Social Media Boosts Branding Efforts
From "Marketwise"
November 2010

Marketers are turning to social media to strengthen customer loyalty and brand awareness, but not so much to boost customer acquisition, a new report finds. The eROI study from the Direct Marketing Association and Colloquy found that 29% of respondents put brand awareness as the most effective goal for social media, and 25% put customer growth and loyalty at the top.

Of the three categories suggested, customer acquisition was selected by the fewest respondents – only 19% – as the most effective social media goal (the remaining 27% selected “other”).

“We use social media to keep our name in front of clients,” says Amanda Maxwell, owner and president of Marketing Communications Inc. (asi/261624). The company uses a broad range of marketing to promote its business and acquire new clients.

Dawn Schaefer, CEO of Creative Ad Solutions Inc. (asi/170034), has found LinkedIn to be an effective way to reach out to clients, and says that it works better for business-to-business marketing than Facebook or Twitter. However, she finds it more useful as a tool for keeping in touch with existing clients than finding new ones.

“People have found us on LinkedIn through referrals or through a testimonial from another client, but we don’t actively try to acquire customers,” Schaefer says. “Expanding our social media marketing is part of our 2011 business plan, but we’re going to continue to see how it’s received by the public – some people hate being marketed to and feel their personal space is being invaded by advertisers.”

The survey, which drew on the responses of 269 marketers, also looked at the average spend on social media for each of the three objectives. Comparing media spend over the three years between 2008 and 2010, the research found not only that spending has increased significantly (from $17,000 to $171,000, on average), but there is a growing disparity in what the money is being spent on.

While approximately the same was being spent on customer loyalty, customer acquisition and brand awareness in 2008 ($6,000 for the first two objectives and $5,000 for the third), by 2010, marketers are spending nearly three times as much on customer loyalty ($88,000) as they are on customer acquisition ($30,000). – AP

Online Marketing Leads To Biz Success
From "Marketwise"
November 2010

Small-business owners who embrace online advertising are having more success in their marketing efforts, according to the latest Network Solutions Small Business Index. The survey, conducted every six months, draws on the telephone responses of 500 small-business owners, asking them to score themselves in six separate areas: innovation, workforce, capital access, customer service, computer technology and compliance.

Of those companies that consider themselves highly successful at marketing, 26% use online advertising (more than the 18% of all small businesses that say the same) and 72% expect to make a profit from social media. But even as social media and search marketing grow in popularity, websites remain the top area where business owners are putting their online effort. The index found that more than two-thirds of respondents (67%) either already have or expect to have a website in the next two years.

“I am finding more and more customers want a website to look at and search products,” says Marcy Koral, president of OK Koral Marketing Inc. (asi/287123). She is currently looking to revamp her site to make it easier to search and navigate, which she says used to be optional but is now a necessity.

However, Koral believes that a website serves as a tool for existing customers rather than a means of attracting new business, and she still expects that “95% of my customers will come from referrals.”

Susan Wade, director of public relations for Network Solutions, which published the index, says that this is true of small businesses generally, which use their sites as a hub for their information rather than a marketing tool in itself. “Those that are using social media are often using it to direct clients back to their websites,” she says.
Besides marketing, the index looked at concerns about access to capital, and found that only 36% reported success in securing capital for long-term needs, down from 39% six months ago.

“As soon as I make a sale, I sometimes have to demand at least 50% down in order to make the purchase just for the items,” says William Lundy, owner of Precisions Promotions and Graphics (asi/394219), who says that finding capital continues to be one of the biggest challenges for his company. – AP

Create a Killer Press Center
By Joe Dysart
March-April 2010

Here are nine ways to get the media to notice your decorating business in cyberspace.

One of the Web’s great secrets is that with a killer press center, you’ll be able to attract many more editors and reporters to your embroidery industry Web site, and generate many more stories about your firm in the news media.

“We put up a press release to get better recognition in the search engines, and it worked,” says Dean Gannet, treasurer at Star Embroidery (www.star-embroidery.com), who used press release distributor PRWeb (www.prweb.com) to disseminate news about his company. “Now, any time someone keys in ‘Star Embroidery’ on Google, our name and press release comes up. The release presents a very positive image for our company, and for the nominal cost that PRWeb charged, we think it was worth it,” he says.

The trick to putting together a press center is knowing how to trigger story ideas, how to relentlessly promote what you’re offering, and being sure you post the equivalent of a neon “welcome sign” for members of the press.

“News publicity costs you nothing,” says Thomas Wong, author of 101 Ways To Boost Your Web Traffic. “It often produces better results than advertising, because people trust news articles more than sales ads. Press releases often lead to personal interviews on the phone or TV or radio appearances, which can make you and your Web site very popular.”

In fact, there are so many tactics and new Web technologies available for courting the media online that building a killer press center on your company Web site can become an ever more sophisticated, ever more publicity generating pursuit. Here’s how to begin:

1. Offer Web-friendly press releases. While some text, quotes and contact info are a good start for a press release, you’ll get better play if you optimize press releases for the Web. This means embedding a relevant keyword in the press release headline, as well as in the text, if possible, so it can be easily found by the search engines.

It’s also a good idea to make it easy for others to spread the word about your press release by adding a social bookmarking tool like AddThis (www.addthis.com). Vodmochka Graffix (www.vodmochka.com) tries to generate news buzz about its site with an AddThis tool embedded in the bottom right corner of its home page. The EmbroideryWarehouse has a similar tool at the top of its site:  www.theembroiderywarehouse.com/home.php.

Another good practice is to ensure visitors can effortlessly cut and paste your press release text into a Microsoft Word or similar word-processing document. (On some sites, press release text is impossible to copy; others use Adobe PDF documents, which are meant to be tough to cut and paste.)

2. Trigger coverage with other content. Editors and reporters are always hungry for story ideas, so you can never offer too much story idea content in your press center. The overarching guideline here is to clearly state that all – or as much as possible – of the content you post can be directly quoted by editors and reporters. The importance of this practice can’t be overstated. Essentially, this little permission can save the press five days or more of phone tag with your company, and often means the difference between getting covered and being skipped over for a more press-friendly company.

Specific content ideal for launching press coverage includes company white papers, as well as executive quotes on recent industry news, legislation or studies. The press also loves transcripts of executive speeches they can quote (always include the exec’s name and title for attribution purposes), transcripts of recent company Webinars, company case studies, industry survey results and customer testimonials. (Always include a name, title and company for the testimonial.) If you’re lucky enough to have already been covered, also offer links to these news stories.

3. Become a media authority. You’ll get even more coverage if you establish one or more executives at your company as a media authority. Blogs are one of the quickest ways for an exec to loom large before the press – but only if the blog is interesting and insightful. One of the easiest ways to guarantee this is to simply hire a good ghost blogger for your exec.

Meanwhile, you can enhance the credibility of your media authority execs by publicizing them in the various “expert stables” on the Web – places where experts gather to be quoted by the media. Some of the more prominent include Profnet (www.profnet.com) and ExpertClick (www.expertclick.com).

4. Add dimension with rich media. One thing YouTube has taught us all is that Web users, including the press, love their sound and pictures. Besides posting your company video on YouTube like thousands of other firms, you can also embed a free YouTube video player on your own Web site. For a how-to video on adding the YouTube player to your Web site (it takes just a few minutes), check out: www.youtube.com/youtubeonyoursite. There’s also a separate how-to video on how to customize your player at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwWEtVtu58. For a good example, view the Stitching Cow promotional video on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOwzJDC5-MA.

One caveat: Have your attorney look at YouTube’s fine print before you get too aggressive using the player or the YouTube site strictly for advertising your company. As with many things Web-related, this area is still very gray.
Other multimedia you can add to your site are podcasts (check out www.podcast directory.com for all the skinny on those) and virtual reality, or 3-D moving images. Software for creating virtual reality includes Quicktime VR and IPIX.

Of course, don’t forget to include basic digital images that can be downloaded to accompany stories. EmbroidX.com, for example, includes a logo journalists can download with the press releases it distributes through PRWeb; Star Embroidery offers color images for journalists via PRWeb, as well.

5. Be charming. Most companies know that offering a name, phone number and e-mail contact info for all key public-
relations personnel in your press center is a good start. But the same contact info for executives who are open to being interviewed is even better. A promise – and practice – to turn around all press requests within 24 hours will go even further toward winning you instant friendships in the press. And a stated openness to quickly respond to a media “e-mail interview” will make reporters wonder if they’ve died and gone to heaven. 

6. Tweak under the hood. Over the past few years, Google has released a number of free tools designed to help your press center appear as high as possible on Google search engine returns. Sign up for a free Google Webmaster’s account (www.google.com/webmasters) and these tools are yours to use. Plus, once your press center is search-friendly for Google, the center will also be optimized for most of the other major search engines.

While you’re at it, ensure that your press center downloads like quicksilver. For speed optimization tips, check out Andrew B. King’s book, Speed Up Your Site. Founder of Web Site Optimization LLC, King also offers a free tool that will check to see if your press center is optimized for speed at: www.websiteoptimization.com/
services/analyze.

7. Promote relentlessly. One of the great equalizers of the Web is the fact that a tiny, nimble company can leap ahead of the largest goliath with the right promotion. Offering press releases and a company e-newsletter gets this process started. But you can also offer the same information via RSS feeds for reporters who like their news delivered that way. IceRocket (rss.icerocket.com) will make your page RSS-friendly for free. Madeira, for example, offers an RSS-feed for its press releases at: www.newswiretoday.com/news/30769.

Other tactics that work: Circulate your news through a professional press release distribution service like PRNewswire (www.prnewswire.com) or PRWeb, or via free services (use the keywords “free press release distribution” to find these on the search engines). Include a “send this page to a friend” button on every page of your press center and Web site. To attract more traffic to your site, establish a directory of industry links with FocalMedia’s PowerSeek SQL or similar software. Add a live chat room to your press center if you have a staffer who can babysit it – LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) is one of many good live-chat solutions. And establish a presence in virtual worlds like Second Life (www.secondlife.com) if your target market tends to cluster there.

8. Measure your success. The quickest way to an increased press center budget, as we all know, is quantifiable results. Document how press traffic has increased on your press center with Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), another free program.

Or, if you’re looking for even more robust analytics, check out software such as Coremetrics (www.coremetrics.com), Web Trends (www.webtrends.com) and Omniture (www.omniture.com).

9. Safeguard Your Reputation. Once people start talking about your company on the Web – including editors, reporters, bloggers and others – make sure they’re not engaging in libel, slander or other image-tarnishing talk.

Specific service providers that will help you out with reputation monitoring include Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence (www.factiva.com/factivainsight/reputation), Nielsen Online (www.nielsen-online.com), BlogSquirrel (www.cyberalert.com/blogmonitoring.html) and WebClipping.com.

JOE DYSART is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan.

Woo Your Clients
By Nicole Rollender
July 2010

Here are five savvy ways to make your business – and approach to sales – really stand out in the crowd.

Ordinary salespeople might be content with cushy repeat orders of 25,000 pens and 10,000 squeeze balls. Not Keith Wilson, a decidedly unordinary salesperson who really knows how to market himself and his services (he cheekily calls himself the Promogenie and brings his clients “ideas that are out of this world”). For years, he fulfilled these standard orders for a good client, until he said to his buyer, “Guess what? There’s a product out there that’s far cooler than what you’re ordering, and I’m going to find it for you.”

So Wilson, an account executive for PromoShop (asi/300446), trolled an industry trade show and came upon a squeeze ball with red glitter inside. “I showed it to my buyer, and she loved it – she said they were like desk ornaments,” he says. “She tripled her order that day, and since then, she’s reordered 30,000 balls three times.”

So, what’s the lesson from the guy who was able to upsell 90,000 squeeze balls? He understands how to stand out from the crowd. To help your company reach its moneymaking goals, Stitches offers super-charged marketing secrets we learned from interviewing some of the industry’s most successful dealmakers.

Prospect Like A Pro

According to Stitches’ latest State of the Industry report, 85% of decorators say referrals are among the three most successful marketing methods for their businesses. “I’ve gotten all my clients from referrals, and then they give me more referrals,” says Josh Ebrahemi, a partner at Jack Nadel International (asi/279600). “I don’t cold call. For me, it’s just a never-ending referral process.”

Getting referrals does require patience, though, since you need to wait until you’ve established a relationship with a client to ask for one. Indeed, the best referrals come from client relationships that are built over time. “I know her well enough to send her a congratulations card if she quits smoking, or I can ask him to lunch for his birthday,” says Mike Beckman, owner of Proforma-BPM (asi/300094). “I could go directly to another potential buyer in that company, but I cultivate one relationship, and then ask for the introduction. That goes a long way in establishing trust.”

When Beckman gets a referral, he uses creative mailers to begin wooing his prospect. One example: a themed three-part mailer about fearing change. “I sent my prospects a postcard with a lion’s eye on it, and the text, ‘We have our eye on you – to provide your marketing services,’ ” he says. “Then, we sent a promo item – a cage – with the message, ‘Don’t fear change.’ Finally, I sent another postcard with a picture of a lion, urging the prospect not to be afraid of the way they market. Then, I made a phone call to discuss how we can help with their marketing efforts.”

And, don’t forget to court your prospect with self-promos. Wilson is the master of this. When he makes a cold phone call, if the prospect acts like she’s not interested, “I say, ‘Wait, I have a box of $75 worth of promotional products with your logo on it to send you,’ ” he says. “Then, I ask, ‘Are you still not interested?’ That gets their attention.”

At trade shows, Wilson uses what he calls his “dirty-bomb approach to self-promotion.” He chooses five cool items from his garage full of promo products, such as an ergonomic potato/carrot slicer, a BlackBerry cover, a toothbrush holder and a jump rope, to display at the show. “I’ve got my tagline on everything,” he says. “On the jump rope, I put, ‘Remember doing jump rope way back when? The healthy alternative to buying a pen.’ On the other side, it says, ‘Promogenie – when ordinary just won’t do.’ ”

After Wilson wows a prospect with his unique array, he arranges to have a box of the same products sent to her office before she returns from the show. “My goal is to have my self-promo stuff all over their house and their office,” he says.

Always Be Available 

It’s not as easy to reach out and touch your clients these days – it used to be that you’d drop in for a face-to-face meeting, pick up the phone or send out a quick e-mail. Now, not so much, with Tweets, texts, instant messages and webcams thrown into the mix.

“Some clients want to talk to you in person,” says Paula Gossett, senior promotional consultant for Brown & Bigelow (asi/148500). “Others don’t have time for that. They want to send you a three-word e-mail, and expect you to answer them back in three words within five minutes. On your first meeting with a client, ask, ‘So, how do you want me to contact you? Do you prefer e-mail? Tweets or texts?’ And then, stick to communicating with them the way they want – get on the client’s wavelength.”

And, top salespeople really are available to their clients 24/7. “I sleep with my BlackBerry next to me,” says Karen Johnson, owner of Avalon Imaging Group, an iPromoteU (asi/232119) affiliate.

Johnson, who has a lot of clients in Europe and the Middle East, needs to be available to buyers during their workdays and literally responds to all e-mails within five minutes, even at 3 a.m. “I call it extreme customer service,” says Johnson, who returns up to 300 customer e-mails every 24 hours. “I also use the Smart Text feature on my BlackBerry to send people short messages about what action I’ll take in response to their request.”

Don’t hesitate to enlist a staff member to help stay in touch with clients. Johnson, who also uses Skype and instant messenger to communicate with her overseas clients, works with her personal assistant to send clients updated tracking and shipping info every 72 hours. “If a customer has to call me about their order, I’ve failed them,” she says.

Be a Little Off the Wall

Write a unique tagline for your business and use it on all your collateral. Or, take it one step further and compose a rap song. Keith Wilson, an account executive for PromoShop (asi/300446) has a video series to show off products. How does he begin the videos? With a catchy rap, of course: “I grant three wishes ’cause I’m Promogenie./ My competition’s played out like Sergio Tacchini./ If you’re lookin’ for the best – and I’m not just in the West –/ Put me to the test, ’cause the Genie never rests./ I’ve been takin’ care of clients for a decade and half/ Livin’ off referrals. Now you do the math.”

Thank Your Clients 

Wilson sends his top clients edible thank-you gifts, like a huge fortune cookie drizzled with caramel and chocolate with a message inside that reads, “Very fortunate to have you as a client.”

And, Beckman sends his apparel clients one-off personalized garments with their apparel orders. Case in point: He gave a client a fleece with a laser-engraved back. “She and her boss loved it, and they ordered 75 more,” he says.

Would you send your client an iPod Shuffle for ordering a certain dollar amount? That works for John Resnick, owner of Proforma Printing and Promotion (asi/300094). He developed a tier program, where he sends clients edible arrangements, iPods or other brand-name gifts for orders that are $2,500 and above. “This year we’ve also been sending chocolate or randomly sending lunch for a client’s whole office,” says Resnick, who’s a strong believer in spending money on thank-you efforts to show clients his business is doing OK.

Anita Brooks, owner of Geiger-On The Gulf Coast/ASB Marketing (asi/202900), sends “good client” letters to her top 40 clients in June, thanking them for their business and offering them a free service, a discount on their next order, or a $75 donation to a charity in their name. “About 10 might be redeemed, but all of the recipients like receiving the letter,” she says.

Brooks also hand-delivers a desk calendar to each one of her 250 clients in December. On those visits, she asks what events they’ve got planned in the first quarter of the new year so she can prepare campaign ideas to pitch to them. “We give a gift to everyone, even if they only ordered once that year,” she says.

Neal Munn, owner of Rhino Marketing Specialties Inc., a Geiger affiliate (asi/202900), has learned to keep his client’s gender in mind when sending them holiday gifts. “One year, I sent my female clients Waterford crystal ornaments, and I didn’t get much feedback,” he says. “The next year, I gave them highway safety kits. I was getting phone calls raving about the great gift, stuff like, ‘I put the kit in my car right away.’ ”

Network Like Crazy

It’s important to network both in person (think local business meetings or charity events) and online (use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). Plus, have your elevator pitch down cold, and use it all the time. Patrick Doyle, owner of Proforma Synergy (asi/300094), has a great pitch: “I’m not the ‘promotional products guy.’ I sell promotional programs and campaigns. I have four services: print, promotional products, multimedia and graphic design. I put all those together by creating effective programs and promo campaigns that get measurable results for my clients.” He also gives out unique business cards, like a chocolate bar with his contact info on the wrapper or a desk game that people tend to keep.

Nicole Rollender is editor of Stitches and director of ASI Education. Contact: nrollender@asicentral.com.

Test Your Creative Power
By Dave Vagnoni
March 2010

Think you’re creative? Looking to be more creative? Take our quiz to measure your talents and get some new ideas on how to stimulate your business imagination.

1) Which pair of qualities most
accurately describes you?
a) resilient and outgoing
b) understanding and honest
c) patient and trusting
d) curious and persistent

2) If you had unlimited money to spend, which of the following new cars would you buy?
a) black Ferrari Enzo
b) orange Porsche Carrera GT
c) blue BMW 7-Series
d) white Toyota Yaris
e) silver Honda Pilot

3) As an account manager, you’re looking for ideas for a cutting-edge marketing campaign. You seek advice from:
a) your boss
b) the janitor
c) a consulting firm
d) a crystal ball

4) Which of the following are you most likely to do?
a) sing in the shower
b) write in a journal
c) go to a drive-in movie
d) text message a friend from your desk

5) Which of these marketing plans do you like the most?
a) maintaining a consistent logo and tagline for many years
b) re-branding a logo and tagline every few years
c) joining at least three social networking sites
d) sending frequent press releases                             

6) You own a company with 50 employees. At 4:00 on a Friday afternoon in October, your staff is:
a) in a new-product training session
b) in a meeting planning next week’s sales strategies
c) cold-calling
d) eating pizza and playing office
Olympics

7) At a local chamber of commerce event, you are most comfortable doing which of these?
a) passing out your business card
b) doing more listening than talking
c) talking about new products you can offer
d) talking about new services you can offer

8) When facing a problem that you’re struggling to solve, you most often do which of the following?
a) take a walk
b) squeeze a stress ball
c) ask a colleague for help
d) research a solution on the Internet

9) You’re in charge of organizing an office retreat to increase creativity. Which of the following activities do you plan?
a) going on a nature hike
b) role-playing a negotiation session
c) holding a tug-of-war match
d) all of the above

10) You’re driving through a small town on your way to a trade show that begins in two hours. Suddenly, it begins to rain and your navigation system loses its signal. What do
you do?
a) keep driving in the direction you were headed, hoping the weather clears
b) call a friend to ask for directions
c) call your boss to let him/her know you might be late to the show
d) restart your navigation system and wait for a signal

11) Thanks to a brilliant idea, you’ve just won new business from a major client. What do you do next?
a) since you’re feeling lucky, you try to pursue other accounts
b) you go buy yourself an ice cream sundae
c) you send your client a thank-you card
d) you stay humble and continue your work schedule and routine

12) You’re stuck in a burning tower that’s 50 feet high. You have 25 feet of heavy rope, a pack of chewing gum, goggles and a pair of scissors. To escape you:
a) jump and hope you land softly
b) use the chewing gum and rope to reach the ground
c) use the goggles to put out the fire
d) use the rope and scissors to reach the ground

13) Which most closely resembles your daily schedule?
a) 10 hours of work, dinner with family, watch TV, six hours of sleep
b) 10 hours of work, watch kids play sports, search the Web, eight hours of sleep
c) Nine hours of work, exercise, drinks with friends, six hours of sleep
d) Nine hours of work, nap, dinner, reading, eight hours of sleep

14) You’re charged with making more money for a struggling circus. Which of the following strategies do you employ?
a) offer fewer shows, but charge more money
b) offer more shows, and charge less money
c) hold a fundraising gala
d) hire a new ring-leader, but keep all the other performers

15) Your goal for 2010 is to encourage creativity among your sales staff. You should:
a) tell them to eat together in the cafeteria
b) tell them to volunteer at a prison
c) buy them new computers
d) send them to the doctor to take stress tests

16) You’ve been given a special assignment by your company. Your job is to visit a state fair and find the most creative person to be your company’s new marketing director. Who do you hire?
a) a clown
b) the judge of a pie-eating contest
c) the attractive magician who is also a makeup model
d) the teenager who just won a huge stuffed animal by playing a game

17) You’re scheduled to give a presentation tomorrow morning to potential investors. After dinner tonight, you should:
a) watch a horror movie
b) iron the clothes you’re going to wear
c) go to a bar, have a glass of wine and relax
d) practice hand gestures in the mirror

18) When do you most often hold brainstorming meetings?
a) between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.
b) during smoke breaks
c) between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
d) on late-night conference calls

19) You notice a friend looks a bit depressed. Which question are you most likely to ask?
a) What’s up with you?
b) Why do you look so sad?
c) How’s it going?
d) Hey, what happened?

20) In a brainstorming session with your sales team, you most often say which of these phrases?
a) I like these two ideas the best.
b) I love you guys!
c) Yeah, that’s great, but not for this client.
d) I want to hear the dumbest idea you’ve got!

21) How many words can be formed from the letters P-R-O-M-O?
a) five
b) seven
c) 11
d) 12

Answer Key

1) D
Reason: There is consensus among psychologists that curiosity is a key to creativity. Also, creative people tend to be persistent and don’t easily give up on what they believe.

2) C
Reason: A University of British Columbia study has linked the color blue to creativity.

3) B
Reason: To find innovative ideas, creativity coaches suggest speaking to people who have limited knowledge of your field of business. These people aren’t limited by commonly held beliefs. Children can also be great resources.

4) B
Reason: To increase creativity and idea generation, many psychologists recommend spending time writing each day.

5) B
Reason: Many creativity coaches advise companies to re-brand every few years to help business owners consider the future and expand their imaginations. Often cited is the marketing plan of McDonald’s, which has used 23 different slogans in its 70 years in business.

6) D
Reason: Researchers say having fun and being in a good mood helps people be more creative.

7) B
Reason: Some psychologists argue that high-level listening skills can translate into creative thinking.  

8) A
Reason: Significant research, including a study at Indiana University Bloomington, has found that increasing psychological distance can boost creativity and aid in problem solving.

9) D
Reason: Psychologists generally agree that spending time in nature, considering different viewpoints and taking part in heated competition increases creativity.

10) B
Reason: The most creative people aggressively look for solutions and have disdain for the status quo.

11) B
Reason: While it’s important to show appreciation to your client, creativity coaches say quickly rewarding great ideas with positive reinforcement (like ice cream) often leads to more great ideas.

12) D
Reason: Psychologists use a variation of this problem to test creative thinking. To escape, you cut the rope in half length-wise and tie the two pieces together.

13) D
Reason: Increasing research, including a University of California San Diego study, links sleep with creative problem solving. Creativity is enhanced further if a nap produces rapid-eye-movement sleep.

14) B
Reason: Creative psychologists say ideas that seem to make the least sense (at first) often can be tweaked to be successful ones. Actor Tim Robbins was in a similar position with his failing theater company in Los Angeles. In doing the opposite of what initially made sense (he increased shows and lowered prices), Robbins turned the company around.

15) B
Reason: Researchers say one of the most effective ways to increase creativity is by embracing wildly new experiences. In contrast, comfort zones block creativity.

16) A
Reason: Studies show a good sense of humor contributes to creativity, so you should hire the clown. Conversely, someone who is judgmental is often limiting and is afraid to take risks.
17) A
Reason: Research shows high emotion can heighten creativity, helping you merge ideas.

18) A
Reason: Between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., research shows the brain has moderate levels of the stress hormone cortisol, making it the best time for focus and creativity.

19) B
Reason: Creative thinkers tend to ask questions that begin with “why” instead of other words. Asking “why” also usually generates conversation and can lead to solutions.

20) D
Reason: Creativity coaches say you should give your staff freedom to think differently, even asking for outlandish ideas. It’s called pie-in-the-sky thinking. 

21) C
Reason: Creative-minded people excel at seeing different answers to questions. In case you’re wondering, the 11 words are: or, pro, mop, pom, moo, room, romp, prom, poor, moor and promo. Yes, moo totally counts.

Scoring
21 Correct – Creative Genius – We want to hire you.
17-20 Correct – Creative Guru – Just call yourself Captain Creativity.
13-16 Correct – Creative Expert – You should ask for a raise (or give yourself one).
9-12 correct – Creative Professional – The ad specialties industry is for you.
5-8 correct – Creative Student – You’re a bit of an understudy, but the talent is there.
0-4 correct – Creative Novice – Read this issue of Counselor every day this month from cover to cover.

Dave Vagnoni is a staff writer for Counselor.

Big Idea - Become A Marketing Agency
By Kenneth Hein
March 2010

Here are five distributors that don’t just talk about being creative and providing ideas and services to clients, they actually do it. Here’s how.

A little word association. Creative approach. Added value for clients. Expanding revenue and sales opportunities. Business success for distributors. TSee the formula? Are you on board? TIn a market where clients need to justify their every marketing expense, distributors have to be more creative than ever in the ways they go to market.

They need to provide solutions to clients’ marketing challenges. They need to partner with clients to identify programs that garner a better-than-ever return on investment. And they need to expand into new businesses like Web site design, fulfillment and public relations.

Very simply, it’s time to turn your business into a marketing agency.

Added value is a big phrase in the ad specialties world these days. Distributors are often claiming to do more than they ever have before to give existing and prospective clients their money’s worth. For some, this means offering advice as to how an item can be woven into a marketing effort. For others, it’s free graphic design. Still, there is another level entirely that some bold businesses are striving for. That level is one where they act as a full-service agency. 

Read on to find out how five distributors take an agency approach to their clients and their markets.

Big Ideas Pay Off

Here is the scene: It’s a Friday night at the bar. Basketball is on the flat-screen TVs and various groups of young males are officially “getting their drink on.” In enter ... the Jägermeister nurses. Dressed in revealing sexy nurse outfits they offer up their alcoholic liquid version of a flu shot.

Ads and posters touted the event with sayings like “Say ah!” and “No prescription necessary.” Revelers got a chance to sample the liqueur, interact with models and take home some goodies as souvenirs from a night well spent.

Now, typically an event like this would involve an ad agency, an event marketing and production company or both. One of which would reach out to a promotional products distributor to supply the giveaways. This wasn’t the case with the Jägermeister events. Instead, Post No Bills! (asi/109480) handled the effort in its entirety. “It’s our concept, our creation and execution,” says Doreen Sullivan, president of the firm.

In many ways Post No Bills! is the exception, not the rule when it comes to offering added services. In 1987, it began as a promotional products company, but for the past decade it has beefed up its array of offerings. Today, it bills about half a million dollars every year in creative services alone.

Post No Bills! offers consultation for premiums, direct mail, packaging, sales materials, viral marketing and other marketing services. It creates ads, brand identities, events and Web sites. And it designs logos, displays, collateral materials and print and outdoor ads. Clients include Disney, ESPN, Paramount, NBC and others.
 
“I always thought of promotional products as a 3-D form of ads. I knew it could be so creative by tying into bigger campaigns,” Sullivan says. “It’s nice to see our industry aspire to those levels.”

The problem is, “People think you can just start charging consulting fees because you’re doing board presentations and acting like an agency. Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Sullivan. “You need to have big ideas. There is a grand canyon between agencies and our industry.”

She says that acting like an agency “has become more popular in terms of words vs. the actual work going into it. If you’re going to have an agency, it has to be driven by incredible creative.”

For example, Sullivan recently created a direct mail campaign for ESPN Deportes. Clients like Comcast and Time Warner received a logoed refrigerator filled with food from the various countries the channel covers. “We sent it to all 40 of their top clients,” she says. “The head of Time Warner sent them a great letter after receiving the item. Typically they would have hired an agency to do that.”

Not anymore.

Full-Service Provider

It was a fairly common story for 2009. Many budgets were corseted last year, leaving distributors with smaller or no orders at all. To help combat this, WorkflowOne (asi/333647) dug deeper into its clients’ businesses to help develop marketing programs rather than just supply products for them.

“Some of the keys to our success in 2009, when there were a lot of trials and tribulations in the industry, were with added value. We’re not just order takers,” says Michael Riddle, promotional marketing director for the Eastern region of WorkflowOne. “This allows you to go from the expense line to the revenue line. We help figure out how to generate revenue for our clients.”

For example, WorkflowOne works with many not-for-profits. It helped come up with programs that would help boost retention for the organizations. “We entice members to renew and to renew early. If nonprofits drop membership, they drop revenue,” says Riddle. Some of the tools used for retention campaigns provided by WorkflowOne to its clients are offers for travel bags, travel kits and umbrellas.

However, rather than just suggest and fulfill items, WorkflowOne comes up with the language for the mailings, does the printing, conducts the mailings and tests the products to see how they are performing. Like bigger agencies, they often use focus groups to get feedback. Riddle says, “Some mailings got clients upwards of a 20% to 25% response rate. The client values you so much; they bring you in with other agencies. Forward-thinking approaches like that allowed us to grow during a tough year. Promotional products are one of the first things to go when people cut budgets.”

Clients appreciate that WorkflowOne often takes the extra step, like conducting third-party testing of items that are consumer-facing. “The last thing we want is a black eye for them,” Riddle says. “It’s devastating for a company.”

Clients also appreciate the fact that WorkflowOne understands their businesses as a whole. Conducting research about clients using the Web, Lexis Nexis and other sources is key, Riddle says. “We find out ways to enhance the brand and look at the direction the company is going. If you go to a client and say, ‘We don’t want to just get the business, we want to help grow your business,’ they look at you in a different light.”

Helping Clients Grow Their Business

When an alcohol company was looking to spur its wholesalers, it didn’t go to one of the large incentive houses or to its advertising agency. It turned to Counselor Top 40 distributor GatewayCDI (asi/202515). Gateway CDI designed the program, built the Web site that hosted it, sent out the information binder to participants and handled all of the printing.

“From a promotional products point of view, we sold a binder and a pen. But we were able to bill them for much more,” says Chuck Fandos, CEO of GatewayCDI. “People in the industry look at it as just product. If that’s the way we look at it, then we’ll all be out of business soon. We try and provide service that allows products to be used in different ways.”

GatewayCDI has had a lot of success with “kitting.” “A lot of times we have projects where clients ask, ‘Can you bundle some products and some literature.’ They give us a database and we put it all together and ship it,” Fandos says.

For example, a sales division may want to send something to 300 clients along with a poll. GatewayCDI can create the poll, using e-mail, snail mail and a Web site. “We make it turnkey,” says Fandos.

The goal is always to ascertain ways to help grow the client’s business. Whether it is working with human resources to develop a years of service program or a safety incentive, “We try and work in as many areas as possible,” says Fandos.

This is accomplished by asking the client questions about their business and building up a knowledge base, so if the client calls needing something quickly, perhaps for their dealers, GatewayCDI can turn it around in a hurry. “You may call the person who runs the company store and say, ‘You may know us for that, but these are the other services we provide,’ and then the lightbulb goes off,” Fandos says.

GatewayCDI also provides staffing for corporate events for clients who are holding regional or national meetings. “These are all things we do to add value. If you ask them, ‘Do you have a budget for T-shirts?’ It’s no. If you ask them, ‘Do you have a recruiting budget? What can I do to help you there?’ Then T-shirts may be the answer,” says Fandos. “If you’re just being reactive, it will be very difficult to find budgets.”

“I Hate When It Looks Like We’re Just Selling Pens.”

When ESPN needs something in a hurry they call The Brandmarket Inc. (asi/145006). Sure, the sports cable behemoth has bigger agencies to work with, but executives want a provider that’s a little more agile. “They come to us for graphics. We’re creative in what we do and we do it quickly and move on to the next project,” says Kathleen Watts, president of The Brandmarket.

Watts sees her company as a boutique agency that gives added value to her clients. In addition to graphic design, her company handles Web site development, print production, private-label products, incentives and other creative solutions.

“Although we have belonged to ASI for over 10 years, we never fit the mold. We have broken out of the mold and have become more specialized,” says Watts.

The Brandmarket works with Disney, ABC, publishing giant Condé Nast and even ad agencies themselves, like Ogilvy & Mather. “We’re an added value creative outlet,” Watts says. “They are very corporate. They may not excel at creativity.”

Keeping these blue-chip clients requires ingenuity. “I can’t remember the last time I sold a stress ball. I almost refuse,” Watts says. “There is not a lot of value in that. If you’re going to spend some money, put value in the brand. Buy a $6 messenger bag. This way the recipient becomes a walking billboard.”

Watts has to work to educate clients about all of the additional services they provide. “Some use us for our graphics. Some want us creating their e-mail blasts. Some want us doing print services.”

Watts says she benefits from the fact that “Clients don’t have the time or energy to do a lot of things themselves. People have cut back on staff. They don’t have the manpower.” This creates opportunities for distributors willing to jump in the fray. 

“We do everything we can to make it look like it’s not a promotional products company,” says Watts. “I hate it when it looks like we’re out there just to sell pens. You want to be out there doing things that are creative. We want to promote our clients’ corporate identities.”

Solutions Sell

Like any company pitching new business, Brand Fuel (asi/145025) used to start off their presentations with a laundry list of awards and achievements. After all, spotlighting the company’s many successes seemed like a smart strategy.

Today, Brand Fuel has learned that it’s far more valuable to spend that time talking about the client, their needs and some solutions while on a sales call. “It’s 20% about the company now and 80% about the client,” says Danny Rosin, president of Brand Fuel. “We still say we’re great, but if we don’t understand the client’s business it doesn’t matter. Even if you’ve been working with them for a decade, there may be new pain points in their organization.”

Rosin says in the age of the Internet, there is no excuse for not being prepared. “You need to be a competitive marketer. Look at what their competitors are doing. Look at what’s in the news. Research like that is industrial reconnaissance,” he says.

Along the way, Rosin says, you may find that the company isn’t in the top-20 searches for their category, “Then you can say, ‘Let us help you with that.’” The key is identifying challenges that the company is having in its marketing efforts and then offering solutions that can help the client overcome and beat those issues.

One of the tools Brand Fuel offers is survey software that can get to the root of a client’s problem just by simply asking the target audience what the problem is. In one instance, the distributor did a poll of its own clients. One large customer revealed that they didn’t like an account manager that Brand Fuel had assigned to them. “We said, ‘Thanks for being honest. Let’s fix the problem.’ We gave them a new account manager and now they are singing our praises,” Rosin says.

In the case of BlueCross, Brand Fuel put together a program for its sales force that centered on arming them with premium items and tracking the results. It created a pilot program for sales reps that gave them $30 worth of gifts and information. At first the company balked because it seemed like an expense, but Rosin reasoned that if they did 2% more new business, that could pull in $2 million in additional revenue which would more than pay for the costs of the premiums.
 
BlueCross in North Carolina agreed to fund half of the program. Rosin is now planning on bringing the program to BlueCross in Virginia next and then another state and another ...

“After we do a pitch they will say, ‘You guys aren’t like the promotional products people we are used to dealing with,’” says Rosin. “That’s music to our ears. If we don’t hear it we feel like we did something wrong.”

Kenneth Hein is a contributing writer for Counselor.

Follow The Brand Leader
By Kenneth Hein
March 2010

Creative promotions are consistently run by some of the most well-known brands. Here, we look at six client promotions that used ad specialties in creative ways.

Big brands from many economic sectors often have stark differences in their marketing efforts. Some choose the big-splash Super Bowl-type ad campaign. Others choose the direct route, heading into a market with a one-to-one strategy that allows consumers to touch and feel their products. T One thing they all have in common, though: the use of promotional products to enhance their marketing efforts. Brands as diverse as EA Sports, The Weather Channel, Dunkin Donuts and Heinz have all recently incorporated ad specialty items into their promotional campaigns. Why? Let’s have Kiernan Laughlin, senior marketing associate for Gorton’s Seafood, and Sara Braca, associate brand manager for Heinz Ketchup, explain the thought behind the strategy used when these brands recently hooked up for a joint promotion.

“A personalized bottle of ketchup and other giveaways, including Heinz and Gorton’s magnets and stickers, provide an added value for prospective winners and allow us to reinforce brand loyalty across both brands,” they say in a joint statement.

Even further, other brands use promotional items as a way to get their best customers constantly promoting their brand names. Call it true grass-roots marketing. “It is a badge of identity for people who wear and use gear branded with the Jones Soda logo,” says Josh Groff, brand manager for Jones Soda Co. (asi/63541). “By making these personal connections with our fans, they each become brand ambassadors.”

Pretty powerful statements for the use of promo items by some large consumer packaged-goods brands. The key for these and other large and popular brands is to find ways to creatively inject promotional products into their marketing strategies. For these companies, it’s not as simple as just handing out a pen or mug during random events. Items often have to be co-branded to incorporate multi-sponsored events. And they need to fit into an overall strategy.

Here, we present six case studies of how various large brand-name companies have used ad specialties in recent marketing and promotional efforts. Read on to find some large-scale creative inspiration.

Promo Items Enhance Online Marketing Effort

Last summer, Jones Soda proudly proclaimed that it was “the official soda of the road trip.” To prove it, the premium soda brand teamed with Griffin Technology to reward people for sharing their most creative photos taken while traveling across North America.

Using Twitter, travelers were asked to make a post with the hashtag #roadtripjones and include their destination or itinerary. Photos and videos could then be uploaded at www.jonessoda.com/gallery and hashtagged through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Ten winners received one of 10 Griffin iTrip AutoPilots, and 10 photos from their journeys were selected to appear on Jones Soda bottles internationally. The grand prize winner also received a $500 shopping spree at www.griffintechnology.com.

While the main marketing strategy for Jones Soda was conceived through online channels, the whole effort was enhanced by the use of a live road-show tour that included representatives handing out ad specialties to people they encountered. During the summer, the Jones Soda RV hit various locations during a 10,000-mile journey throughout the country, tweeting all the way (@Jones_Soda_RV). Consumers who caught up with the RV or stopped by the soda company’s national headquarters received bumper stickers and coupons.

Jones Soda has a long history of giving out branded items and will continue to do so, says Groff. The key to the strategy behind the use of ad specialty items – even within a marketing campaign conducted mostly online – is for the Jones Soda brand to consistently connect with its customers. “It is a badge of identity for people who wear and use gear branded with the Jones Soda logo,” says Groff. “It’s how they distinguish themselves from the crowd.”

The brand, which has a partnership with the Seattle Seahawks, also gave away T-shirts before the NFL team’s home opener last year. This season it gave out schedule posters. “By making these personal connections with our fans, they each become brand ambassadors,” says Groff. “It is an efficient way for Jones Soda to expand awareness, and it is extremely effective because it is done in a viral and genuine way.”

Winners Reel In Tackle Box Full Of Promos

Many people can’t enjoy their fish sticks without a dab of ketchup. That’s why H.J. Heinz Company and Gorton’s formed a cross-promotional partnership last year.

The two have been working in tandem to promote their products as healthy food options.

In October, they borrowed a little fishing lingo to further drive home the point with the “Gone Dipping with Gorton’s and Heinz” sweepstakes. Playing off the Heinz 57 heritage, consumers were invited to visit www.gonedipping.com to win a prize every single day for 57 days.

Winners who hooked a prize received a “Gone Dipping” tackle box containing a personalized bottle of Heinz ketchup, a Gorton’s Sudoku game and branded stickers and magnets. They also received a 57-day supply of fish sticks and ketchup. The grand prize winner, lucky enough to reel in the big one, also got $1,000.

The key for both brands: providing a lasting impression of the two product lines through ad specialty items meant to match the theme of the promotion. “The goal of the ‘Gone Dipping with Gorton’s and Heinz’ sweepstakes is to increase consumer engagement with the two brands and drive consumption of fish sticks and ketchup,” say Laughlin and Braca in a joint statement.

The contest was promoted on the packaging of both products, along with the various health benefits of the products. Gorton’s has been touting the natural omega-3 fatty acids found in its products, while Heinz is promoting its tomatoes grown from Heinz seeds.

Multi-Brand Gift Card Wakes Up Morning Promo

There are two things most people do when they get up in the morning. One is grab a hot cup of coffee. The other is to turn on The Weather Channel to see what the local weather has in store for them. Playing off of these two rituals, The Weather Channel, Dunkin’ Donuts and Al Roker all teamed up for the recent “Wake Up With Al” promotion.

Consumers who visited www.weather.com/wakeup over a two-month time period last fall could enter to win a $100 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. The co-branded sweepstakes entry page also reminded people to tune in weekdays at 6 a.m. to watch Al Roker and co-host Stephanie Abrams tell them whether it was going to be a raincoat or sunglasses kind of day.

“Waking up with Al Roker and Dunkin Donuts are both popular morning rituals. This is a great way to reach consumers who need to be alert and ready to go in the mornings and let them know about ‘Wake Up With Al,’” says Cynthia Ashworth, vice president of consumer engagement at Dunkin’ Donuts. “It’s a natural fit – watch America’s favorite weatherman while sipping America’s favorite coffee, then visit www.weather.com for a chance to win.”

The sweepstakes was advertised via a 15-second TV spot on The Weather Channel. In-store displays including a life-size stand-up featuring Roker popped up at many of the nearly 6,000 Dunkin’ Donuts locations. Online, banner ads appeared at www.weather.com. Also, some direct marketing efforts included a targeted e-mail blast to people who opted in to Dunkin’ and Weather Channel databases which touted the limited-time gift-card offer.

T-Shirts Help Brand Revival

Was that Kim Kardashian in a Boone’s Farm T-shirt? Yes, it was. The socialite and reality show star is just one of many trendsetters to sport a T-shirt touting the quirky brand. Boone’s Farm, the fruit-flavored, inexpensive wine launched in the 1960s, is in the midst of a revival.

Three years ago it launched its “Bring Boone’s Back” marketing effort. The goal was to make the brand relevant among influencers. Its marketing tool of choice: T-shirts. Style-conscious celebrities, deejays and members of the press were seeded with a high-end logoed shirt, which is also available at upscale retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue.

“The branded Boone’s Farm T-shirts are an effective marketing tool because they serve as walking billboards for our brand,” says Kammy Dosanjh Chahal, assistant marketing manager of E&J Gallo Winery, which owns Boone’s. “Simply using posters and serving product is great, but that’s easily ignored by consumers.”

Looking to broaden its tongue-in-cheek outreach, the brand partnered with the ’80s-inspired Tony-award-winning Broadway musical Rock of Ages. As a sponsor, Boone’s was integrated into pre- and post-show activities.

Boone’s Farm also struck a sponsorship deal with the 2009 Air Guitar Championship. The tour traveled throughout U.S. cities in search of the person who can “rock out the hardest on an invisible guitar.” Samplers clad in hot-pink Boone’s Farm shirts handed out drink cards promoting Boone’s Farm and its newest flavor, Sunshine Pink. The “Boone’s Farm Girls” also swept balloons, confetti and other debris from the stage in-between acts. Contestants received the shirts as well as samples of the product, which they were seen chugging on stage, backstage and on the tour bus.

“The presence of the samplers moving through the crowd in bright pink T-shirts was impossible to ignore, and it helped to have the hosts, a focal point of every show, wear the shirts as well,” says Chahal. “Air guitar talent wore the T-shirts on TV appearances, which extended the Boone’s Farm presence. It created a common theme and made our presence and co-branding undeniable.”

Video-Game Maker Goes On Tour

Last October was a good month for video-game maker EA Sports. In Europe, it sold 1.7 million copies of FIFA Soccer 10 in one week, making it one of the fastest-selling sports titles ever. To rally U.S. fans, EA Sports hit the road armed with gaming kiosks and some cool prizes for players who sampled the soccer game.

Beginning in Chicago, FIFA Soccer 10 was brought to 15 cities during a five-week tour last fall. Two vehicles hit hot spots on both coasts. The custom-wrapped trucks held 13 TVs and featured the new, slimmer 120GB PlayStation 3. A full-time crew showed players how to use the 360-degree dribbling systems and all-new Virtual Pro that allows the player the chance to live out the fantasy of being a professional soccer player.

Major League Soccer star Cuauhtemoc Blanco of the Chicago Fire, one of three athletes featured on the cover of the game, was also on hand to celebrate the game’s kickoff at a launch party. He held an autograph session and participated in an in-store tournament. The tournament winner received a 42-inch Panasonic HDTV.

Of course, the promotional tour wasn’t complete without the creative use of ad specialty items. While the main attractions were the soccer stars and the chance for fans to actually try out the new game for themselves, the lasting memories and continuous advertising impressions were made through promotional products handed out during the events. The tour, which included free handouts like posters and T-shirts for game players, concluded November 22 in Las Vegas.

“The EA Sports FIFA Soccer 10 tour is an integral part of the overall marketing campaign, as it provides consumers with the opportunity to experience the game in a fun and engaging environment,” says Darren Lachtmen, director of business development for rEvolution, the tour’s creator. “EA Sports FIFA Soccer 10 has the potential to be the highest-rated sports game of all time, and we are confident that providing a unique and memorable opportunity to play the game will drive consumers to purchase.”

Green Item Promotes Eco-Friendly Vodka

When you have a name like the Earth Friendly Distilling Company (EFDC), you’d better back it up. To promote its 360 Vodka, the distiller believes it has done just that. Not only does EFDC donate $1 to environmental charities when a 360 Vodka swing-top closure is returned for recycling, but each of its 1.75 liter bottles comes with a reusable metal handle.

The handle helps create a steady pour that reduces spillage and breakage. What’s more, the vodka is produced using machines that run on biodiesel fuel, and recycled materials are used for its glass bottle and paper label.
To hammer its sustainability message home, EFDC shipped 10,000 cases of 360 Vodka with logoed, reusable recycling bins sized to hold 12 bottles each. The company hopes that the blue bins will be used again and again for recycling efforts. It views them as a superior alternative to the boxes that wholesalers often provide to their customers for carrying home their bottles.

“As the world’s only eco-friendly, luxury vodka, it’s essential that our marketing efforts promote sustainability and, whenever possible, give consumers reusable and recyclable solutions that encourage positive environmental changes, such as our recycling bin shipping containers,” says Vic Morrison, vice president at McCormick Distilling, parent company of EFDC. “We are also proud that 360 Vodka listens to the feedback of our mixologists, consumers and accounts, and provides them with eco-friendly solutions such as the reusable bottle handle.”

Earth Friendly believes it has not only lived up to its name, but it has also set a higher standard for sustainability in the spirits industry.

Kenneth Hein is a contributing writer for Counselor.

Online Marketing Spending Accelerates - from Marketwise
By Kenneth Hein
February 2010

According to projections from the online marketing research firm eMarketer, distributors would be remiss not to get more involved in social media and other online tools.

It forecasts that overall ad spending will increase this year with more marketing dollars headed online. Spending online will increase 5.5%, thanks to a boost in search marketing, banner ads and online videos.

Still, despite these increases, eMarketer says media dollars will not likely return to pre-recession levels. Why? There are more measurement tools to help target ads, more media fragmentation that will force marketers into smaller niches and new technologies to help companies market themselves.

Web sites, blogs, online videos, e-mail and social media are especially helpful for small- and medium-size businesses, says David Hallerman, senior analyst for eMarketer. For example, “Blogs are a way to draw in prospects that wouldn’t have been on your radar. You may not think customers or potential customers are there online, but they are,” Hallerman says.

Too often, business owners avoid interacting on the Web because they feel “something that doesn’t contribute to getting their work done better has to be jettisoned,” says Hallerman. This is a mistake, he says.

Bobby Lehew has vowed to put more energy behind his promotional products blogs: www.bobbylehew.com and www.brandedmatters.com. The director of operations at Robyn Promos (asi/309656) says, “There is a dramatic increase in people getting information online. The biggest increase in Facebook users are people over 55. It shows that even people you don’t expect to be on the Web are there.”

Lehew says blogs have taken a backseat to Facebook and Twitter, but in terms of doing business, they are superior. “For the small-business world, people buy from people they know and like,” he says. “They need to find you. Blogs help position you as an expert.”

Still, Twitter “helps get more exposure and contacts. It’s a door opener,” says Lehew. The Twitter population is expected to grow 15.5% to 26 million users this year, according to the eMarketer report.

Search marketing is also growing in importance and is an online marketing medium that distributors should capitalize on. Robert Stillman, owner of Farfromboring.com (asi/192001), says, “Using Google Adwords is very helpful until your site has been around long enough and you have enough relevant information that allows it to get natural listings from the search engines.” – KH

The Power of Persistence
By Jean Erickson
March-April 2010

If you want your campaign to get noticed by clients and employees, you’ll need to deliver your message over and over (and over) again. Here’s how to get started on a successful continuity program.

There’s a reason why Absolut Vodka ads use the same distinctively shaped bottle in different settings, year after year. Why the California Milk Processor Board continues to use famous people sporting the same milk moustache in dozens of campaigns (see page 22.)  And why Geico repeatedly uses the same, somewhat creepy, large-eyed pile-of-cash character in all of its recent TV campaigns. Thanks to the consistency in these companies’ campaigns over the years, millions of consumers have come to recognize the brands their ads represent. But your company doesn’t have to be a behemoth to make the same marketing concepts work for you. 

“Marketers who harness the power of repetition will build brand awareness far quicker than those who simply do isolated campaigns,” says Gerald DeHuff, a brand consultant. So whether you’re planning a service-award program for employees, a direct-mail campaign, a tiered gifts program for clients, or a sales-incentive promotion, you’d be wise to treat it as a continuity program comprised of multiple elements. Here’s a primer to help you get started.

Type of Program: Direct-Mail Campaign

Multi-part direct mail is the perfect way to approach dream prospects. For instance, a real estate agent might target this type of campaign to an upscale neighborhood. A restaurant may aim one at houses and businesses within a given radius of its location.

The timing of the mailings is crucial to your overall success. “Schedule your campaign strategically so that targets understand that everything goes together and so they’ll have good memory of the last piece when the new one arrives,” says Lauron Sonnier, practical marketing expert and author of Think Like a Marketer: What It Really Takes to Stand Out from the Crowd, the Clutter, and the Competition. “Weekly or biweekly is likely your best bet for a knockout punch.” Then, follow these key steps:

Step 1: Make sure the first mailing is an attention-grabber. The promotional product used doesn’t have to be expensive, but the envelope or package must be “lumpy” to ensure it gets opened. “You can mix up the heavy, expensive items with lighter, less-expensive ones,” Sonnier says. “You can build up to your message or tease a grand finale – so many ways to work it.” To add to the intrigue, write an enticing teaser for the outside of the package.

Step 2: According to Sonnier, what makes any campaign real is a theme, and that theme should be clear at the second exposure. “Themes can be singular, such as, ‘10 reasons to spend spring break at our resort,’ ” she says. “Or, campaigns can be more broad and random, like, ‘Here are some of the benefits of working with us.’ ”

Step 3: When choosing the product for the third mailing, remember that for maximum impact, each component of the campaign should stir the right emotions in your targets. “If you want to instill excitement, then choose items that will make people laugh,” Sonnier says. “If you want to instill confidence, then choose items that communicate security, peace of mind and an overall ‘nothing to worry about with us’ attitude.”

Step 4: For your last mailing, continue playing off the same emotion you’ve used in the others. “Don’t send targets all over the emotional map,” Sonnier says. “Pick an emotion and choose your items accordingly and consistently.” Finally, punctuate the last mailing with a call to action. Ask the recipient to contact you, go to a Web site, return a card, etc.

Type of Program: Sales-Cycle Gifting

If you’re running a sales or marketing organization, you’ll likely want to target clients with special gifts, depending on their spend and where they are in the sales cycle. A good continuity program for client retention includes tiered gifts that go up in value depending on the client’s value.

Diana Martin, a promotional products distributor, has developed her own trademarked type of continuity plan: the DM Client Gift Cycle Program. Here’s how it works in the case of a real estate agency:

Step 1: When a homeowner lists their house with an agent or a prospective buyer signs on, they receive their first token of appreciation: a linen box of note cards personalized with the client’s name. The buyers love the cards. “They write thank-you notes to the agents on the stationery,” Martin says, “so it’s been very positive feedback.”

Step 2: If a considerable amount of time passes before the sale or purchase of a house, the agent has a couple of “on occasion” gifts he or she can present. An hourglass is given when the agent is hoping for an extension on a listing. If the client has a birthday or other special occasion, the agent may present a decorative throw.

Step 3: As the client enters the escrow phase, they get a croc-embossed leather document holder. Inside is a congratulations letter, an explanation of escrow and its processes, and a utilities contact list. “That’s all done on our client’s letterhead, which we preprint ahead of time,” Martin says.

Step 4: Finally, at move-in time, the buyer receives a high-quality atlas from the agent. The atlas is meant to serve as a reminder of the many paths that lead to great success.

Type of Program: Service Award 

Service awards are most effective when they are part of a tiered program – for instance, employees get an award on their first anniversary and then every fifth anniversary thereafter. Laurene Powers, a promotional products distributor, specializes in service-award programs for companies. Her top tip? Targeting service gifts to the personality of recipients.

“We always keep some traditional items at each level – leather, crystal, clocks, watches – but offer a variety of targeted lifestyle items also,” she says. “Jewelry is popular with women of any age, but, again, target the style for the age group.” Electronics like TVs, iPods and headphones are also hot but hard to keep up-to-date with, and their low markup doesn’t always cover the cost of administrating the program. Nevertheless, Powers says, “They are asked for over and over again.”

Once the budget has been established and the selection of gifts has been made, here’s how a typical service-award program plays out:

Step 1: Promote the program to employees with a physical display of gifts available at each service level. “Anybody walking by sees this, and they can stop and look,” Powers says. “When we’re putting it together, we get things like someone stopping and saying, ‘Oh, I really like that. I have 10 years next year. I’m going to have to remember that.’ ” The program should also be promoted in the employee handbook, the company newsletter and on the company Intranet.

Step 2: Employees who are eligible for rewards are contacted and asked to make their gift selection via a Web site. If they don’t respond, communication is crucial. “You need to have a mechanism in place to remind and encourage people who haven’t made a selection,” Powers says.

Step 3: To get the most out of the program, center a celebration around the gift presentation. “Some of that’s gone by the wayside, just because of expense,” Powers says, “so companies might have a dinner and presentation for 15 years and above, where it used to be five and above.” But even calling employees together for cake at the end of the workday will make them feel special.

Step 4: With some oversize gifts, Powers’ company actually takes the item to the employee’s house and sets it up, getting a great opportunity for feedback. “One of my most memorable times was taking a grandfather clock in for a 20-year recipient,” Powers says. “She showed me her 15-year and her 10-year gifts that she had also received from the company. We had supplied those gifts, and she was very proud to show them.”

Type of Program: Sales Incentive 

In this type of promotion, salespeople may collect points for sales or have a goal to reach in order to earn a gift. There are often different gift selections at different levels of achievement. The program may apply to your own sales team or be targeted to independent dealers who sell your product to consumers.

“Where these programs are most used is where our clients need to influence the purchase- influencers,” says Mark Ziskind, a promotional products distributor. “So a counter clerk at Grainger Industrial Supply can sell any of five brands of items. How do I get them to push our client’s brand?”

Once the budget has been established, a typical program may work like this:

Step 1: Choose the right products to motivate the demographic in your target sales group. “Whether you’re appealing to travel agents, clerks that work in a store or financial advisors, you have to make sure the product selection appeals to the things they love to do in life,” Ziskind says.

Step 2: Get the word out to the sales force. The program Ziskind manages targeting sales associates at Grainger is marketed in collateral that goes to store managers. The client also promotes directly to many of the sales associates. “To the best of my knowledge, they have a pretty good database, because they do online training programs about their products,” he says.

Step 3: As recipients send in their points or receipts, check the totals and record everything carefully for tax purposes.

Step 4: Handle the fulfillment immediately, so recipients are happy with the program. Even if you’re partnering with another company on fulfillment, do what you can to speed processing. “The big thing is when you get the order, enter it,” Ziskind says. “Don’t sit on it for a couple of weeks.”

First Things First 

The first step to installing a successful continuity program is to consider exactly what your business needs to accomplish. Better safety records? Increased sales? Brand recognition? A carefully planned and executed continuity program can help your company reach these goals, and more.
Ask yourself:

• Has my company ever used a continuity program before? What did I like or dislike about it? 
• What does my company hope to accomplish with the program? Generate awareness? Decrease on-the-job accidents? Accomplish a client- or employee-related goal? 
• What actions should the program encourage/reward? Does my company want more visits on its Web site? Higher rates of client satisfaction? 
• Who am I trying to influence with the program? Are the recipients mainly male or female? Young or old? Computer programmers or construction workers? 
• Should the program be ongoing or will it last for a specified amount of time?
  

Direct Mail That Delivers
By Alex Palmer
July/August 2010

Direct mail has been the go-to marketing solution for many businesses for decades, but it has had more than its share of challenges in recent years. The expanding use of online marketing, rising postage costs and dramatic cutbacks that direct mail’s biggest industries (including finance, insurance and automotive) had to make in the wake of the recession have led some to predict that direct mail is on its last legs.

But, despite these troubles, direct mail shows signs of resilience. In its Quarterly Business Review, released in March, the Direct Marketing Association predicted that after spending on direct mail dropped 16% in 2009, to $44.4 billion, it would steadily rise over the next few years – rising 2.5% in 2010 alone.

“Direct mail is not disappearing by any stretch of the imagination,” says Yoram Wurmser, research manager at the Direct Marketing Association. He believes the category will continue to see sales growth for the foreseeable future. “In the past you had direct mail as broadcast mail. What you are going to see now is more targeted mail, more personalized and more of a conversation.”

These four case studies show how direct mail is changing with the times, and why it continues to get results in ways that other marketing channels cannot.

Decoding Customer Engagement

One of the advantages unique to direct mail is that it gets something into the recipient’s hands, encouraging them to take action. The leadership at American Car Care Centers (ACCC) had this in mind when they ran a campaign to help drive donations for their charity partner, the Children’s Miracle Network, while also boosting foot traffic to their 1,000 stores nationwide.

As an exclusive partner of Children’s Miracle Network, ACCC sells “miracle balloons” at its retail sales counters. The company offers customers the branded balloon for a $1 donation, and the donation form includes a customizable bottom portion where partners can include coupons or special offers to help drive sales and traffic in the store.

Instead of attaching coupons to this area, ACCC printed coded messages; 95% of the messages offered $10 off of any item in the store, but a handful awarded big-ticket prizes like free iPods and LCD televisions.

This is where direct mail came in. ACCC sent out “decoders” (a special red cellophane lens die-cut into the shape of a balloon) to nearly 300,000 individuals. Recipients could bring the decoder into a store and run it over the special coupon on the donation form. The promise of prizes and curiosity of the consumers drove heavy traffic into the stores, raising $250,000 for the Children’s Miracle Network in less than three months.

“In a tire retail environment, it’s very difficult to get new foot traffic that you wouldn’t otherwise organically get – people don’t just come browse tires,” says Jeremy Lewin, director of marketing for ACCC, who developed the campaign. “Ultimately, if you take the increase of foot traffic and multiply it by the rate at which a new customer buys something, we had some significant ROI.”

Steal this idea

Kathleen Hanover, executive creative director for Imagine That Creative, who has worked with Fortune 1000 companies on their direct marketing campaigns, says that a charity aspect offers a crucial boost to a response rate of direct mail campaigns. “It says that not only can you personally get something, which appeals to the person’s self-interest, but it also says that in the process you are going to help out these children in need,” she says.

Interactive Magnets Stick for Restaurateur

When the owners of Pinebrook, NJ-based Italian eatery Suppa’s Restaurant looked to get more customers coming into the restaurant, they decided to go for emotional appeal. Reaching out to The Mood Swinger, a supplier of customized magnets, they developed a special “mood magnet” featuring four humorous illustrations of “satisfied” and “hungry” cartoon faces.

The Mood Swinger’s magnets can feature a selection of some 100 different expressions, like “proud,” “happy” and “rundown,” plus the expression “I Feel Sooo … ”. Suppa’s decided to go with a 4-inch by 5-inch magnet, featuring four squares where cartoon faces could be included. The aim was for recipients to have fun with the magnet and keep it on their refrigerator, changing the emotions when the mood struck – with Suppa’s logo and contact information prominently displayed the whole time.

“There’s that interactive piece that makes it unique and effective, plus it links emotional benefits to your brand,” says David Unger, owner of The Mood Swinger. “It’s different than your normal static magnet.”

With a mailing list supplied by Suppa’s, The Mood Swinger sent out the magnets, along with a sales letter about the restaurant, to some 1,000 customers in the neighborhood last winter. To help the promotion speak to customers’ wallets as well as their moods, the magnet came with both a 10% off and a $2 coupon that could be removed and brought into the restaurant. The mailer was a huge success, with 284 people redeeming the coupons over the promotion’s three-month period – an astonishing 28.4% response rate.

“The foot traffic was outstanding, and they had a lot of people coming in saying, ‘Oh, those magnets are cute,’” says Unger. Plans are now in the works for another mailer and magnet.

Steal this idea

“The more interactive a product can be, the more it’s going to stick with the consumer,” says Josh Moritz, managing partner of Customer Growth, who has 25 years of experience in direct marketing, including direct mail. He cites kitchen magnets in particular as a valuable way to keep one’s brand or product in front of the customer, whether Italian restaurant, home repair service or e-commerce website. “Plus, one of the great things about kitchen magnets is you can only deliver that through the mail – you can’t deliver it on the Web.”

Healthy Responses to Targeted Marketing

For Harrison HealthLink, time was of the essence when it set out to launch a direct mail campaign to promote its electronic record services to hospitals. With all hospitals required to shift to online records for patients, competition had gotten fierce between providers of these services.

Harrison worked with Orbit Direct Creative Marketing to develop Harrison’s logo and its tagline, “For the Way You Practice Medicine,” and to create a direct mail campaign targeted toward 500 medical professionals in the Kitsap Peninsula area of Washington. Two sets of mailers were sent out over a period of three weeks.

The first set emphasized the approaching federal deadline to shift to electronic records, while the second featured an image of graduates and used variable data fields to insert the recipient’s name into an attention-getting phrase: “It’s the best thing to happen to patient care since [doctor’s name] graduated from med school.”

Both mailers offered a special flash drive to those who sent in a business reply card, or signed up online. Branded with Harrison’s logo and containing additional information about enhancing patient care, the flash drive helped generate responses, and the campaign had a 7% response rate – strong results for a direct mail campaign. While Orbit generally gets more responses through the reply cards, in this case it was almost evenly split between direct mail and e-mail responses, pointing to the value of a multi-platform approach.

“Each piece leverages the other one, and you’re getting really good saturation for not a lot of money,” says Darby Roach, principal of Orbit Direct.

Steal this idea

Before spending money on a direct mail initiative, make sure you’re hitting the right target. “It all goes back to Direct Marketing 101,” says Ed Glaser, director of marketing at Colortree and a 25-year veteran of direct mail campaigns. He says targeting the right consumers, as Harrison HealthLink did, is 40% of whether the campaign will be a success (another 40% is the offer, and the final 20% is the presentation). “If you send it to someone who is not relevant, they might enjoy the product you send, but in the end, what good is it?” he says.

Alex Palmer is a contributing writer for Successful Promotions.

 

How To Effectively Use Facebook - from "Marketwise"
By Kenneth Hein
March, 2010

Have a Facebook page? Yep, you probably do if you’re like most businesspeople these days. The problem is that those same “most people” often don’t know how to make the most of the social media medium.
 
However, many social media experts agree that Facebook can provide great benefits for small- and medium-size businesses. “There are bigger advantages for smaller business than there are for larger businesses,” says Steve Coulsin, creative director for Campfire, which is the social media agency for American Eagle Outfitters and Snapple. “There is a level of authenticity that smaller brands have that allows them to speak with an opinion and a voice.”

The idea is that if a distributor sets up a page and communicates with fans or friends, and those people share it with their community of 100 or 200 friends, then digital word-of-mouth has officially spread. The trick is to effectively talk to your customers, says Coulsin. “Ask them questions. Create polls. Treat the Facebook page as a destination, not just another Web page,” he says. “Think of it as a discussion group. It only works if you are interacting with them. Your Facebook page becomes a publishing system to publish your message to your fans.”

This conversation isn’t just about posting offers or trying to make direct sales. “Post information relevant to your business, comment on industry trends and point people to interesting sites and articles,” says Bill Corbett Jr., president of the PR and social media agency Corbett Public Relations. “This way you will be a conduit of information and a respected provider of information, not a salesperson.”

That’s not to say Facebook can’t be helpful for making sales. In many ways it can help speed up the process. A savvy salesperson can check out a prospect’s profile to get a quick snapshot of their personal life. “It’s like a virtual golf outing. You get to quickly learn about their hobbies and interests. You get a quick sense of who the person is,” says Phil Nourie, president of Park Lane Communications.

In terms of digital marketing, Facebook is also a good tool for improving the search engine rankings of a business. By posting an in-depth profile on Facebook, distributors are increasing the chance of people finding their business online, says Toni Iafrate, managing director of marketing consulting firm Davies Murphy Group.

“Small businesses should also remember to promote their Facebook presence in other marketing materials – Web site, e-mail signature, marketing collateral, press releases, etc.,” Iafrate says. “A simple note of ‘find us here’ will drive additional fans.”
For more information on how to make your Facebook page a business success, go to www.mashable.com/guidebook/facebook. – KH

Be a Website Design Convert
By By William J. Lynott
August 2010

SHARE & BOOKMARK

To build a website that really sings your company’s praises, avoid the seven deadly site design sins.

Deciding that your decorating business would benefit from having its own website was the easy part, right? The tough part is avoiding the nasty pitfalls that make too many websites money-losers instead of money-makers.

Web design has evolved into a sophisticated combination of art and science, so today’s best sites are powerful marketing and communication tools. Unfortunately, plenty of the old clunkers are still around – and even worse, more are going up every day.

Here’s how you can make sure that your site – whether it’s in the planning stage or is already a reality – isn’t marred by one or more of the seven most damaging errors of website design.

Sin 1: Failing to formulate a clear purpose for your site. This may sound obvious, but failing to define and execute a clear purpose – what you want people to be able to learn or do on your site – is one of the more common website design errors, and one of the most costly.

Do you want a website solely to establish an Internet presence, with a single page providing basic information (such as your contact information) and a general description of your decoration services? Or do you want a complete e-commerce site with multiple pages, photos of your work, a description of your specialized expertise and other data? Or, something in between? If you can’t state your site’s purpose clearly in a sentence or two, you’re probably not ready to dip a toe into the Internet waters.

Sin 2: Failing to communicate your purpose clearly to your site designer. If you hire a professional to create your site (and you probably should), you’ll pay additional charges if you keep exercising your right to change your mind. Changes in basic design after the project is underway can result in wasted creative hours. Unless your designer has agreed to a flat rate, you’ll be stuck with a larger bill than you expected.

You can avoid this common error by taking time to sit down in advance with your designer to discuss your ideas. Sketching out layouts and text on paper can save hours of costly design time. Don’t allow yourself to become an obstacle to completion of the work by over-managing, but also don’t sit back and assume you shouldn’t be involved at all in the creative process. Either approach would be a mistake.

Sin 3: Failing to realize content is king. Web surfers are looking for information about your business and the products and services you offer. Such details as site design elements and colors should always be transparent to the viewer. Too much “design” in a website can be compared with wearing too much makeup.

A site cluttered with annoying gimmicks such as animations and graphics that do nothing to enhance your message will be a sure turnoff for most viewers. Perhaps you’ve seen sites alive with dancing bears, cartoons, pulsating banners and other irrelevant devices. If you’re like most Web surfers, you have little patience with that if it interferes in your page viewing.

“Always remember that your customers and prospective customers are interested in benefits, as in, ‘How is this good for me?’” says Ray Redlich, art manager at Carell Corp. “Try to turn your features into benefit statements.”

Be sure to include an “About Us” link inviting visitors to learn more about the personal side of your enterprise. “Include a photo of yourself and your partners, if any, to give a personal touch to your company,” Redlich says.

Sin 4: Failing to provide a simple navigation system. “Your customers and prospects want their Web experience to be familiar and comfortable,” Redlich says. “They want to be able to find what they want quickly. All of your navigation should be simple and intuitive.”

Web surfers are notoriously impatient. Viewers who log on to your site want to see at a glance what services and products you offer, and what they must do to find other key information. If your home page and your navigation system don’t provide quick answers, many viewers will quickly move on.

Every page on your site must provide an easy and intuitive way to reach any other page. Internet viewers simply won’t invest the time and effort needed to plow their way through a confusing maze of menus. The most popular navigation systems consist of bars laid out vertically on the left side or horizontally across the top of each page. Whatever system you choose, it must be consistent. At an absolute minimum, every page on your site should contain a “return to home page” link.

You’ve probably visited sites that seem to be made up of nothing but menus. You keep clicking and clicking without ever arriving at the information you want. Remember: If you allow your viewer to get confused, you’ve probably lost a potential customer. Your navigation system must provide your visitors with enough information to make easy and effective choices – no more, no less.

Sin 5: Failing to provide an easy way for interested viewers to contact you. If your site is a full e-commerce site, this requirement may seem too obvious to mention. However, if it contains only basic information, such as company contact information and a description of your services, it’ll be easy to overlook the need to provide a feedback link.

Prospective customers may have questions that you haven’t anticipated, or there may be problems with the site such as broken links. In either case, a quick-and-easy e-mail link will allow the viewer to reach you with the click of a mouse.

Caution: Once you set up a feedback link, you must check your e-mail every day and respond promptly to every message. Many people regard unanswered e-mail messages as a personal affront. That’s not a good way to build your business image.

Sin 6: Failing to test loading time on an average computer. Most people these days have short tech attention spans, so they’ll move on quickly if your site takes more than a few seconds to load on their screens.

Excessive use of large graphics, animations and other devices that increase the file size of the pages on your site will increase the time it takes for the page to appear on the viewer’s screen. Many sites are elaborate creations with the potential to win design prizes from fellow professionals, but they accomplish little or nothing for the people who are paying the bills.

If you own a high-powered computer with a lightning-speed processor and a ton of memory, or if you have high-speed Internet access, don’t use your own system to test your site’s loading time. Find a friend with an average setup. Then, if your site takes more than six or eight seconds to load, you and your designer need to sit down and decide what has to go.

Sin 7: Failing to make it easy for search engines to find your site. Internet search engines allow Web surfers to type in key words such as “custom T-shirts,” “embroidery,” a company name or any other subject. Then, in the blink of an eye, the search engine scans the millions of sites on the Web and lists those that have meta-tags identical to the typed-in search term.

Meta-tags are simply words and phrases that describe the contents of your website and the nature of your business, making it easier for the search engines and interested viewers to find your site. These tags aren’t a magic key to site effectiveness; however, they can increase the chances that your site will be included in the list that pops up when a Web surfer types in one of those words or phrases.

Using meta-tags is a technical subject too complex to cover in full here. For our purposes, it’s sufficient to say that you should discuss the matter with your Web designer to make certain that a full measure of appropriate tags is included in your home page.

“If you’d like to learn more, log on to a search engine – there are many, but the most popular is Google – and type in ‘meta-tags,’ ” Redlich says. You’ll learn how search engines work, and you’ll get a long list of websites that can provide all you ever wanted to know about the subject. Then, once you’ve checked out meta-tags, type in a general description of your business – and you’ll get an idea of how meta-tags work.”

WILLIAM J. LYNOTT is a contributing writer for Stitches.

A Call for Creativity
By Robert Carey
January 2010

Technology helps distributors sharpen their marketing efforts, but it can’t bring sales success all by itself. Here’s how creative marketing strategies have boosted business for some firms.

Thanks to the power of creative marketing, Morrison O’Hara Custom Awards (asi/277220) operates on a scale in 2010 that its president, Kent Von Hof, never could have imagined 15 years ago. This three-person shop casts its net well beyond its Sacramento, CA, location and stays top of mind with clients by creating eight different e-mail newsletters every few weeks using the Constant Contact software program. Each newsletter is customized to the preferences of its recipients – there’s one for wearables, one for awards, one for eco-friendly products, one for the medical niche, and so on. And within each newsletter, Von Hof makes sure to include links to specific pages in suppliers’ e-catalogs that feature products the clients have expressed interest in before.

“I’m just trying to get a response back from them, even if it’s to say, ‘I’m looking for something a little different than what you sent; help me find it,’” Van Hof say. “At the very least, I’m trying to push them into visiting our Web site. The software plus the ability to send specific links to e-catalogs has really helped us.”

The Internet has become a monumentally powerful marketing tool for small wearables distributors – but it’s not the only tool. Indeed, other elements (taking the time to keep e-mail databases clean, numbing clients with the electronic onslaught, being undercut on price by online vendors) have made the avenue far from bulletproof.

As a result, a complete and effective marketing plan requires more than technology solutions. “When times are tough, being cutting-edge is certainly wise, but you can’t skip over the basics of marketing that serve to develop relationships,” says Kirby Hasseman, account executive for Lee Wayne Corp. (asi/356000) and author of the new book Think Big: Marketing for Small Business. “Tangible things like direct mail and the interpersonal stuff didn’t go away after the creation of the Internet for a reason: They still work.”

Smart Giving Pays Off

“We probably don’t do enough database marketing,” admits Adam Thornton, general manager of Match-Up Promotions (asi/264230), a 10-employee shop in Longwood, FL. But why does Thornton refrain from joining the crowd? “We don’t want to send clients and prospects pages from e-catalogs unless they are asking for specific items,” he says, “because we try to make their experience with us as personal as possible from the outset.”

To do this, Match-Up takes pains to qualify all prospects, making sure the sales rep has a connection he or she can refer to when initiating contact, rather than simply scouring the Internet to find the right person in a prospective firm. While this tactic narrows Match-Up’s potential universe of prospects, there’s a reason behind it: Thornton sends top prospects a desktop paper shredder that’s co-branded with the recipient’s logo as well as Match-Up’s logo. The accompanying material features the phrase, “Let us help you shred your competition.” And when the prospect opens the tray, they find the shredded logos of their main competitors.

Thornton says the success rate, as measured by having multiple contacts with a prospect afterward receiving the shredder, exceeds 50%. “It’s something they haven’t seen before, it’s useful and it shows that we know about their business. So it makes good sense, despite the cost,” he says. “High-quality items that are personalized show that you’re willing to make an extra effort.”

Meg O’Dea, president of Oakland, CA-based O2 Marketing (asi/286464), says she will send prospects “something that’s nice enough to get their attention,” such as a wine aerator or a fancy calculator. About a week later, “We try to get them on the phone to make sure they got our gift, and to say that there are many other quality things we can provide. We find this very successful.”

Even though O2 Marketing is sending products to potential clients, “We eliminate the idea that we’re simply selling commodities, and prove that we’ll be a consultative partner who understands them,” Thornton says. “It moves them away from using price as the primary buying factor.”

Hasseman adds, “I’m blown away that personalized items are used so infrequently for marketing within our own industry.” He routinely asks his salespeople for unique product ideas so he can hand-deliver different items to selected clients and prospects (and their assistants) each month. Recently, he’s used customized pens, T-shirts and faux-leather desktop-storage pieces from Starline (asi/89320). “Doing a gift once per quarter is fine, as long as the quality is there,” he says. “It definitely drives sales – your credibility rises when they realize how many nice items you can provide.”

Upselling Today ...

Another tactic that’s underutilized: Piggybacking onto an existing apparel order to deliver an “aha” moment that drives additional orders. Thornton says that his firm is “heavy into personalized apparel samples, and we always try to find out the sizes of the decision-makers so that we can send them something for themselves” along with their order. “When a supplier takes the time to do that for me, I definitely notice it and appreciate it,” he adds. “If you know something about who you’re sending to and their business potential, it’s definitely worth the cost.”

Whenever Hasseman sells a certain quantity of moderate- or higher-priced apparel, he makes sure to include a spec piece that either complements the ordered apparel or is a new item in his firm’s lineup. “If I sell 24 golf shirts, I’ll do a cap or a jacket embroidered with the client’s logo and ship it with the shirts. It’s a thank-you item that surprises them when they open the box, and now they have another product idea, too,” he says.

Recently, Hasseman sent a jacket to a manufacturing firm’s buyer along with an order. The buyer wore it on vacation, where he was photographed landing a big fish. When he returned to work and showed the photo around, the plant manager said, “That’s a nice fish, but where did you get that jacket?” A 300-piece order came in shortly thereafter.
Savvy reps can even leverage their database to create customer-loyalty rewards on the fly, and land another sale.

For instance, if a client makes a $2,000 order, “The rep can respond that this amount qualifies them for a special discount on another item the rep knows they’ve been interested in before,” says Hasseman, noting that studies show about a one-in-five success rate with this tactic. “Those are dollars that come simply because you made them feel like you know them, and because you’ve asked for the business but with no real sales pressure.” This is the equivalent of point-of-purchase offers in retail stores.

... And Upselling Tomorrow

With some up-front work, a distributor could develop a more comprehensive loyalty marketing program that’s designed to snare a larger share of each client’s total business over the year. Glen Eisenberg, president of Precision Marketing, a Montreal-based marketing agency for the apparel, cosmetic, packaged goods and financial industries, cites the benefits of “stock-up” purchase programs. So if one non-exclusive client tends to buy 500 pieces at a time, “You can offer them a cool gift such as an iPhone, a Sony Reader, or a small flat-screen TV if they buy 800 or 1,000 pieces at once,” Eisenberg says.

If successful, this strategy leaves fewer future orders for competitors to bid on. “You can steal market share,” notes Eisenberg, “particularly when you time it with the seasonality of the business. Do an August promotion for the holiday season, or for the following year, when the new budget allocations come through. All you’re saying is, ‘Load up now for what you’ll need anyway, and you get a great reward.’”

Eisenberg has also helped several firms create programs where off-season price promotions are scrapped in favor of a year-long incentive program. He recommends that distributors calculate the average spend among their direct-program clients as well as decorating-shop clients, and then devise a higher number that clients in each segment must reach to trigger a major reward. By working the numbers on the back-end, distributors can rake in far more than they pay out. The goal? “Have clients go with your firm even if price is not in your favor, but still in the ballpark,” Eisenberg says.

An alternative to this program framework is to offer several tiered rewards, so that the largest percentage of clients can be prodded into buying more. Either way, Eisenberg stresses the importance of providing clients with monthly e-mail updates plus online account access so that they always know where they stand. A reward-related ad specialty – such as a luggage tag – should also be sent when clients reach certain milestones, reminding and exciting them about the program.

The Main Event

Proprietary trade shows aimed at clients and prospects are not new, but there are a few wrinkles that can make a distributor’s event stand out from others. Hasseman and Lee Wayne hold a customer-appreciation show each year, drawing more than 100 people from within a 90-minute drive of his office. At the invitation-only event, though, it’s not just Hasseman and his reps who schmooze guests as they listen to a DJ, nibble on hors d’oeuvres and sip wine; reps from SanMar (asi/84863) and other suppliers are there, too, “because they can talk about their lines much better than I can,” Hasseman says.

While the annual autumn event, held at a local catering hall, costs Hasseman quite a bit, he finds the return far exceeds the expense. Case in point: He once piqued the interest of a client for an item introduced at the show, but the client had no budget for it at that time. But two years later, the client called him out of the blue to order 2,500 pieces, and repeated the order the following year, as well. “It all came from her handling the item, and me standing in front of her and talking it up,” he says.

O2 Marketing also holds an annual event at its Oakland headquarters. The event, called Ozone, lets people see how O2 operates and better calibrates their expectations. For clients who live farther away in San Jose, O’Dea has used the San Jose offices of one of her main suppliers, Logomark (asi/67866), to host an event for her contacts in that area. “They definitely appreciated the effort,” she says.

Occasionally, it makes sense to use public events where your wearables are in action. Match-Up Promotions’ sports division has contracts with a few sports teams in Orlando, FL. For a recent pro basketball game, Match-Up produced the thousands of T-shirts that were given to fans; Thornton hosted guests in a corporate suite so they could observe the cheering sea of blue and white below, making sure to mention that the firm turned around the shirts in about 24 hours. “Seeing the product in the midst of all that excitement made a huge impression on them,” he says.
 
On a smaller scale, Hasseman suggests that distributors approach their local chambers of commerce and offer to conduct free seminars on the creation and uses of promotional apparel and products. “You are the expert,” he says, “and that would be the perfect audience for you to meet and educate.”

Robert Carey is a contributing writer for Wearables.

Breakthrough Internet Marketing Takes Work

The Internet has been a terrific business tool for small distributors. When done properly, a company’s electronic initiatives – e-mail marketing, Web site presence, blog, etc. – can make the company appear much larger than it actually is. This allows a firm to bring in more business than it could have landed by spending its marketing dollars on more-costly traditional strategies.

But experts agree the sticking point with Internet marketing is this: Too many firms, both large and small, only think they are doing it effectively. Because of its ease of use, the technology tends to foster complacency, with the actual result being that a lot of electronic marketing fails to make an impact on its targets.

Distributors inside the industry are changing that by utilizing the Web through the power of information. Kirby Hasseman, account executive for Lee Wayne Corp. (asi/356000), crafts a weekly e-mail that is less about specials and more about advice that helps recipients improve their marketing and sales to direct-program clients and decorators alike. At Oakland, CA-based O2 Marketing & Design (asi/286464), Meg O’Dea sends a monthly e-mail that contains the introductory paragraph of her blog posting, which addresses a pressing topic in the industry. She also inserts a hot link that takes recipients to the firm’s Web site so they can read the rest.

Delivering knowledge more than delivering endless product deals is catching on everywhere; a recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted that firms such as IBM, Microsoft, and Harrah’s Entertainment have employees scouring the Internet for the issues and trends that are bubbling up in various chat rooms, for use in their marketing campaigns.
O2 also keeps things fresh by making sure visitors rarely see the exact same thing twice. The site is updated weekly, with O’Dea changing key words and photos so that search engines continue to keep O2 near the top of Google search rankings. And to keep her e-mail blasts from taking too long to load on recipients’ screens, she uses only a few photos, saving them for her Web site instead. With the open rate on O’Dea’s e-newsletters at about 35%, she is clearly doing something right.

Glen Eisenberg at Toronto-based Precision Marketing suggests that distributors set up their Web sites for maximum interactivity. “If you allow visitors to drop in a logo to see it on your products, and then save and send a PDF of the result to their customers, you’re helping them make sales,” he says. “They are going to come to your site over and over.”

Other interactive elements such as e-commerce ability and contests make a site more enticing, and also allow the distributor to gather visitor information plus insight on which areas interest visitors the most. The best part? “If you are delivering real value online, you can work it into your pricing,” Eisenberg says. “People will pay more when they’re getting beneficial experiences in addition to merchandise.”

Millennial Marketing - Take It To The Next Level
By Shane Dale
October 2009

It’s not business as usual. Young adults are a vast market with plenty of potential, as long as you keep it fresh.

Baby boomers have long been viewed as the ultimate target market, both because of their strength in numbers and strength in dollars. But, guess what? Those boomers had babies … and those babies are growing up.

Millennials, teens to under-30 adults, are a burgeoning buying power, outnumbering the boomers at 70-plus million strong. Experts say their earning power is growing faster than any other age group. As a result, their buying power is too. Visa USA estimates that this generation will account for $2.45 trillion in annual spending by 2015. So they matter … big time.

Here are four rules for relating to your next top clients.

Rule #1: Be Cool, Be Clever

Carol Phillips, president of Brand Amplitude LLC, says the number one rule of selling to millennials is that the product must fit seamlessly into their lifestyle. “They are very much about function,” she says. “I write on my blog: Be quick, shiny and meaningful. It’s about being efficient.”

Anup Gupta, president of AG PrintPromo Solutions (asi/101271), says customized flash drives fit that bill. “They’re looking for something cool and trendy,” he says. Other hot high-tech-related items, such as ear buds and laptop skins, are also big sellers with this crowd, and you can’t go wrong with carabiners.

Carabiners were one of five products that Gupta offered to a local university that was putting together a no-smoking campaign. The university outsourced the job of finding distributors to a local public relations firm. Fortunately, the school and AG PrintPromo had worked together previously on athletic events and at high school recruitment activities.

For this no-smoking campaign, Gupta provided carabiners from CPS/Keystone (asi/43051), along with lip balm from HumphreyLine Inc. (asi/62050), silicone bracelets from Quikey Mfg. Co. Inc. (asi/80210) and popcorn bags from Bag Makers Inc. (asi/37940). Each item came in several colors and featured the anti-smoking Web site that the client had set up.
Gupta also supplied T-shirts that contained a clever anti-smoking message on the front and back, such as, “We’re sick of staring at your butts,” to encourage students to actually wear them. “That kind of stuff works with college students,” he says.

Altogether, the university ordered 150 T-shirts at $5.23 each, 100 tubes of lip balm at $1.55 each, 250 orange bracelets at $1.29 each, 250 carabiners at $1.18 each, and 500 popcorn bags at $0.47 each. AG PrintPromos received a 40% profit margin on the order.

Rule #2: Use Your Connections

When Jay Kapadia, certified multimedia specialist for Proforma On Point Marketing (asi/300094), thinks about the right promotional products for millennials, he considers his own preferences. After all, as a man in his late 20s, he’s a member of the target age group, and he has plenty of ties to that community.

“I believe I have a specific advantage in this industry because many of my clients range from college groups, like Greek organizations, to youth organizations to social networking groups,” he says. “I’m also an avid user of social networking and I see what my peers are purchasing, and we come aboard and promote these to our clients.”

Kapadia has no problem getting creative. He provided purple oriole drawstring backpacks from Bullet Line LLC (asi/42424) for a parade for Pride for Youth, a New York-based advocacy group for gay and lesbian teens, and threw in a purple T-shirt from Gildan for kids to find inside the backpack. “My client was thrilled at the product selection and they had other people asking where they got the bags from,” he says.

One of the most popular apparel categories among millennials, according to Kapadia, is T-shirts from leading apparel brands that feature some of the latest embellishments.

One of his clients is Sexification, an online magazine similar to Maxim and GQ that caters to the college-age crowd. He was asked to provide 1,000 shirts to promote the magazine – T-shirts for guys and tank tops for girls. “They wanted a shirt from a leading apparel retailer,” he says. “They wanted a shirt that had a soft-comfort feel to it.” He went with a T-shirt from Alpha Shirt Company (asi/34408) for the men, and Bella ribbed tank tops from Broder Bros. Co. (asi/42090) for the women.

“For decoration, we did screen printing with a design going across the shirt and an imprint on the bottom-right going from top to bottom,” Kapadia says. “My client wanted these because they were looking for popular retail-brand shirts that are geared toward their target demographics.”

Each shirt and tank top cost Kapadia $3.76, and he sold the shirts at $6.71 each. His total cost was $4,758.75, and the shirts retailed at $6,598.25, resulting in a 28% profit margin.
The key to this kind of success in the millennial market is to stay as fresh as possible, and your ability to stay on top of trends is crucial. “A product could be in and hot one minute, and by the next week, the hype is over,” Kapadia says, “so in an ever-changing marketplace, you always have to be on top and see what’s hot or not in the market.”

Rule #3: Look to Retail

Kevin McCracken, COO and cofounder of Social Imprints (asi/164607), says many products that attract this market are the same items that appeal to those who millennials seek to emulate. “We take the stuff we’ve done for bands and artists, and sell them direct to organizations,” he says. “It’s taking what we’ve done in this niche retail market and selling it to the general public.”

One of his biggest clients is Deluxe Distribution, a skateboarding company that carries five distinct brands of skateboards and related paraphernalia. Deluxe’s biggest market is 18- to 25-year-olds who, McCracken, says are careful with their money. “For Deluxe, it needs to be a certain price or they won’t buy it,” he says.

Social Imprints provides several promotional items, including logoed can coolers, coffee mugs, pennant flags and coin pouches, for one of Deluxe’s edgier brands called Krooked. “We just shipped another couple thousand of the coin pouches,” McCracken says. “It’s funny, because I wouldn’t expect the coin pouch to be popular. Those were big when I was a little kid, but people 18 to 25 are buying them. The skateboard company logo goes directly on the coin pouch, and then they carry it with them wherever they go. It’s a status symbol.”

But the most popular items that Social Imprints sells to Deluxe are the logoed sunglasses that have the Krooked logo on white print on one side. The sunglasses come in two colors: black and tortoiseshell. “It was just kind of like one of those things they were going to do as a giveaway, and it kind of exploded on them,” McCracken says.

Deluxe has ordered 288 pairs of sunglasses from Social Imprints four times in the past four months. McCracken says he nets $2.89 for each pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses and $1.75 for each pair of black. “I think that, because of the price that they’re getting for them and that they’re branded with their logo, they have been huge,” he says. “The price point is fantastic. We’re getting a 50% profit margin on those things.”

Social Imprints provides a lot of promotional products to the younger half of the millennial crowd, as well. “When we’re doing stuff for youth organizations, we’re doing the carabiner keychains, sun block, coin patches and can coolers,” McCracken says. “The carabiner water bottles are hugely popular again, and we’re doing a lot of more really basic, inexpensive stuff like stickers.

“My suggestion is if companies want to get involved with this age group, look at what’s kind of hot with the retail brands they’re buying, and try to emulate that as much as possible.”

Rule #4: Be Socially Conscious

Many marketing experts call millennials the most socially conscious generation in American history. In fact, a Visa USA survey showed 81% of them say they give what they can to charity. When the American Heart Association (AHA) decided to take advantage of this fact, it turned to Promocard Services (asi/77966), and its distributing partner, Sunflower Marketing (asi/339297), for help.

Hoops for Heart is an AHA program that teaches basketball skills to middle school students and encourages them and their parents to donate to life-saving heart and stroke research. The program reaches 40,000 middle schools nationwide each year. The association decided that they wanted to offer redeemable music, movie and ringtone cards to reward the students and schools that donated the most.

“We are the national vendor and handle all fulfillments for the Heart Association’s youth market programs,” says Kenna Freking, national accounts buyer for Sunflower Marketing. “It started with Jump Rope for Heart (aimed at younger kids), which has been around for 31 years. Typically, it is middle schools that do the Hoops program. They tend to be older, and the cards become a better fit for this program.”

Freking turned to Promocard. Karen Sorota, vice president of Promocard, says 85% of today’s business promotions include a promotional gift card of some kind and, thus, the AHA was right on trend.

The ongoing promotion started with 100,000 of these cards for their campaign three years ago. Each card contains the Hoops for Heart logo. Sorota received the artwork for the cards from Sunflower Marketing, but she says the various colors were her idea. “Since it was an ongoing program, I color coordinated the different cards for them,” she says. “The ringtone cards are purple and the music cards are orange. The colors are a little more exciting for the kids.”

Sorota says each type of card works the same. “You get a custom card, you go online, put in a unique PIN code, and it’s that code that allows you to redeem,” she says.

Each type of card has a different affiliate. The movie cards, for example, are redeemable from the movie ticket site www.fandango.com. The music cards, however, are redeemable through Promocard’s own music library that features 3 million songs. “It’s our own store for the promotional world,” Sorota says. “You’re getting a customized turnkey program. That’s not what you’re getting in the retail world.”

Sorota says the response from middle schoolers and their folks has been so overwhelming that the AHA has ordered the same amount of cards from Promocard in each successive year, including this year.

The price of the download cards varies by quantity. Distributors can purchase 500 single-song music cards for $1.55 each, 1,000 for $1.40 each, 2,500 for $1.30 each or 5,000 for $1.15 each. Ringtone cards cost a bit more. Single-movie cards cost anywhere from $13.60 each for a quantity of 100 to $9.30 each for a quantity of 2,500.

These cards may be millennials’ favorite things, but the fact that their parents seem to enjoy them just as much is a big bonus, according to Sorota. “You’re connecting consumers with things they like to do anyway,” she says. “You’re connecting a brand to those consumer goods that have those high perceived values.”

And centering a promotion on such a great cause is not only gratifying; it boosts the images of the companies involved. “Of course, raising funds to cure heart disease is very important,” Freking says. “Knowing that children in schools are gaining awareness about how to live healthy lifestyles and help find a cure, is very rewarding.”

Shane Dale is a freelance writer based in AZ.

7 Ways to Stand Out From the Crowd
By Jennifer Vishnevsky
July 2010

SHARE & BOOKMARK

A strong brand identity elicits trust from your clients, and trust from your clients begets more business. Here’s how to market yourself as a pro.

There are the logos we can’t mistake – the Starbucks mermaid, Nike’s swoosh, Tiffany’s blue box, McDonald’s golden arches. These iconic enterprises have been perfectly branded as experts in coffee, athletic apparel, baubles and burgers. s There are also the people who have successfully branded themselves as confident experts in their respective fields. Think Oprah, Donald Trump and Bono for starters. s When it comes to success in sales, too, there’s much to be said for standing out from the crowd. Here are proven ways seven of your peers are branding themselves as experts their clients can count on for all of their promotional needs.

1. Start a Video Series
Be a little off the wall.

When it comes to standing out among distributors, it helps to show a little spunk. Keith Wilson, account executive for PromoShop (asi/300446), launched a video series to show off products. The videos begin with Wilson singing a rap song: “I grant three wishes ’cause I’m Promogenie. My competition’s played out like Sergio Tacchini. If you’re lookin’ for the best and I’m not just in the West. Put me to the test, cause the genie never rests. I’ve been takin’ care of clients for a decade and a half. Livin’ off referrals, now you do the math.”

Recently Wilson began doing his own “flip of the month” – he shoots a video of new products and sends it to his clients. “I’m doing something different to stand out. I stay fresh and differentiate myself by being in front of my clients and prospects,” he says.

Wilson has found that the videos really resonate with his clients. “It’s easy to delete e-mails and screen calls, but a video keeps them captivated,” he says. And for someone who isn’t very computer-savvy, he can still dress up in genie garb and do something ingenious as part of the video. “I go way out of the box so that I can touch someone around the world with one click,” he says. Luckily, he’s been able to make sales because of the video – he has had clients come to him because the video popped up in their e-mail and reminded them of something they needed to buy.

2. Write a Book
Focus your experience.

At Custom Design Marketing Inc. (CDM, asi/173073), Bob Dawson decided to incorporate his knowledge of the incentive and recognition industry. Since he joined CDM almost three years ago, he has developed a proven method of demonstrating how incentive and recognition programs can show a true ROI.

Dawson started thinking about ways that he had been helping his clients grow sales, and he decided to write a thesis about getting a return on an incentive investment. He tied financials to incentive programs, and showed the final product to his appreciative clients. When others in the industry began approaching him about the work he published, he realized that there was an opportunity to share the message about how he combined two careers.

Dawson met with a professional writer and explained the work he was doing. He collaborated with the writer and published The Secret to Incentive Program Success: Incentive ROI That Makes Bean Counters Smile! Over the years, he has also authored several other books about the industry and ROI.

Every time Dawson meets a new prospect, he is asked whether his strategies have worked for a company. “People like stories. They want to read something that sounds like it could work for their business,” he says.

Many years ago, Rick Georges, president of Georges Communications Inc. (asi/204609), was in charge of the bachelor party for one of his best buddies. He created a T-shirt by hand with fun dares written on it that the bachelor had to complete on his “Last Night Out.”

At the party, people asked where the shirt came from. Georges says, “Over the next few months a couple more friends, and friends of friends, got married and also threw bachelor and bachelorette parties. They asked me to create Last Night Out dare shirts for them too.”

Georges realized quickly that there was a market for the Last Night Out shirts. He designed logos for the bachelor and bachelorette and started selling a few hundred of the shirts around Ohio. A handful of stores and bars purchased them – and kept reordering.

Then one day 10 years ago, Georges walked into a Spencer Gifts store and noticed that they sold bachelorette party supplies, and his wheels started turning. His initial promotion included mailing a bachelor and a bachelorette Last Night Out shirt to Spencer Gifts. “They placed their first order for 3,600 shirts,” he says. In the first three months he received reorders totaling more than $80,000.

Georges saw the potential for the addition of other products then, too. He looked to industry suppliers for some ideas, including hanging shot glasses, glow badges, sashes and name tags. “Adding these new products through ASI suppliers helped grow my business, which started with just two T-shirts, to $1.5 million in sales per year selling just bachelor and bachelorette products. I now sell to over 1,000 stores in addition to Spencer’s 700-plus stores,” he says.

4. Teach What You Know
Showcase your area of expertise.

Before she started her own company, Debbie Honig was buying promotional products in the corporate world. Through the companies she worked for, she could see that promotional products reinforced the business.

Now the president  of Active Concepts Inc. (asi/104857), Honig started speaking more than a decade ago to college students and coaching organizations about how to put the buzz in their business. “When I started lecturing at the Fashion Institute of Technology, I was teaching some classes there about how to promote and market their brand. I’d talk to many different types of students to explain the marketing aspect,” she says.

Honig finds the benefit of teaching students is twofold. “Their eyes are wide open because they haven’t been taught any of this. I come in and walk around the room and I’m coaching them on how to promote their business,” she says. She mentions that the students start to see the world outside of textbooks. And most importantly, “I’m learning from them and they’re learning from me,” she adds.

After the class is over, Honig offers a free consultation for the students working on a project or a problem. “Sometimes, they turn me over to their bosses and then I ask if I can come in to make a presentation,” she says. She’s also started mentoring two distributors due to her speaking engagements. “The more you speak to a targeted audience, the more clear and focused you become on what your goals are,” she adds.

When the economy started to sputter last year, Noel Garcia, managing director at Boundless Network Inc. (asi/143717), sat down with his client to devise a plan to help them save money. He had been working with the client for eight years. Overall, their procurement department had a goal to reduce spending by $30 million.

Garcia came up with a way to reduce their inventory requirements by 80%. He put together a presentation and showed his client different ways to save money, ranging from distribution and handling fees to inventory capacity. “The client had been carrying around $150,000 to $250,000 worth of inventory, so we were able to come up with a solution to reduce inventory down to $30,000,” he says. By working with the client to create the presentation, he was able to take the relationship to the next level.

He has always been a partner, but last year, Garcia really became an extension of the client’s department. He even helped with international presentations to their management team. “The relationship has allowed me to have a lot more visibility into the account and the people who are involved. Salespeople face a challenge, being on the outside,” he says. “We’re on the same team. The relationship has created a lot more stickiness between us and the client.”
Garcia’s reward was a three-year exclusive contract, which should result in a threefold increase in business. “As they saw the value that I can provide as far as helping them achieve their objectives, it increased the trust in our relationship,” he says.

About 10 years ago, Paula Gossett, sales rep with Brown & Bigelow (asi/148500), started taking note of her regular, loyal clients and volunteered to work alongside them at their events, basically becoming a part of their team. She was already booking regular business with these clients, so she was focusing on providing added value and strengthening interpersonal relationships.

Case in point: One client was having a very large event on the island of Oahu, HI. There were 1,000 attendees. Gossett provided several items for this event and had everything shipped to the hotel. “I flew out and worked with the client for five, 12-hour days, getting everything set up, stuffing goodie bags, polishing awards, etc., and I did this at my own expense,” she says.

“One item we provided was Aloha Shirts with the client’s logo as part of the pattern of the fabric. ... totally custom job,” Gossett says. “Since the shirts were done overseas it made sense to bring them in to the country through the Port of Honolulu instead of into L.A. and then shipping them back. The only hitch was to figure out who would receive the shirts, count them and store them until the event.”

Gossett located a large commercial laundry and contracted with them to receive the shirts, count, press, hang, bag them and deliver them to the hotel. The laundry even placed the shirts on a rack by size so that it was very easy for the hotel to do room drops.

“The client is still talking about this,” Gosset says. The event is held annually and she does about $250,000 in sales a year with them. She notes that helping at special events is also a way to meet other contacts within the company. “I have extremely loyal clients. The projects are never bid out,” she says.

For Mike Beckman, head of Proforma-BPM (asi/300094), giving presentations stemmed from a desire to share what was working for him. After Proforma asked him to share his knowledge at a national convention, he decided to hit the public-speaking circuit, because he enjoyed it so much. He earned a spot as a panelist for several education tracks at The ASI Show Orlando and will be giving three presentations at The ASI Show Chicago this month. Locally, Beckman offers his presentations to various chambers of commerce and business organizations. He recently spoke at the North Fulton Chamber and a local rotary club. “I enjoy sharing my insights into marketing so that others can possibly learn something that will expand their own business,” he says. “It’s also a great way to solidify my own personal thinking. Bringing business to myself is really an afterthought. My mindset is that if I provide a service to others, that service will come back to me in some shape or form.”

Beckman cites his public speaking engagements when he speaks to customers and prospects. “I can literally tell people that I’m an industry expert because I speak on it and share my knowledge. I tell people that they can learn from an expert like me,” he says. After recently speaking at a local chamber of commerce, he also booked two jobs.

Jennifer Vishnevsky is a staff writer for Advantages.