Make Your Own Postcard Advertisements Work For You by: Lynne Saarte

You of course should be familiar with travel postcards. You get it when people you love go on vacation and send the postcard as a reminder of where they are. The “wish you were here” print postcards is indeed a classic, one that most people are familiar with. What if I tell you however that you can use this same postcard printing method to help your business? Indeed, some businesses have started to use postcard printing for direct mail advertising, while slowly moving away from envelopes and letters. If you are interested to see how this postcard advertising works, then read on. In this article I will teach you how to make your own postcard advertisements work for you.

Thinking of the right advertising angle for postcards
The first step into making a custom postcard for advertising is to think of your angle. Your angle is basically the “wish you were here” counterpart from travel postcards. You have to think of a great message that gets your reader's attention. For most marketing postcards, they try to display the certain lifestyle that their products and services represent. The message basically is “wish you can be like this”.

So if you are advertising some fitness products for example, you can display pictures of fit men and women, and tell your readers that they can be like that. For educational services on the other hand, a picture of graduating student with high grades should be great. Of course this message must be distinct from your rivals. The more distinguishing your message is from others the better that postcard message will be. So take your time and compose the right advertising angle for your color postcards. This is a very important step.

Producing good postcards for marketing
Once you have that message already figured out, you should then start on the business of producing them. In this regard you will need a designer and a printer for postcards. The layout designer for your postcards should be a good graphic artist. You can of course hire a free lancer if you like, or you can even recruit yourself if you are willing to learn some basic graphic design. There are plenty of templates and tutorials out there so you can learn fast enough with no trouble.

For the printer, you have two options. If you plan on a mass postcard marketing campaign, you will need a professional printer with mass production capabilities. An online postcard printing service should be fast enough for most campaigns. You can search for them of course via the Internet.

Your second option on the other hand is when you plan on only printing a couple of custom postcards for local distribution. If your aim is this, then printing from your own color printer should be more feasible. Whatever you choose though, it should be easy enough to create and print postcards since they are pretty easy to understand. A picture and a little message on the cover, and some mailing lines and guides at the back. That's all there is to it.

Knowing how and where to send them
The final hurdle for postcard advertising is distribution. You must know where to send them for your postcards to work. If you plan on a large advertising campaign, you might have to buy the addresses provided by research firms and other marketing companies and then use the addresses for mailing. If you want advertising on a more local level however, you can just hire a person to give them out in your city. You might also want to try hiring the printing service to help you since some of them also have distribution options for postcards.

Whatever your mode of deployment is though, make sure that you decide smartly on the houses you will be distributing to. It is best to distribute them on areas where you know will have a better chance of relating to your postcard. So if you plan on advertising to a richer crowd, distribute your postcards to richer residences, while common products should be pretty comfortably sent towards more main stream residences. This should maximize the impact of your postcards, getting them to the people that will be most interested.

Once you get the hang of the distribution, more or less, you should already know how to postcard advertising works. It is not as easy as posters and brochures, but they do get a lot of work done and they can be used to reach out to a very wide area. So do not underestimate their powers.

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About The Author

Lynne Saarte is a writer that hails from Texas. She has been in the Internet business for some years now, specializing in Internet marketing and other online business strategies.