Posters are strange things. Sometimes an extremely pretty picture wins all the awards but none of the expected customers, while those tacky posters win more attention that wonderful ones.
When I was younger, with my first attempt at poster printing was a recruitment poster for my university organization. Of course, I took it as a chance to show off my design skills and aimed for a professional looking poster that will win admiration. It was professional looking alright, but it looks like every other advertising poster around.
I guess my friends at the organization liked it though because they have something to plaster around the booth, and they were extra enthusiastic about it. They even used the slogan to call people’s attention. Our recruitment improved that year, but I doubt the posters effectiveness has anything to do with it.
With the popularity of non-traditional marketing, you may wonder whether your print ads are worth printing at all. For retail industries, you think you can always rely on good old word of mouth from satisfied customers to get the sales ball going.
I realized that although these posters looked nice, no one bothered to stop and look at them. There wasn’t anything in them that communicated any specific benefit to the target audience. The one benefit it served though is at least people are now aware our little club existed.
It was a good thing as well that the cheap poster printing didn’t dry up our budget. Don’t get me wrong, the posters are in very high quality but because we had it printed digitally it didn’t exhaust our budget.
In the business world, word of mouth is still the most potent marketing tool businesses can use. The thing is though satisfied customers are seldom very good at voicing their enthusiasm about every single product or service that exceeded their expectations. Sometimes a talkative customer can mention your business in passing but has no motivation to pursue the conversation.
I think posters are important as a backup marketing material to make explaining a little easier for customers. You can use an interesting and thought provoking poster to give your customers a little more leverage.
One of the reasons posters mass advertising is so popular because it gives people a starting point for conversations. A common ground they can use to create a context they can use to clue in other people into the conversation.
I guess, if I can do things over again, I would have made the poster less professional and more college student looking, maybe use graffiti art or use a more personal tone in the copywriting. It will make it a little more relatable to, and a whole lot more interesting.
