One of the keys to effective branding is consistency.  Therefore, any promotional give-away must have your name and contact information on it.  It should have your logo and have a similar look and feel to your other materials such as your web site, stationary, business cards, etc to maintain that uniformity.

Further, for branding to be valuable, it must have “legs”.  In other words, something that your target will want to not only keep, but keep in a prominent place; and keep it there for a long time.

How many commercials or other advertising vehicles have you seen where the content captured your attention, but frankly, you have no idea what company is doing the marketing?? Often, it is almost impossible to understand what product or service that they are trying to sell.  That doesn’t sound like money well spent to me.

As a centerpiece of any marketing and branding campaign, the Printed Advertising Calendar still deserves a prominent role!!  You should use blogs, newsletters, and regular e-mail campaigns and you probably give out tons of pens, stress balls, and other items to stay relevant to your clients and prospects.  Even in this ever-increasing technological age, it’s important to know that the printed advertising calendar is still very pertinent, and very wanted.  A Recent study of Calendar Usage in the Workplace reported that 50% of people have never used the calendar function on their cell phone!!

Two recent studies by the PPAI reveal that :
>79% of homes and 78% of businesses still have a printed calendar
>61% of calendars at home and 76% at a business are promotional vehicles
>there are 3 calendars in the home and 2 at a business

As I’ve pointed out before, it is up to you to make sure that your calendar, with your name and contact information is one of the calendars kept.  Wall calendars do better if you market business-to-consumer whereas desktop calendars should be the choice of those marketing business-to-business.

When done properly your calendar can hold valuable real estate on the wall or desk of your prospects and/or clients and will hold that space for a year or more.  Now that’s legs!!!

I’ve personally received many mailings which even utilize fonts which attempt to make them look like a real person hand wrote them.  Those go in the circular file first!!  Same with those companies who try to make their correspondence look like they are from the government or other official entity.  Trying to trick people only gets your mail thrown out faster.

To get mailings read, you must give the target a reason to open the mail and then to look and spend time viewing your message.  In many companies, a letter must first get past the receptionist or administrative assistant before ever even getting onto the desk of the decision maker.  Remember that the job of a good AA is to save time for the decision maker allowing him/her to focus on the most important tasks.

One of the concepts I learned while working for a world-renowned marketing consultant is to send bulky packages rather than just plain letters.  Bulky correspondence will definitely get opened by the gatekeeper.  As we know, getting it opened and looked at is half the battle.  The other half of the battle is to make the message worth reading further.  If your mailing has something cool or unique in it, it will certainly get passed along by the dreaded gatekeeper.

Offering “Great Deals” or “Best Deal of the Year” or other similar messages just makes you sound like everyone else and cuts your margins.  Get creative and tie your message to some kind of essential, helpful, interesting content and include some type of promotional product with your name and contact info on it so that they can easily find you.  You have to earn the right for a prospect to want to do business with you.  Educate them.  Help them.  Position yourself as the definitive expert in your field and get them wanting to work with you.  The result is that you will get more new business and at higher margins.  Most people will pay more for an expert, so find a way to get looked at as THE expert in your market in your location.

I’ve seen so many sales executives who just want to sell something and wonder why they have difficulty getting in front of their prospects.  It’s important to realize that you will attract prospects in greater numbers and more quickly if you offer to teach them something of value rather than just trying to sell them something.

I remember years ago while I worked in the publishing business when we were first transitioning from loose-leaf books to CD delivery of content.  Most of the accountants and attorneys were using a computer for the first time.  I created the “Top 10 Tips for using a Desktop Computer” and I went around offering to teach my existing clients and prospects key tips on utilizing the computer.  These tips had nothing to do with my services; they were how to use MS-DOS and then Windows.  This technique got me in front of my prospects and got them looking at me as an expert and a really helpful guy.  When they needed my type of service, I was at the top of the list of publishers whom they called.  Further, my existing clients were very grateful for the information as well and it kept them loyal to me.  Many of my customers wouldn’t even speak with my competitors!

How can you do this in your business?? If you are in mortgages, offer a report teaching prospects about something related to mortgages rather than just saying that “rates have dropped, call us now”.  If you are in Real Estate, send homeowners a mailing teaching them about preparing a home for sale rather than just saying that you “have many years of experience and have helped many other homeowners to sell their homes”.   If you sell telephone systems, instead of calling and telling them that you can save them a lot of money and make them more efficient by purchasing a new phone system, how about a report on the “biggest mistakes small businesses make with their phone systems” or “top ten problems with most voice mail messages”.   Hairstylist??  Instead of offering discounts to attract new clients, how about offer a report on how to best keep the color in hair or keep those curls curled!  While rates may have dropped, you may have indeed helped many other homeowners, or have saved some companies time and money on their phones; who really cares?  It’s what all your competitors are saying as well and just makes you sound like one more of the pack.

Instead, teach them something of value and get them wanting to speak with you, the local expert.

Your mailing could include a super-personalized desktop calendar and the bullet points of your incredible, helpful, content rich “free report”.  Include a way to have them call you for more information or to receive the full report.  Many of my associates have been successful by offering a regularly scheduled training class to teach their prospects and/or existing clients something which will make them say WOW!!

Get creative, educate and earn!!!

See you right back here next Tuesday for my newest posting.  In the meantime I wish all of you a very Happy Holiday Season!!!

As I dug a bit deeper with them, a very interesting conundrum was common with most of them.  They told me that they had cut, if not totally ceased their marketing efforts.  They pulled out of yellow pages; cut back, or totally cut, their sales force; stopped direct mail efforts; quit associations they had previously been members of; etc.

They blamed the retrenching on the administration, the economy, the alignment of the planets; frankly,  just about anything they could think of, rather than placing the blame squarely where it belonged:  On their shoulders!!   The scary thing is that they didn’t even recognize the correlation between their cutbacks to their marketing programs and the corresponding negative trends of their business.  They felt that they just couldn’t afford to do marketing anymore and had these other reasons which they could pass the blame on to.

I propose to you that just the opposite is required in this market.  The smart businesses are indeed increasing their marketing efforts and gaining in market share in their marketplace.

This is exactly the time to INCREASE YOUR MARKETING!!  Businesses are going out of business in record numbers and you have a choice to join that trend and go out of business, or to see this time in our history as one of the most incredible opportunities to expand and grow.

If you are in Real Estate, or Mortgages, or a Lawyer, or a Contractor, and the list goes on and on, be like the Borg from Star Trek and “assimilate” your competition.  Consider buying them out, merging with them, or just waiting for them to go under and grab their key employees.

But at the same time you should be increasing your own marketing efforts to become the top player in your field and gain TOMA.

An extremely interesting statistic I ran into while working for the consultant was that a 2009 study found more than half of the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were launched during a recession or bear market.  This study was sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation.

Stop the blame game and get creative.  Partner with other local businesses; expand your geographic footprint; get better at holding on to your valued business and expanding your existing clients; hire sales people; and yes, increase your marketing efforts.  Spend money now to take as much market share as possible.  When the economy does take a turn for the better you will be well positioned to see your business absolutely take off.

Get those calendars out to existing and prospective clients.  Put a pen in every business persons hand in your area and a magnet on every refrigerator.   Sponsor meetings and give out super-personalized journals and agendas.

I’ll watch for you on the Fortune 500!!!!

Happy Holidays and Happy Marketing!!

Whether you are the meeting planner or a vendor attending a conference, the “end game” is to create lasting impressions which present you or your organization as one who cares and who is interested in providing the utmost experience.  It is therefore critical to make the event exciting, pleasurable, educational, and ideally, personalized to each individual’s needs.

All too often at National Sales Meetings for instance, the attendee’s feel like pigs in a pen, being shepherded from meeting to meeting.   By utilizing customized/personalized agendas you can deliver them the content they need in a format that will make them remember the event for a long time.

You probably already do a little personalization with the packet you hand out.  It may have their personalized name tag for instance, but that is about where the personalization ends.  Our clients have had great success by utilizing our Wink! Technology and personalizing each individuals journal/agendas.

Imagine how special your attendee’s will feel when you take the extra step to provide them with materials which has THEIR name all over it.  It’s custom and cool, and also serves as a way for each attendee to be able to more easily keep track of their particular agenda’s.  We’ve all seen the people who leave their materials, with their notes, in a meeting room; most of the time they will never see it again.  But if it was personalized with their name, it will be easy to track them down and return their materials.

We have been using this “super personalization” for a while in our industry leading calendar’s, and now we can offer this technology to journals, agenda’s or almost any printed material.

We have used primarily stock photo’s in the past, but now have the ability to use YOUR PHOTO’s—YOUR CLIENT NAMES—YOUR CAMPAIGN.

As a vendor at a conference or convention, or if you offer training classes, the primary task is to make a lasting impression with the attendee’s.   Imagine the buzz you will create when you hand out personalized packages to visitors at your booth.

To get this working well, get the attendee list, or create your own from prior visits to the same event; create an excel spreadsheet with the names; pick your delivery product (journal, calendar, etc.); contact your promotional products vendor with enough time to get the job done (give a few weeks to be safe); attend the event and hand out your personalized materials; and finally, rejoice at the buzz you will generate!!  You can also use this approach for your follow-up correspondence to the attendee’s whether it was a National Sales Meeting, Convention, Conference or training class.

Be creative, be different, be personal and reap the rewards!!!!

Whether you are selling Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer it is essential that you find a way to brand your business with the goal to ultimately achieve “Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA)” in your marketplace.

As defined by Wikipedia, TOMA is:
“When people think of you first to fulfill their product or service needs. “  Further, they go on to say that “traditionally, TOMA has been achieved through traditional channels such as radio, newspapers, television, and magazines.   Increasingly companies of all sizes are moving towards social media like Twitter and Facebook over traditional channels.”

TOMA is incredibly difficult to achieve and although I am all for utilizing social media as a key channel for getting your name in front of those who need to know who you are, there is still only one way to keep yourself and your business front and center in your customers/prospects/clients minds, and that is through innovative, eye-appealing, customized, even personalized, desktop, wall and day planner calendars.

A 2011 survey performed by the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) of 1050 businesses indicated that wall and desk calendars are still utilized in heavy numbers, in fact, more so than electronic versions.  48% of those surveyed stated that they use a wall calendar, 34% use a desk calendar and 29% utilize a printed day planner.  Fully 78% stated that they have a printed calendar in their office.

Let’s face it.  Even in this technologically advanced world of smart phones and computers, just about everyone still has a conventional printed calendar.

If you are selling a service to other businesses, what could be better than having your name right on the desk or hanging on the wall of your clients?  Or if you are selling to consumers directly, I ask you, what family doesn’t have a calendar hanging in their kitchen????  Your goal is to make sure that it is YOUR calendar which they are keeping.

79% of the respondents to the PPAI survey stated that they enjoy receiving calendars as a complimentary gift.

When receiving an item and deciding whether to keep it or not, details such as usefulness, desirability, attractiveness, ability to be used as a reference tool and uniqueness, all play a part.  Calendar marketing fulfills all of these components and to boot, is also a very inexpensive way to get your name in front of your clients/prospects and to keep it there for a year or more!!

With new technologies, printed wall, desk, or day planners can even be personalized with a respondent’s name to better fulfill the desirability, attractiveness and uniqueness of the item!!

We of course offer a full line of customized and/or personalized calendars right here…