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Promotional Products
As a promotions director for a lot of super markets, one of my key responsibilities was finding promotional products for the events we make. I worked with distributors to order, design and customize these items to promote the super markets image to the general public. When it comes to finding Promotional Products for your business, you want to find items that feature your company name prominently. If you're promoting a "toys event", you don't want to give people watches, or mugs. Promotional Products Made Simple Promotional products marketing fits easily into any advertising budget. Promotional products complement and actually increase the effectiveness of other advertising media. They can be directed to selected audiences, which dramatically increases their effectiveness. And they remain in use for long periods of time to repeat the advertising message each time the product is used, without extra cost per exposure. People like to receive them. And since the items are useful and appealing, they are effective as incentives and motivators. Because there are so many products available, there is a lot of flexibility in planning a successful promotion. The Power of Promotional Items and Gifts In 1993, a Baylor University study2 found that salespeople who handed out promo items received 22% more referrals than those who did not give out free gifts. In addition, when compared to coupons (discount offers), promotional goods produce more sales, according to a 1993 Southern Methodist University study3. Within the food delivery industry, the study found that "customers who received promotional products reordered up to 18% sooner than those who received coupons and up to 13% sooner than those who received no promotions." A similar 1994 SMU study4 of dry cleaning customers discovered that "new customers that received promotional products spent 27% more than those who received coupons." Finally, promotional items are a great way to thank your employees and partzners for a job well done. I'm promotions director for a lot of super markets.
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Sell Big Ticket Items Now! - 1 Simple Step To Keep Your Fears From Holding YOU Back First, some background on today's topic. I've had a terrible week. Not terrible as in I got nothing done because I did actually get quite a bit done. But man, I struggled. And I didn't even really understand why. I have to admit, most of what I got done happened between Thursday and Sunday. Have you ever had a week like that where you struggled to get things done? Or worse yet, struggled and didn't get anything done? Or maybe it just FELT LIKE you didn't accomplish anything? I hate weeks like that and I rarely feel that way. So why was this week different? At first, I couldn't put my finger on anything specific. Looking back and replaying my week in my mind didn't cause anything to stand out either. In short, nothing really clicked as the cause for the way I was feeling and acting. So then I decided to do what I always do when I am trying to solve a problem. I just kinda let it go for a while and did something else. And THEN, I finally figured out what the problem was! It wasn't anything specific about THIS week. It was related to something I had done several weeks ago. And it's very ironic that this was the cause of my problem. You see, several weeks ago I had drafted my 90 marketing plan. This document describes what I plan to do in my Big Ticket Marketing efforts over a 3 month period. It's actually not that hard to figure out but it is something that you need to track closely and see which weeks of marketing effort have the biggest payoff. In other words, you want to track which things you did that resulted in the biggest payoff in sales, opt-ins by potential customers, joint ventures, branding, etc. Basically all the stuff we need to do to as part of our Big Ticket Marketing efforts. We want to repeat those things that give us the largest payoff in our next 3 month marketing plans and drop those things that didn't work out. And of course we always try new things that we think will work, as well. Anyway, the reason that I was struggling and feeling like I wasn't accomplishing this week was because... I was in OVERWHELM! I had a lot of tasks I wanted to accomplish, because I'm an ambitious guy. I want to do well and I have a lot of goals I want to reach. This is all fine, but the point of having a 90 day marketing plan is so that it will be easy to focus on the specific set of tasks that I need to accomplish each week by focusing on ONLY ONE main area each week. And normally, this system is very effective at keeping me focused. But, ironically, the act of creating the 90 day marketing plan made me look at everything I had to accomplish in the next 3 months and I was sort of stuck in that mode. I wasn't being effective at focusing on this weeks tasks because I was in OVERWHELM thinking about everything I had to get done, overall. Have you ever experienced that? I think we all have at one point or another. However, I am disappointed that I didn't recognize what was going on sooner. My background as a software engineer for Microsoft forced me to be pretty disciplined about focusing on what I needed to do and what our team needed to do every week to accomplish our goals. And sometimes the ship cycles lasted between 1.5 to 2 years. Plus I have a black belt in Hapkido (a Korean martial art like a cross between Tae Kwon Do and Aikido), which requires a lot of training discipline, patience, practice and long term view. But at the same time requires you to learn and work on smaller portions of the entire body of techniques, patterns, because that is the only way you can really learn what you need to know. Anyway, my point is that I should know better and yet I still fell into the fear from OVERWHELM. And I think everyone experiences not only overwhelm but other fears about what they want to do as well. The title of this article promised you a simple secret to keep your fears from holding you back - from selling Big Ticket Items. Can you guess what the secret is? I'll give you a hint. It's not really a secret at all. In fact everyone knows about this but unfortunately not everyone knows what to do especially in a case like overwhelm. Ready... the secret is ACTION! Yes, ACTION. Now you are probably wondering... "Hey, wait a sec, you just said you were in overwhelm, how can action possibly be the secret for that?" Napoleon Hill, in his book "Think and Grow Rich" said, "Action is the real measure of intelligence". Thomas Huxley said: "The great end of life is not knowledge but action." Intelligence means nothing, action means everything. I knew what I had to do this week and yet I was struggling to do it. I even had a 90 day marketing plan with each week spelled out for me and yet I was stuck. I got unstuck when I realized I was overwhelmed and decided to do something about it. What I decided to do was to take action. But the type of action I decided to take was influenced by my precious experience both in software development and martial arts. Have you heard of Kaizen? Kaizen is a Japanese word which basically means 'continuous and incremental improvement'. The word came from when the Japanese were introduced to the work of W. Edward Deming when he was stationed in Japan to help them rebuild after World War II. While there, Deming introduced them to what later became know as Total Quality Management. What I like about Kaizen is that it takes small action steps over time to solve problems. The beauty of this approach is that you can take something that currently seems daunting or puts you in overwhelm and start by only focusing on one small step that you can take to help improve the problem. The small step is so easy that you bypass your overwhelm and fears and just do that one small step. Then after a little while you introduce another small step and continuously improve the situation or problem until it is solved. So in this way you CAN take action, even if it is very small, and slowly over time each action you take has an effect that builds on all the others and creates an unstoppable force until your problem has been solved. The fact that the action is so small makes it easy for you to do SOMETHING and not focus on how much you have to do. Maybe a short example will help. One of my goals is to increase the readership of my articles and to get more people exciting about Big Ticket Marketing. One of the best ways to do that is to get my blog and my articles out to as many readers as I can. So this week, I wanted to get my Blog and my articles listed in as many E-zine and Electronic List directories as possible. I even have software to help me do this. Guess how many directories and list locations there are? Well... there are over 1000 just in the built in database in the software I am using. I kept putting this off, because I had a bunch of other stuff I needed to get done as well. But this was a major focus for me this week. Finally, what I decided to do was to just add my information to ONE directory or list every time I finished another task. Breaking it down so that I only had to worry about one entry every so often REALLY helped me make some progress in this area, without worrying about how many there were. I still have a long way to go, but my initial goal was to get listed in 20-25 sites and I'm currently sitting at 17. A few more sites and I will have met my goal! Plus, Kaizen is really how I study martial arts so the process is very familiar to me even when applied to something else. Ok, so the one 1 simple step you need to take anytime you have a fear to conquer or an overwhelming situation to deal with is to decide on one simple action that you can do in a very short amount of time that will ultimately help you solve your problem. Do this, and then increase what you are doing in that area by a little bit each time and before you know it you will have your problem solved. Try this! It works amazingly well with very little effort. And you get a huge amount of satisfaction knowing that you are taking steps to accomplish what you want to get done... and you'll be doing it almost effortlessly. By the way, if you want a great little resource on how to apply Kaizen, you should get The Kaizen Way - One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. It's a relatively recent book and a quick read at 182 pages. You can find it on Amazon or at Barnes and Noble online. Maybe this is your first small action step. Also, check out the resource box below for some websites that will give you some resources you can really use related to your Big Ticket Marketing efforts! The Most Powerful Marketing Weapon Ever Invented It was probably first discovered out there in the caves or wherever else the history of mankind begun. And yet this weapon has been used so sparingly over the centuries. It is so powerful that those surprisingly few who have stumbled on to it and appreciated and respected its power have ended up making untold fortunes. Creating Your Future with a Marketing Plan Almost everyone who dreams of starting their own business is familiar with the fact that they should create a business plan. However, often that's where many people stop. When you created your business plan, what did you do with it? You actually have the base for the next step, which is creating your marketing plan. Without the plan of how you are going to market your business, the business plan is just an empty jumble of words speaking of dreams and desires. The marketing plan takes those dreams and creates a strategy for how to make those dreams come true. How To Go From Under Dog to Top Dog by Unleashing The Power Of a Postcard The Tale of Two Dentists... Service Marketers; How?s Your Packaging? When a shopper picks up a product in a store, what's the first thing they notice? The packaging, right? The same holds true for someone buying a service. Marketing ? Like a Game of Chess Have you started thinking about your Valentines Day Promotion yet? Beyond Fear And Greed: Emotions That Sell Fear and Greed. The stock-in-trade of sales. Appeal to them, and your success is assured. But isn't there more to life than those two emotions? The Secret to Adding Credibility to Your Business ? Testimonials! You may not realize it, but you already have a gold mine of endorsements waiting to be created. Everyone who is serious about building a business and creating credibility uses this idea. What is it? Testimonials from your satisfied clients. Developing A Focused Marketing Strategy You want all of your marketing messages to have a single focus, so they pull together instead of competing with each other. Great! So how do you come up with one? Youre Halfway There!...Or Not Part 2 Now that you have had a chance to create a game plan for accomplishing your business goals during the third quarter of this year, let's focus on the fourth quarter of this year. Do You Know Where Your Email Address is Today? Having people go to your website is not always easy: remind them with a special business card. Thinking About More Business Did you increase your business in the past 12 months? Don't discriminate between more new clients or old clients spending more money--count the increase either way. If you didn't, you really should be asking yourself why not. Are Your Marketing Efforts Working...Or Could They Use A Little Help? Marketing is a broad business subject that encompasses a range of activities including advertising, public relations, sales, and promotions. Generally, you will find that people often confuse sales with marketing, when in fact the two are quite different. Marketing is all about getting a product or service into the market, promoting it, influencing behavior, and encouraging sales turnover. Sales, quite distinctly, is the actual transaction of getting a product or service into the hands of your customers. Build A Successful Business By Staying Connected Over the course of your business life you'll come in contact with a number of other business people. They could be lawyers, business services, suppliers, customers, etc. These people are important to your business in more ways than one. If you hired them or they bought your product or service, you can also gain their business knowledge, experience, ideas, and advice. How do you do this? Stay Connected! Network! Networking is when two or more different businesses stay in contact on a regular basis to build and improve each others business. Postcard Marketing Done Right Say it with a post card. A well designed, colorful, high impact postcard in the mail box of your prospect is your best ticket to a new customer. For your existing customer, a marketing campaign which includes frequent post cards is the perfect start to new sales - this is one of the key small business marketing strategies. Tooting Your Own Horn "If he who has a thing to sell Goes and whispers in a well, He won't be so apt to make the dollars As he who climbs a tree and hollers!" -- Anonymous These Four Things Will Make Your Direct Marketing Successful Direct marketing is built on four things. The other way to look at it is that when you think direct marketing is not working only one of four things can be wrong. Let's look at each. Trade Show Marketing ? Getting Prepared for the Big Event With the increase in number of tradeshows being held across the world, it has become imperative to check the trade shows' credentials before you commit participation. Here are some quick tips on checks to ensure that you are not heading for a dud trade show: Adapting Blog Technologies To Corporate E-Newsletters Every January, trade publications put out a list of predictions for the coming year. They discuss products, services and trends that they think will change the way business is done, labeling these "disruptive technologies." The idea of disruptive technologies comes from Clayton Christensen's 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. A disruptive technology is a method, procedure, skill, device, or material that redefines the competitive standards. Note that the technology doesn't have to be a physical item and that it often forces us to re-examine the way we work. InfoWorld's list of disruptive technologies for 2003 included open source, self-service CRM, digital identity, and my personal favorite, Weblogs. How can a simple, Web-based journal be disruptive? For starters, it's worth describing what a Weblog is. Basically, a Weblog or "blog" is a personally created, online, time-stamped web page that includes the thoughts, ideas, and comments of the "blogger." The musings are usually brief, but they are published frequently and consistently. People can subscribe to receive the blog updates via e-mail. Often, the blogger is an expert on the subject he/she is discussing. At first glance, it doesn't appear that blogs would be at all disruptive. So why all the hype? If we look closely at the structure and intent of blogs as a communications tool, we can see some powerful ideas at work. Blogs are a direct, one-to-many vehicle for communicating ideas. They expand an individual's ability to communicate. They are fresh and timely. The blogger, in order to maintain interest, must communicate often. Blogs enable a single person to share ideas, insights, and useful knowledge with an audience. Thanks to the Web, the audience can be a global one. Whenever a new tool or process-such as e-mail- expands communications, the effects are far-reaching and dramatic. Even though blogs have been around for 3-4 years, they could be the next big thing. Blogs Are The "Real Voice" Two important characteristics of blogs are that they are written by a person who is knowledgeable and passionate about the topic, and that they are written in a "real voice." This is a cosmic shift from the marketing and public relations materials that are the staple of business communications. Often, when information goes through a formal marketing or PR process, the end result is an attractive, expensive, stale, diluted document written in corporate speak. This result is generally due to the processes that evolved to accommodate the costs and standards of print technology, rather than to the incompetence or malevolence of corporate communicators. The edge, the authenticity, and the voice of the professional speaking to his fellow professionals is lost. Blogs offer the human voice that can be loud, controversial, and even wacky. But the realness of the blog inspires trust and piques people's curiosity. A blog can create a community and a dynamic discussion. If you are a product manager working in the chemical products industry, chances are that you would rather hear about the real experiences of other product managers in your industry than read a glossy marketing piece put out by the marcom department. Blogs fit this communications requirement perfectly. Blogs Are Simple Weblogs are easy for people to publish, read and respond to. They can foster a community of like-minded individuals and be the catalyst for spirited discussions. Blogs are an inherently proactive form of communications. Weblog participants can subscribe to receive scheduled postings to the blog. Weblogs are inexpensive to produce and they can include a variety of multimedia content (audio, video, files, etc.) and hypertext links that add value to the discussion. Blogs Empower The Individual There are a host of tools on the Internet that make blogging a snap! Blogs empower a single person to capitalize on the reach and ubiquity of the Web. And they don't require the investment or recurring costs of print technologies. Blogs Empower The Enterprise Blogs empower the knowledgeable people within a company to share their insights, know-how, and expertise. The value to a corporation is that this knowledge can be organized, distributed, and leveraged to increase the value of different product and service offerings to the customer. If a corporation is going to use a blog, however, it should understand that controlling the content of the discussion is difficult. If you want an authentic exchange, you have to be willing to accept the stone-throwing and critical comments that often occur in a blog. This requires extending trust and giving up some of the control a company would normally have when it publishes a press release or hosts its own online forum, for example. The upside is that people will listen to a real voice. Adapting Blog Concepts To Your Newsletters You can adapt blog technologies to your corporate electronic newsletters by taking advantage of the underlying concepts. You can, for example: * Publish a small amount of well-organized information frequently and regularly * Include content from individuals who are knowledgeable and passionate about their work * Make it easy for your employees to communicate directly in their own, human voice * Respect the reader by making sure your e-newsletter provides value and that he/she wants to receive it. E-newsletters geared towards educating a marketplace, rather than those focused on advertising or marketing, turn out to be particularly effective. E-newsletters offer an affordable, direct way for the experts in a company to communicate with an audience. This means that a product manager or an engineer can enhance the flow of information and make it more accessible to those who want it. Think of your channel and the information needs of your partners. Your company has a wealth of information that would help them sell your products more effectively. There is much insight within your partner community that could be leveraged throughout the channel. And your technical experts and engineers have critical knowledge and understanding that everyone could utilize. What's often missing is an easy way for the "know-how" keepers to capture their knowledge, organize it, and deliver it. The best e-newsletters are written in a real voice, not in corporate speak. Two years ago, the book The Cluetrain Manifesto shook up the business community (see http://www.cluetrain.com/book.html). The revelation? That business is about humans. As Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Petzinger Jr. writes in the foreword: "I was dumbstruck. There in a few pages, I read a startlingly concise summary of everything I'd seen in twenty-one years as a reporter, editor, bureau chief and columnist for my newspaper. The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with people on the outside." It turns out that the human "voice" is an underserved or ignored need. In a world of 6+ billion inhabitants, the individual craves to speak and to be heard. References Blogs As Disruptive Tech: How Weblogs Are Flying Under The Radar Of The Content Management Giants, By John Hiler, CEO, Webcrimson, http://www.webcrimson.com/ourstories/blogsdisruptivetech.Htm Making Room For Disruptive And Emergent Technologies, By Hugh Blackmer, Science Librarian, Washington & Lee University, http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/sabb/nitle2.html* Blogs As Disruptive Innovation: What A Brave New World Blogging Is Building!, by Dr. James V. McGee, Professor, The Kellogg School Of Management, http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2002/05/15.html Weblogs At Harvard Law, Bookmark List For ABCD Weblogs Meeting, By Dave Winer, http://Blogs.Law.Harvard.Edu/Stories/Storyreader$199 Networking Basics Turn Yourself Into A Profit Making Giant I would like to introduce you to one of my brick and mortar business I run. It is called AFM Computer Repair. This business takes me about 5 hours a week, yet I usually make a few hundred dollars cash in my pocket spending money a week. Now I know what everyone is thinking, "How the HELL do you run a brick and mortar business with only 5 hours of your time a week!". Well its quite simple. Its called networking. Ok I admit the location isn't mine, it doesn't have my name on it. But the benefits are great I don't pay monthly bills! This is like a dream come true, your own store with no bills.
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