Online Ads, Newscast Sponsorship, or Feature Story?
Your local news is a great place to advertise. Even if paper news is no longer a big thing in your community, there are TV newscasts that have websites. You can choose between placing ads on the website, sponsoring part of a newscast, and actually having a feature story done on your business if it does something newsworthy. (Commercials are obviously an option, too, although they are expensive to produce.) Considering that all of these options have advantages, you really need to look at what they entail before choosing.
Online Ads: Straightforward but Not Always Seen
Online ads are like newspaper ads. They sit in the margins of the webpage, and you get to design them. However, not everyone will look at them. So they're a great place to start because they do get your business' name out there, but they're not a guarantee. Remember to monitor how well they do and how much business they seem to bring in.
Sponsorship: Seen, Mentioned, but General
When you watch the local news, sometimes you see the weather segment or sports report with a small banner at the bottom of the screen. The banner may have a "brought to you by" phrase with a business logo. This sponsorship is a type of advertising that is more involved than simple online ads. The contract may have more terms, and the partnership is entered into by both the company and the newscast. If you choose this option, you have a very good chance of getting your business name seen, of course, although you can't create an ad for it. This is basically your name and logo pasted at the bottom of the screen for a short time.
Feature Story: Upfront but Must Be Specific and Newsworthy
No doubt you feel anything your business does is newsworthy, but that doesn't mean it actually is. And that's the issue you face when trying to get a feature story on the news; you need to have done something that the community truly needs to know about because of how lives might be affected daily. Your business may have developed some new technology or entered into a deal with other local businesses, and those might be of interest to people. Merely selling a specific product, though, would not be worthy of a feature story on the news. So if you want to use this avenue to get noticed, your company has to have done something that is worth noticing.
Businesses usually find themselves fit more for one of these options than the others, but that doesn't mean they should ignore the other options. Take your advertising month by month and see which avenues seem to work. Start with online ads on websites for your local news channel and go from there.
Look into a network such as News 12 or Spectrum News to learn more.