer. How do you do this? By making it obvious and clear how they will benefit from your product or service. Your product will save them time and money and make them look 20 years younger all while cleaning your gutters. You get the picture. Don’t be coy, be something they can’t say no to.

While Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for all we have in our lives, it can also be a reminder how powerful newspaper advertising can be for your bottom line.

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