School letters can be a great way of reaching families living in your community.  Quite often schools are happy to let local businesses advertise in their newsletters for a minimal cost.  It helps to offset the production cost of the newsletter, enabling the school to spend money in other areas.

Most schools have a minimum of several hundred students and many have several thousand.  This represents a lot of households and families.

Some examples of businesses that could do this kind of promotion include:

• the local Tyre company can advertise a reminder and special offer to check your tyres before going on holidays.
• a driving school can target hundreds of potential customers as teenagers reach driving age.
• the local theme park can make special school holiday offersto keep the kinds entertained.
• the toy store can have a school holiday special.
• restaurants can offer a family special.

Obviously this type of promotion may not apply to every business but it does not apply to most.  If your local school does not have a regular newsletter perhaps you can encourage them to do one and your business can sponsor it.

This is a great idea I have used in the past to target a younger audience.

I don’t know about you but getting older makes me sick.  Don’t get me wrong, Im all about getting older gracefully but I still hate the fact.

Recently I went to a rock festival and damm did I feel old!  So to make myself feel better I sat and devised a plan on how I could some how use this to my advantage.  I noticed lots of young men swarming around groups of women, and then it hit….

I new there was another festival coming up in the months ahead, so what I did was:

• buy 5 tickets for my sister and some of her better looking friends.
• got 5 fluoro tight pink shirts made up with my web site address and company on the back.
• printed 5000 business cards with a special offers on the back for concert goers.

All I pretty much did then was offer my sister and her friends transport and free tickets to the concert in agreement they handed out as many business cards as possible and stay together for the day (drawing plenty of attention by being in a group of 5 beautiful women in fluoro pink shirts).

The response was awesome. I got some great advertising and top conversion on my investment which was relatively cheap, and my sister and her friends had a great day which didn’t cost them a cent.

Everybody wins!

I’m probably going to get in big trouble for saying this, but here goes anyway. Gyms are the male equivalent of the hairdressers for women, where men get together and talk and gossip also.

From my experience at the gym I’ve seen three very good ways to promote your business using the existing clientele already using the service.

1) Sponsor Board

Sponsoring a board at the main entrance of gym can prove very profitable and affordable.  By holding a promotion for “gym members only” your local gym owner will most likely allow you to do this for free because it’s good promotion for their gym.

Your promotion could include a discount for gym members upon showing their membership when coming to your business.

2) Noticeboard

Most gyms have a notice board.  Take advantage of people standing around resting or waiting to use certain machines.  Don’t forget about the power of the gold noticeboard.

3) Sponsor Gym Membership Cards

Ask your local gym if you can pay for the production and printing of their membership cards in exchange for your advertisement or promotion on the back.

Whats great about this is the gym owner is happy by not having to pay for the manufacturing of membership cards and you basically get your business card into lots of people pockets that are guaranteed not to get thrown out straight away.

Like I said earlier, “Gyms are a popular gossip place amongst men”.  Having a good promotion specifically for gym members is a sure fire way to get your service talked about and used by a large exsisting member base already in place.