Imagine you decided to put up a big and festive supper, let's say a Christmas party. There will be many steps to success.
You start planning ahead, find a theme and decide on the things that would make it special. You order bits and pieces of décor or maybe special treats. You clean and organize the house and then decorate it. You put up a tree, make it look beautiful and ensure the lights complete the atmosphere.
You also have to plan the meal itself. You decide on the menu, list your ingredients, and then shop for groceries and drinks. Maybe, you want to cook something new and fancy, so you look it up or call your grandma for that very special dish recipe. Or maybe, you even hire someone to cater or just serve your event, because you want to make sure it's absolutely amazing and everyone gets to relax and indulge in that atmosphere of celebration that you've put so much effort into.
The day comes, it's time to put the final touches. The music is playing and the twinkly lights are on. You are beautifully dressed and in anticipation.
And then the time comes, but no one shows up. Even though you thought through every puzzle piece of this beautiful night, you left out one important thing – the invitations. Because after putting a lot of effort into creating something special, you decided that it wasn't necessary to let people know that it was happening. Ridiculous, right?
But I've seen too many such situations. Not with guests of course, because when it comes to parties no one would think that people are supposed to learn about it themselves, but in daily life, in which advertisement is the same invitation for your special guests to come and share the results of your work with you. However, this step is often skipped as something unnecessary or too expensive.
It happens in Estevan, and it's sad to see when people do put a lot of effort into organizing events or businesses, but have no guests. Of course, lack of advertising might not be the only issue, but its absence definitely won't lead to success.
Estevan has many diverse options to let others know about what you are doing.
The Mercury offers various opportunities to help people get noticed. (Someone will always say that no one reads papers anymore, but hey, our newspaper stands at the office and around town regularly are empty well before the new edition comes out, even though we also deliver the paper to thousands of homes, so judge for yourself). We have fun and eye-catching promos throughout the year, like Kid-vertising in this week's paper, thematical sections or Christmas catalogues, and we have many other options that are personalized and cater to our community.
We also have a fast-growing provincial website that is different from anything else offered in Saskatchewan. And we are always open to finding solutions specific to your project.
I believe that we do provide a great platform for our advertisers to get noticed and known through our website and our paper. But I also never was a believer in putting eggs in one basket.
To ensure you are noticed, you do need to use different mediums and be consistent. Thankfully, Estevan has a lot of options. We have billboards, community bulletin boards, audio and video advertising, we have endless sponsorship opportunities throughout the year, we have social media, and we have many internet opportunities. We do have local influencers in the southeast, and we have provincial influencers.
And then there is also your imagination.
Back in my university years, in a class about public relations and advertisement, as an example we were given a story of a new restaurant named Orange. They fell back on extreme creativity for their campaign, and on the day of their opening had a semi-truck loaded with oranges run into their display. This picturesque scene made all the news, which helped them let everyone know they existed.
(Definitely not calling for this, but using creativity may help.)
Yes, advertising might be that tempting "extra" piece that you may feel you could save on, but see above – a party is not a party without guests. And no matter what you do, a garage sale or a community event, an organization or a business, sorry, but without advertising your ship won't sail too far.
