The Advantages of Posters

Like many small-business owners, you may consider digital marketing to be a genuine boon to your business. Because of the intricacies involved in planning a strategy and assessing the results, it's no wonder you do a double-take when someone suggests adding posters to your promotional mix. Posters? That's a blissfully simple idea that has some advantages – and not only because posters can deliver a solid ROI. A look at the pros and cons of posters will show you how.

Some of the people on your team may register an immediate reaction to the word “poster.” They may assume the idea is to create a fairly large poster, meaning the size of traditional movie and music posters: 24-by-36 inches.

Print shop owners in particular are eager for small-business owners to know that they should expand the definition, even if it means reducing the size of the poster. Many print shops can accommodate custom sizes ranging from 8-by-8 inches to 58-by-100 inches.

This range includes two sizes favored by many small-business owners – 8.5-by-11 inches and 11-by-17 inches – because they can save money by making extra copies on their office printers.

At these smaller sizes, some people may refer to your creative effort as a flyer, sell sheet or one-pager. But semantics shouldn't give you pause, especially when you assess the other advantages of posters.

The various sizes at your disposal are one of the distinct advantages of posters. This versatility means they can be adapted to their environment – you have the latitude to create larger posters for shopping centers and in elevators but can shrink the size for bulletin boards in coffee shops, train stations and restaurants.

It's unlikely that posters will serve as the cornerstone of one of your marketing campaigns, even if you're sponsoring a contest or giveaway. In all likelihood, posters will serve to reinforce your message, tagline or slogan. In this way, posters can spawn that final “Aha” moment that many consumers need to make a purchasing decision.

You can't just hang posters anywhere; you probably will have to get permission to hang them in public places. But chosen carefully, you can put your message right in front of large numbers of your target audience.

One disadvantage of posters is that they can be stolen. And yes, people can tune them out if they “overstay their welcome.” But these problems are easily remedied with monitoring and, perhaps, a steady rotation of new posters.

Like any other advertising message, the value is that you can assess a poster campaign's effectiveness, too.

Ten years ago, no one would have praised posters; they are a “quiet” medium. Then again, 10 years ago, consumers weren't being bombarded with thousands of banner and pop-up ads that clamor incessantly for their attention.

With a compelling blend of words and images, posters are the message. People can read them, take pictures of them and send them to others at their leisure.

To be sure, “affordable” is a value word. But since the final cost of a poster order largely depends on its size and the total number of copies produced, posters offer small-business owners the ability to adapt the order to their marketing budget.

True, it's smart to also factor in the cost of having a professional graphic designer create a poster for your business. As the “custodian of your brand,” they will take the time to choose the most provocative fonts and images that will resonate most with consumers.

If you're still reluctant to call posters “affordable,” you can probably agree that they can be cost-effective, and this will give you the ROI – not to mention the UX (user experience) – you deserve.