How to take advantage of high footfall areas with poster printing
With cheap poster printing on offer, many people wonder if this is something that they can take advantage of in promoting their business, event, product and so on.
The poster is the perfect option in so many ways but understanding why and how they have the impact that they do, it pays to know a little more about the not-so-humble poster and how, with the right design and placement, it can be a powerful promotional force.
High footfall areas – what is footfall (and why is it important?)
Footfall is the name given to describe how many people pass through an area. In some aspects, this can be quite specific and known as shopper counting or people counting.
In the case of a shopping centre, for example, you may have noticed that at the entrances to the mall, there are ‘clickers’ or machines that count the number of people that pass in and out of the place. This is a measurement that is used in promotional materials, in an effort to attract businesses to rent space within the mall or precinct.
The same is true when it comes to what you should place where in terms of promotion material. Get it right, and your poster can be earning its printing cost back ten-fold. But put it in the wrong place, with the wrong people seeing it, and it will not be doing anything. Nothing. At. All.
The psychology behind promotional advert placement
There is a theory that a customer needs to see something at least seven times in order to memorise it. This is why businesses are advised to have their logo bamboozled and etched on everything, from their price tags to posters.
Thus, posters make perfect sense. They can be placed in a high footfall area – shopping mall, bus stop, train stations, festivals, skate parks, clubs and so on – and your customer will see them time and time again. They may not take obvious notice of it each time, but it will be there, in their sub-conscious.
However, before you start designing and printing your posters, let us just ring one note of caution. This ‘rule of seven’ in advertising is all fine and dandy providing that your posters are in the right high footfall places.
What do we mean by the ‘right’ high footfall places?
As part of your business plan, you will have spent some time deciding on who your customer is. Who are you aiming at? Male or female? What age? Where will they be, what do they do, why do they want and need your product?
ALL your marketing campaigns and promotions will be aimed at your customer demographic – and your poster placement should be no different. If your customer demographic don’t eat in fast food chains, why pay to have your posters displayed right outside one?
If your customer will go to festivals, then why not place posters here or tag on to where festival organisers promote their business?
Cost effective
Of course, we all know that cost-effective is a popular phrase for cheap but sometimes, cheap carries connotations of poor quality.
In terms of poster printing, poor quality is not the case. In fact, the paper used for poster printing is usually fairly robust although it always pays to check.
In the case of a poster as a piece of promotional literature, cost-effective actually means more than the price you pay. It means that for what you do pay to have it printed, the poster can have a huge return of investment or ROI.
There are times when being able to measure the ROI of a marketing campaign is important, and so if you are embarking on a poster campaign you may want to ask how is this working for your business? Is it effective or a waste of time?
Effective design carrier
Designers love posters for one reason above all else – there is acres of space in which they can design and use to get an effective message across. You can mix and match text and graphics, or just text. There are very few well-known brands who use photos or graphics, with very little explanatory text, if any at all.
The only problem to the untrained designing eye is that the huge amount of space can invite over-exuberance in terms of content. Don’t squish a load of stuff on, trying to get as much on there as possible because it will become lost in translation, as they say.