Happy National Comic Book day, superfans and text message marketers! Whether you’re a fan of DC, Marvel, or another publisher, we salute you.
Of all the artistic mediums out there, none strike as locally as comic books. Movies and video games sell on a global scale, and thus, advertise the same way. Novels move more towards digital distribution every day, and the music industry is already there. Television, the once-great bastion for local advertising, has a diminishing influence on people’s minds as streaming rids TV shows of advertisements. But not comic books.
Half of a comic book’s appeal is to act as a collectible, either as part of a run or as a copy with a rare variant cover. When large corporations are taking the other artistic mediums under their wing, comic books small enough to go untainted. For small businesses, there is hope for advertising alongside art.
Local businesses can leverage comic book shops by advertising their business using text marketing in order to:
- Gain visibility among a dedicated and consistent local audience
- Take advantage of advertising opportunities year-round and surrounding specific well-trafficked events and
- To take advantage of the trend of pop culture fanaticism surrounding everyone’s favorite icons, superheroes!
1. Comic book stores draw in a consistent and steady local crowd
You might be thinking to yourself, comic books are all about superheroes (which isn’t true). Superheroes are the biggest thing around right now, there’s nothing local about them. In terms of movies, that idea is right, but when it comes to the medium they originate from, that thinking couldn’t be more wrong. Comic books used to be sold as part of newspapers and magazines in the form of comic strips. They were sold to people on the local level, by people working on a local level.
Comic books are still predominantly sold in local comic book stores, not online, meaning that they’re as local as they’ve always been. The people who walk in and out of a comic book store live near your business. Comic book fans shop regularly, every week usually, in order to get new releases and keep up with ongoing story arcs they love.
If you run a local retail shop, restaurant, cafe or coffee shop, pizza parlor, grocery store, barbershop, drug store, club, tattoo parlor, auto shop, or other business with a wider appeal that depends on local foot traffic, then your local comic book shop might be the perfect place to partner with, and advertise your local business.
2. Year-round visitors mean year-round visibility and opportunities
Comic books sell all year round, and publishers will have a big comic event for every season. There’s no seasonal lull for comic books like there would be for another medium. This makes partnering up with your local comic book store a long term endeavor.
Comic book stores, like the art itself, are all about decorating their stores with collectibles, posters, and memorabilia. Take that as an opportunity to display your keyword and short code on a poster or postcard in the store, with a comic book visual theme, and get in front of all of those comic book fans. “Text PIZZA to 64600 for a free slice to SUPERfans of Pete’s Pizza!” Comic fans have to eat, right??
With new comic books coming out every Wednesday, that’s a consistent crowd you know your marketing is hitting. Comic book shops thrive off of making themselves social spots, destinations to go to. People come even after all the new comics have come out. They’ll host events for major comic releases, parties for movie premieres, and some even host Q&As with comic book writers.
Let’s not forget what has made superheroes so popular, movies. They’re tent pool releases for the box office. DC and Marvel release two to three films a year. It’s expensive to advertise a product or service in a movie, but not so to advertise around them.
Comic stores get a flux of customers around superhero movies. People come in wanting to learn more about the character they saw on the big screen. Focus your marketing partnership to center around these peak days, releases, and events, for the most visibility on your marketing materials.
3. Ride the coattails of the popular trend of iconic superheroes
Comic books have been around and successful in their current form for over a hundred years. Since 1897 with the first comic book, The Yellow kid in McFadden’s Flats, they have remained a mainstay in entertainment. Of course, their place was cemented with the creation of Superman in 1938 and Batman 1939. And ever since, comic books remain the home of icons.
That’s what many superheroes are, icons. Everyone around the world knows who Superman is. No one looks at a poster of him in a window and doesn’t know the themes and importance he carries. Your store wants your keyword and shortcode next to that. You want your food, your clothes, your service, your brand, next to an icon. You want locals to think of you in the way people think of truth, justice, and the American way when they look at Superman.
Partnering with a local comic shop, and in a sense, leveraging the brand of these legendary icons and their longrunning iconic stories, is the perfect way to show that you’re hip to what’s happening in pop culture and that you’re somehow associated with these legends.
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