The Clean and Green Club

Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. it was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising.

Here’s when you might use it:

• Your product or service has broad general appeal–like pizza, gasoline, laundry
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive event that cuts across demographics, like a county fair, a sports event, a carnival, a restaurant festival
• It makes sense to use a coupon
• The newspaper you’re planning to use has at least some days when there are no other FSIs
• A high-impact graphic can convey your message quickly: a line drawing, a chart, a cartoon, or a high-contrst simple black-and-white photo
• You want to target a certain neighborhood (FSIs are much easier to segment than space advertising)

Use a bright color, either letter-size or half-letter-size (5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches, in the U.S.). Investigate whether you should have the newspaper do the printing, or whether you should print elsewhere. And set up everything in plenty of time to work out glitches.

For more on cost-effective high-return advertising, have a look at my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist). Right now, if you’re in the U.S., you can get free shipping on any (or all) of my marketing books, which make great gifts. Just visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart and enter FREESHIP as the promotional code.