Private Investigator Advertising and Marketing Help

Other than the standard 'yellow pages' advertisements, what sort of marketing do you find brings you the best results in terms of quality andquantity of paying clients? Where do you get your best draws from? Thank you. -M


From Community support. Such as sponsoring Girls Softball teams, Boys baseball, giving scholarships to school kids. I sponsor 2 or 3 ball teams a year. Much less than a good newspaper ad. No one reads the newspaper ads anyway. But the whole town and visiting teams and other towns when your team goes out of town to play. Will see your T shirts with your name and phone number. Give it a try. -WR


Hello, I find that the first most important place to advertise for PI's is the yellow pages and small ads in out of state markets and out of city markets. Then, the next layer of advertising is sponsering sports teams like hockey, baseball and soccor teams etc. That gives you local reconigition with the community. I dont think the chamber helps much but like sports teams lets people see your name in another place. Now joining groups like ours and ASIS and other PI groups is very valuable but we all forgot the telephone elect web sites also is great because most people look into the computer first to establish who or what companies are around. Hope i helped. -BR


Where you advertise really depends on what type of services you aremarketing, and you many want to advertise in different places for different types of services. For instance. We do a fair amount of Pre-employment background checks for local companies. Last fall we had a nice heavyweight multi-color flyer printed. Our local Chamber of Commerce sends out about 2000 newsletters every month to local members. For the cost of the flyers,and $150 to the chamber, they insert the flyers in their newsletter. I have received a ton of new background check clients over the past few months fromthat. Another thing WE do, but may not work in your market is the following: We have two local college sports play by play announcers that have a 6-9am morning talk show. They basically just sit around and BS, but they have a huge following of business owners and middle aged men. I go on there live twice a week. We BS, talk about local events, and then talk about my business. It is pretty cheap, and I have built quite a following locally to where I run into people I know on the street, and they talk to me about what they heard on the radio that week. The other thing is, I get a lot of calls from business owners, and some from the public calling to hire us because they heard me on the radio and "felt like the know me". It makes them much more comfortable calling someone with their problems when the feel like they have a connection.

We also advertise on the radio in certain markets and situations, State Bar newsletters and magazines, just a name mention in the yellow pages, and several other areas. Other areas you might look into, depending on what you provide, is that Every year they have a statewide Para-legal convention, and we always sponsor that and they hand out our brochures and business cards. I also keep good connections with some of the newspaper reporters here and whenever we do something that is of interested to the news, AND is ok to talk about publicly, we get together and they write a story. You can't beat the free advertising you get in those stories of reuniting siblings separated 20 years ago, or the interview on how to protect yourself from identity theft, or why do background checks, etc. there are a ton of ideas to get you good FREE press, but be careful with that. I have been doing this for 16 years, and it has taken a long time to cultivate relationships with reporters to where you know when and what you can talk about and when to keep your mouth shut. Also in 100% of my marketing I make sure and refer them to our website for more information. If you have any questions, feel free to email me privately. Hope I may have given you at least one idea to help out. -RH


You shot gunned the group on that question, so maybe if you narrow it down you'll get the answer you are looking for.

1. What area (if any ) do you specialize in?
2. Some investigators don't even have a number in the phone book.
3. Others place a huge quarter page ad in the book and does nothing but government contracts, ( go figure)
4. If you are a jack of all trades you will have to resort to outside marketing. Mass advertising, i.e. phone book, newpapers, flyers, business cards (and a lot of them to everyone you see, give one!)
5. If you narrow your list of work to one or two areas you really like, for example looking for people, push skip tracing. People are always wondering "what would of happened if......" then are curious as to where they are.
6. Homocide investigations. (go after criminal defense attorneys)
7. Insurance: go after insurance adjustors
8. an on and on.

Think about this, I have a feeling you haven't been a PI long and are taking anything that comes in. This is very normal and don't think otherwise. Find your own niche and work it till your nuckles are white. You'll make it if you have the creativity, ambition, drive and desire to eat. Be cautious in your quest to take files on. You take too many of different types and you are bound to make errors. Keep in mind this is a long term thing. Eventually word of mouth will be your best advertising. -BB