What are the benefits of poster advertising?

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Poster Advertising|What are the benefits of poster advertising?It may be one of the oldest forms of advertising still in existence but, to this day, poster advertising remains one of the most popular. While the world may be gradually becoming more and more technological and internet-focused, the high visibility that posters can provide makes them one of the best methods for advertisers to use.
You only have to walk down the street to see their power in full effect – poster adverts are literally everywhere. Whether it be a clothing brand advertising a new sale, or Netflix showcasing a new TV programme, posters are one of the most effective ways of reaching new and existing customers.

Here, we go through each of their benefits in further detail, clarifying why poster advertising remains such an effective and widely-used form of advertising.

Design

Posters are, in effect, a blank canvas. They are ideal for brands and businesses who want to show their creative colours, providing a design freedom like no other. Depending on the type of business or purpose the advert is being used for, it is easy to be as creative as you like in their design; if you fancy using bright, attention-grabbing colours – go for it. Want to inject a bit of humour? Why not. How about filling the advert with tons of text? You can, but it’s probably not the best idea.

Nailing the design can make a big difference to how or whether a customer will respond to it. Most businesses tend to hire the help of a professional digital printing service at this stage, to ensure that the poster they want to print is both of sufficient quality, and meets the relevant printing guidelines.

Location

Inside, outside, wherever – posters can be used everywhere and anywhere. You will often find them in shops and on windows, billboards, walls and hoardings – wherever they are likely to be seen. For instance, bars and restaurants often use posters in toilets or bathrooms to advertise particular events, such as quiz nights, happy hour deals and live music events. In essence, wherever you come across people, you are likely to find a poster or two.

Size

The size of posters really varies depending on its location. For a poster placed inside a retail or business premises, smaller posters – such as A4 or A3 – are the most commonly used sizes. Whereas, at a large shopping centre, outdoor poster sizes are normally much larger.

The chosen poster size will largely depend on how customers are expected to interact with it. For example, an A3 poster may look huge when you’re holding it in your own two hands, but it will barely be seen if used outdoors. Similarly, while an A1 or A2 poster may be perfect to use outside, if it takes up half of the wall when using it indoors, then it probably isn’t a practical choice.

However, having this flexibility to decide the ideal size is one of poster advertising’s key benefits. If you are looking to print a poster, here are some of the most common sizes used:

  • A4 – 210 x 297mm
  • A3 – 297 x 420mm
  • A2 – 420 x 594mm
  • A1 – 594 x 841mm
  • A0 – 841 x 1189mm

Visibility

Since posters are typically located wherever people are, they are incredibly visible. Whether a business worker walks past a particular advert at 6 AM, or a dog walker sees the same advert at 12 PM, the advert is always available and able to reach a wide range of people, whatever the time of day may be. This means that a huge number of people will be able to see, interact with and respond to a wide variety of brands throughout the day, which could lead to several potential conversions.

Plus, posters which feature a particular call-to-action on them, such as an email address, website, or social media information, will encourage customers to engage with them, influencing their online and buying behaviour.

Durability

The longevity of a poster really depends on the quality of the material it is printed on. Most good indoor posters are printed on strong, heavy matt or gloss laminated paper, with a ‘Grams per Square Meter’ value between 90gsm and 350gsm.

Outdoor posters, on the other hand, are typically printed on durable water-resistant paper that adheres to the material without cracking or tearing. Take a look next time you walk past a large outdoor poster – there won’t be a crack or blemish anywhere in sight.

Cost

Having a number of stunning posters produced can cost a lot less than you might think. Compared to a large interactive billboard or another form of digital advert, poster advertising can be a much more cost-effective method to use. It could also potentially reach a lot more people, so could offer a better return on investment. Likewise, it is generally considered a more trusted and tolerated form of advertising to consumers over digital or online alternatives.

Final thoughts…

There you have it – the various reasons why using poster advertising can be such an effective way of reaching more customers. It may not have the interactive pizzazz that digital adverts can provide but, as one of the oldest and most widely-used forms of advertising, it certainly is a cost-effective and incredibly popular choice.

Fending of the Cybercriminals: How to Protect Your Business in the Digital Age

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Cybercriminals|Fending of the Cybercriminals: How to Protect Your Business in the Digital AgeIn the digital age of today, cybercriminals are your business’s biggest enemy. They will stop at nothing to take advantage of both your company and your clients in order to benefit themselves, regardless of the damage they cause. They’ll phish, impersonate, hack, and scam their way to financial success, without bothering to even consider the consequences of their actions.

You cannot allow these petty cybercriminals to bring down the business that you’ve worked so hard to build up. Quite simply, you have to resolve to fend them off at all costs. To find out how that can be achieved, be sure to read on.

Know your enemy

Simply knowing your enemy and getting familiar with the dangers that you face will help you to fend off cybercrime.

Some forms of cybercrime that you should definitely be aware of include:

Partner up with an anti-phishing expert

Fake websites, social media accounts, and email addresses are created by cybercriminals in order to hoodwink unsuspecting customers. Instances of this happening are referred to as phishing attacks, and they are common place on the world wide web today. Unfortunately, the bigger your business’s reputation, the greater your chances are of being targeted by a cybercriminal who specializes in this type of criminality — your company’s reputable name and extended customer base provide them with plenty of opportunities to scam their way to financial success.

Fear not, however, as you’re not alone in your fight against phishing. There are plenty of anti-phishing experts out there, and you should partner up with them if you’re serious about preventing this kind of plight before it has the chance to befall you.

FraudWatch International are one such expert that you could turn to in this instance. The anti-phishing services that they offer include:

  • 24/7 monitoring
  • Domain registration
  • Detection capabilities
  • Layered protection
  • Scanning tools
  • End-to-end solutions
  • Speedy site takedowns

Make sure your employees understand the dangers

If they remain in the dark with regards to all the digital dangers your organization faces day in, day out, your employees could inadvertently end up making it incredibly easy for cybercriminals to hack into your business.

Should your staff members access a virus-contaminated website or open up a trojan email while they are connected to your office WiFi, your whole network could be infected and your personal details could be hacked into — once they are granted access in this instance, you can be sure cybercriminals won’t leave you alone or give you back what is rightfully yours until you yield to their financial demands. For this reason, you need to ensure that the entirety of your workforce understands the severity and danger of cybercrime.

In the digital age of today, physical crime is not the only danger that you face. You also have to contend with cybercrime — fail to tackle it, and an untold amount of problems could befall your business. Take the above advice, and be sure to fend off cybercriminals before they have the opportunity to sink their claws into you.

The Art Of Selling Houses: How To Keep Your Books Ticking Over

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Real Estate|The Art Of Selling Houses: How To Keep Your Books Ticking OverKeeping your books full as an estate agent is partly hard work and partly having the gift of the gab. Being able to sell houses involves crafting a delicate balance of being persuasive but also keeping everyone informed. You don’t want to be the real estate agent equivalent of a snake oil salesman, but you also want to keep your books nicely ticking over. If you have just started in real estate, here’s how to get your houses selling.

Marketing strategy

It doesn’t matter what condition they’re in: the houses on your roster need to be well presented online for people to consider them. Even if you have a wreck on your hands, someone who is looking to start a passion-project will want to get a sense of what they will be overhauling. You will come across as a much more reliable real-estate agent if your marketing is of a high standard. Using professional photographers and marketers, such as Yught, will get you a service that is specialized in real estate.

Part of your marketing strategy should involve a strong online presence. A brilliant website allows you to capture your personality and tone of voice. This is hopefully, what will draw potential clients to you – and importantly, gain trust with customers. Your website should be easy to find and accessible. Existing on social media is also important to advertise exciting new properties and open a dialogue with house-hunters.

Don’t rely on word of mouth

Positive word of mouth will certainly benefit you in your career – but that doesn’t mean you should rely on it. It’s been said that a real danger for any new real estate agent is making the assumption that friends and family will get them business. In order to become a successful real estate agent, the reality is that you will need to work hard and network. Don’t wait for the work to find you – you will need to source most of it yourself while you are starting out.

Specialize

Your education should not stop once you finally become a full-time real estate agent. It is important to keep learning not only for the betterment of your skills as a real estate agent, but also to help you specialize. If you want to find a niche set of customers in a particular price bracket, it is recommended that you become an expert in a particular area. As with any job, this comes with a combination of experience and knowledge. You will need to build this up over time, but it could be incredibly beneficial to you – it may even become a real passion.

What will keep your books ticking over is a devotion to your job. Your devotion should be reflected in your marketing strategy, your work ethic, and in your dedication to learning more as an agent. When you combine all of these features you are building the foundations for a successful and busy career.

3 Key Benefits to Automating Accounts Payable

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Accounts Payable Automation|3 Key Benefits to Automating Accounts PayableThe accounting department is one of the most important in a business. It’s therefore vital that it runs smoothly and that errors are kept to a minimum. Usually tasked with reducing costs and improving business performance, a key tool in delivering these objectives is accounts payable automation software. Some of the key benefits are outlined below.

Eliminate Manual Data Entry and Reduce Errors

Accounts payable can use a lot of business resource because it is traditionally a very manual process. Usually it requires someone transferring or inputting invoice information from one system to another be it from an email or a paper invoice. This kind of manual data entry often leads to errors, especially when dealing with large amounts of data.

In accounts payable in particular it’s especially important that mistakes aren’t made as they can have a huge impact on business. An additional zero or a decimal in the wrong place can disrupt other departments and in smaller businesses can lead to cash flow problems.

Implementing accounts payable automation software will help to reduce common errors and will free-up employees to work on higher priority deliverables. One key feature of good accounts payable software is AI driven invoice capture. This will automate the capture of data within invoices that are received via mail, email or fax and input it into the system. Manual data entry and errors are therefore almost completely eliminated.

Streamline Business Processes

All businesses will have an accounts payable process in place to ensure that invoices are paid on time and that the correct approvals are sought. However, usually employees rely on each other to know their part in the process. This becomes a problem if someone leaves the business as it can cause a breakdown in communication, key parts of the process to be missed and payments being delayed.

One way to overcome this is by setting up workflows and processes within automated accounts payable software. Having a visual representation of the procedure and a digital sign off process means that everyone is kept in the loop. It also means that invoices are logged and processed on time and efficiently.

If your business gets discounts for early payment of invoices this can be especially valuable.

Take Advantage of Holistic Reporting

Being able to generate and access reports that give an indication of the health of your business is vital. Typically accounts payable might be using spreadsheets or other software that isn’t linked to other systems in the business. This can lead to data quickly becoming out of date as it’s captured at a single point in time.

Connecting automated accounts payable software to existing systems will give you a holistic view of your business. Real-time dashboards and reports, as opposed to snapshots of data, will ensure that everyone is kept in the loop and that decisions are made based on the most up to date data.

Having this insight will help across the business and deliver on key objectives including:

  • Increasing responsiveness to customers
  • Being pro-active about any emerging cash flow problems
  • Providing a better service based on data-driven insights

Generating Social Media Buzz and Trust To Gain Website Traffic

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Increase Website Traffic|Generating Social Media Buzz and Trust To Gain Website TrafficSocial Media is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website and to create brand recognition. Using social media sources to encourage people to take that big step from moving off of the social media platform they are on and over to your website is not an easy task.

Some people’s perception of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is one that only needs the creation of a Facebook page and a few targeted ads. If only it was that simple.

Facebook is arguably the easiest Social Media platform to encourage people to move from seeing your Facebook page to looking at your website. However, to successfully achieve this user action there are a number of elements you will need to include within your Facebook marketing strategy.

Likes and Followers

Likes and followers of your Facebook page are essentially people endorsing your brand. It doesn’t matter if you are an informational blog website like this one, an e-comm ship, travel website or any other niche, most people will not leave Facebook to visit your website if your Facebook page does not have trust.

Mistakes: Many people make the mistake of using Facebook ads for website clicks. They do this with very little social media content to begin with and no likes/followers. As a result, this type of advertising ends up being a waste of money.

The right thing to do: Start with creating some nice posts that represent your brand. Make sure you have a nice looking banner, contact details, and overall a Facebook page that looks complete and not half done or with important features missing.

To get an idea of how to do this correctly look at your competitors that have a lot of likes and followers as well as lots of comments from people interacting with their Facebook page.

Once you are ready and feel happy then start a ‘Likes and Followers’ campaign before going for clicks directly to your website. You can also use services such as Fast likes that can help build up likes and followers prior to your Facebook operated campaign.

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What Happens Once You Have Built Trust On Your Facebook Page?

The next step is to start to real in engagement from other Facebook users. You can start to create posts that ask questions or competitions. Anything that you think will get people within your industry niche to interact and possibly take the next step which is to visit your website if that is your aim.

You can also start to run a Facebook campaign that encourages people to click through to your website.

With people clearly engaging with your Facebook page, hitting the like button, and following your page, now they are inclined to trust your brand – more so compared to starting the Facebook website clicks campaign with no likes or followers.

What About Using Other Social Media Sites?

You can use other social media platforms to harness trust via likes and followers. Instagram is popular if you want to use images, then YouTube is perfect if you want to use video marketing, then, of course, you have Twitter.

Twitter is much more difficult to master compared to any other social media platforms we have mentioned here. It’s a fast-moving platform and messages can get buried quickly. It is extremely useful if you can master influencer marketing.

Plus, news channels and blogs find it useful to announce new content. It’s not impossible to master Twitter, but it certainly takes a lot more effort to get the right mix of posts and getting the timing of those posts right,