Page 155 - 101 Ways to Market Your Business

101 WAYS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS

64 Everyone gets one of these at the supermarket

Advertising on the back of shopping dockets is not cheap
but it can prove to be effective for certain businesses. A
typical campaign will run for about twelve weeks. During
this time your advertisement will appear thousands of times
at shopping centres of your choice.

Next time you get a receipt start to take note of the
type of companies that are advertising. You may be sur-
prised to see some large national companies promoting
special offers alongside the local takeaway food store.

From my experience, ‘shop-a-dockets’ work if your offer
is good. Customers are spoiled by discounts and special
offers, making it much harder to inspire the masses to buy
your product if the offer is only mediocre. For example,
anything less than 10 per cent and forget it. I often hear
people saying they tried shop-a-dockets and they didn’t
work for them. Typically I ask what their offer was and,
without exception, it is always a 5 per cent discount or
something equally as insignificant.

I was once involved in a shop-a-docket campaign for a
cruise ship operator that specialised in taking people to the
Great Barrier Reef. The offer was sensational—two for the
price of one. The ticket price was $98 so it represented a
great saving for the local customers. This promotion was
run at a time when the company was new, it was outside
of the tourism season and the boat was running virtually
empty. The $49 that we were getting from each of the
shop-a-docket customers more than covered costs. The
goodwill created was excellent and the company soon devel-
oped a solid reputation among the local residents. The
campaign ran for about six months and several thousand
dockets were redeemed.

The company has not repeated the promotion because
it hasn’t needed to. The main reason for the success of the
promotion was the fact that it was a good offer.

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