‘Know our Customer’ is a very special initiative for releaseMyAd. It is one of the favourite sections of our entire team. This is simply because, “Know our Customer” helps us solve issues faced by our clients, make amends in our system, highlight the strengths and features of a medium of advertising, improve our services and above all communicate on one-to-one basis with our customers. Through this section we understand our customers and attempt to convey that how newspaper as a medium has aided their purpose or need for advertising.’
Newspapers are considered to be a source of abysmal information of not only sports, entertainment, politics and current affairs but also for our day-to-day requirements. For example travelling is an everyday task in the life of every working individual in India. We have to travel to various parts of the city, town, country or even the world for business or work purposes. There are some specific travel solutions that provide automobile services for a special section of travellers such as those who travel regularly or often through air. One such unique car travel service provider is Travel Solutions in Maharashtra and the Operations Head, Mr. Jiten Kohli provides us with some valuable insights on advertising in regional newspapers.
Q. Can you describe the nature of the services you provide and tell is something about yourself?
A. Travel Solutions is a 7 year old car rental service provider, located in Pune, Maharashtra. We provide car services to people coming from abroad or via flights on the Mumbai-Pune roads for different purposes. We have both national and international clients, individuals and even businesses have tie-ups with us. We provide them with our cars to travel to any place within Pune and Mumbai from Mumbai airport or Pune Airport. We exclusively deal with travellers from these two airports as these two are the main cities and have airports which handle both national and international flights and get a heavy traffic of flight passengers, across whole of Maharashtra.
I, Jiten Kohli, am the Operations Manager of Travel Solutions and I look in to the complete operations department of the agency. I have been a part of this organisation for quite a few years now and have handles many customers till now.
Q. Why did you feel the need to advertise?
A. We felt that advertising is the best process to get clients and expand our services and business. Nowadays advertising is the only way to generate good business and brand awareness is really essential to grow the client base.
We target mainly regular air travellers like businessmen, NRIs, doctors, new visitors to the city etc. The car services we provide are for the financially well-off people or are funded by the company for business tours. Even though our rates are quite competitive, we wanted to reach out to a client base comprising of mostly the moneyed class.
Q. How effective was newspaper advertising for you? Would you continue to book ads in newspapers in future?
A. See, actually, we are the cheapest and the best car rental service providers of Pune and have the largest client base in the town. Since the rates at which we provide the services are very economical, we need not spend too much on newspaper advertising. We began with advertising national newspapers like Times of India which proved to be quite expensive but we did not receive as many responses as expected.
We shifted to cheaper regional newspapers which had lower rates and more accurate penetration in local areas. Advertising in local newspapers of various regions helped us get a lot more responses than we did when we advertised in a national newspaper. We even advertise in Magazines but I believe, regional newspapers are the best advertising medium for local car rental services.
We continue to advertise in newspapers and will do so in future as well, since most of our revenue is generated from customers approaching through newspapers.
Q. Why do you book your newspaper ads through an online site like releaseMyAd?
A. ReleaseMyAd was the first ad booking site that came up in my online search, which is one of the reasons I went for releaseMyAd. As far as booking ads online is concerned, as I told you we need to book ads in regional newspapers of different cities, the rates for which are directly available online. I do not need to travel or consult anyone else for the rates.
Secondly, it was convenient and saves a lot of time.
Q. How was your experience with releaseMyAd while booking your advert?
A. It was very good. The entire process is quite smooth and till now I haven’t faced any issues while booking my ads through releasemyad.com. I still book all the advertisements for any newspaper through releaseMyAd itself.
We are glad that we could assist Mr. Jiten Kohli in solving all his newspaper advertising requirements. We hope to continue to serve him in future as well. We are also thankful to him for giving us so much time to complete our survey. To know more about our newspaper ad booking services, you may visit: 
