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Word of mouth advertising is effective because it is trustworthy – when a friend or relative recommends a product or service, you know you can trust their opinion based on the history you have with them. Word of mouth advertising fits well into any budget because it is inexpensive, but it does take a concentrated effort. Here are some tips on how to encourage word of mouth advertising among your customers.

Give Rewards
The most obvious way to get your customers talking about your business is to offer them something in return. This should be a carefully thought out promotion or you may end up spending too much money in your promotional offers. Referral postcards are a great way to keep promotional offers within reason. Offer customers a few of your postcards at checkout. For each new customer who comes in with a referral postcard, the existing customer named on the card could be given 10% off one item or 20% off a purchase of $100 or more. You may want to offer the same special to the new customers as well. Continue reading »

Summer is a great time to connect with people and attract new customers to your business. The sunshine improves every one’s mood, and people are outside and accessible. Take advantage of the summer time to promote your business by trying a few of the fun summer promotional ideas below.

Sponsor a Swim Team
Even small towns have swim teams for children that compete at regional swim meets. You can check at your local swimming pool to find out who is in charge, and ask to sponsor the team. You could purchase their swim gear and have your business name printed on their swim caps. Not only will this help get your business name out there, it will show people that you are involved in the community.

Leave Brochures at Hotels
When you go on vacation, you can leave business brochures at your hotels. You can also leave them at the different restaurants you eat at. Just be sure that your printed brochure has all of your contact info, including a web address, email address, and Facebook or Twitter info.

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Marketing is a great field to be in because there will always be companies who need help selling their products.  The following steps will help you get started in this profitable and creative line of work.

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To determine if your company’s marketing campaign is successful, it is most useful to gather and analyze data pertaining to your customers and their habits. This can be gathered in several different ways. 

Website traffic analysis

Any successful business should have a website these days, even if you don’t do business directly through it. Of course, it is a good option to allow customers not only to learn more about your product, but also to make purchases via your website with a credit card. Many types of shopping cart software are available, and most of these allow for easy tracking of customer habits. Not only do they tell you what the customer bought, they can also tell you which other items they have viewed without buying. 

Likewise, you can also track where a customer came from using link tracking codes or web analyzers included in many website hosting packages. These will often tell you what site or page the customer came from, what the last page on your site they looked at was, and how many hits any page has gotten. Use this data to see which sites bring you the most customers, and put more of your advertising on sites that generate the most web traffic for you. Affiliate links can be used in the same way: using tracking codes to see what sites are bringing you the most money, and where click-throughs are coming from.

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It is important to regularly assess your marketing efforts to make sure they are producing the results you expect.  When you do so, watch out for these signs that should be red flags.

Not Doing Your Homework

We’ve all done it before.  We see or hear about a new marketing technique that sounds great.  So we throw it into our campaign without a second thought. 

Not a good idea.

When you assess your marketing efforts, look for any of these type of tactics that were thrown in without due diligence.  Go over them a bit more closely than you do everything else.  Make sure they are holding up their weight.

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Advertising is important in creating your brand presence, but a strong brand is more than a name and a logo: it must generate an emotional bond with the customer to keep them coming back. It must be memorable enough to gain the attention of potential customers and differentiate it from other brands. What is it about your brand that is special? Why should a customer choose your brand over others? Your advertisements should build and then communicate these things to the customer. A strong brand should seem relevant to the lifestyle of the customer to keep them coming back even after they have made an initial purchase.

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Have you ever wondered why so many door-to-door salespersons, Online ads, and infomercials use those annoying sell techniques? Surely, if they knew how much it turns the stomach, no one would use the hard sell approach, right? Wrong. The hard sell will continue to be used because it works. “Cold call” advertising requires a much more aggressive approach; these companies don’t have the advantage of time to develop relationships through a series of postcard and brochure mailings. As corny and obvious as the hard sell can be, any company can benefit from incorporating some of the techniques into their printed advertisements. Here are some tips so that you can increase the effectiveness of your printed brochure or printed postcard by learning from the hard sell.

1. Hype
The hard sell hype is ten times more extreme than other hype methods of advertising. Hype allows the salesperson to create an “event” surrounding the launch of a new product or service by literally counting down the weeks or days to a deadline, such as placing a countdown clock on the website. This is often used in postcard printing by sending out a postcard in threes, such as three months in a row.

2. Time Limit
A time-sensitive offer invites urgency, creating the sense that if a buyer doesn’t act now, they’ll miss out on a valuable opportunity. In a hard sell, the time line has always (it seems) almost expired. Of course, the offer stands again the next day or two. Yet, including a time-sensitive offer encourages consumers to act faster, so use this technique in your brochures and postcards by including a timely incentive. For instance, offer free shipping for the month of June only.

3. Reviews of Value
Have you ever wondered if those reviews of the product are real? Sometimes, yes, but most of the time they are exaggerated. Hard core salespersons know that social reviews of a service or product improves the believability of their offer. The only problem is that most of these reviews are encouraged to be over-the-top by promises of special discounts or the ability to order early – just to make sure the reviewer gets the product before they run out. Including customer testimonials in brochure and even postcard printing really does work, as long as it’s real. Include the customer’s first name, the company if appropriate, location, and even a picture if the customer approves. Use the exact quote that the customer sent. People can tell when it’s not real.

4. Intimate Approach
Also known as Guerrilla Marketing, reaching prospects on a personal level can build trust. Although this is only short-term relationship building (remember the time-sensitive offer?), this approach gives buyers the feeling that a company knows exactly what is needed to solve their problems. Unlike an impersonal brochure, Guerrilla Marketing involves telling personal hardships and how the buyer can overcome them using the service or product offered. A brochure can be made more personal by including such information. For instance, feature a short success story of a customer or two to connect with prospects on a more personal level.

There are many more hard sell techniques out there, but these four are the ones most important to incorporate into your brochure and postcard printing pieces. Just try to avoid the corny phrases (Don’t be only one in your neighborhood without one. Order now – only 10 left!) and be honest so that your customers will order your products or services for years to come.

Every company needs an Internet presence and marketing plan. A company without these marketing strategies is a company that is missing out on valuable opportunities to reach a nation or world-wide customer base. Even for those businesses who only want to keep their customer base small or local, an Internet marketing plan gets them in touch with the perfect customer they may otherwise never have come across. A dynamic website design, the use of search engine optimization, social marketing, and even print media are all a part of making your presence known on the web.

Dynamic Website
The design of your website needs to be professional, which is why many businesses opt for a web designer. A professional designer knows the current trends for website design and can combine these trends with the image you want to portray. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can build your own website, but be sure to keep some design tips in mind:

• Keep it simple – most websites today are leaving a lot more white space around text and images and breaking up text into columns for readability purposes.
• Use large fonts – the larger your headline font, the more quickly customers will notice it. It should be noticeably larger than the rest of your text, including any subheadings.
• Include vivid, bold images – the more attractive your graphics, the more attractive your website will be. 3D graphics are very popular, as well as enhanced photographic images.
• Study your favorite websites – get inspiration for your website design from those that appeal to you the most. Not sure where to look? Check out these 16 Sites for Web Design Inspiration.
• Use tutorials – especially if you are a beginner with web design programs, using a web design tutorial will help you get the professional look you need.

Search Engine Optimization
Even if you design the most attractive website out there, no one will find you if you don’t show up in the first few pages of Google or Yahoo. Getting your website to meet SEO standards requires more than can be discussed in this article, so your best bet is to hire a professional. Or you could teach yourself some of the basics and at least get the ball rolling until you can afford to hire a professional. Many free SEO tutorials are available and provide both the information and tools you need to get started.

Social Marketing
Keeping up with your customers through social marketing sites builds strong loyalty. Social marketing helps your customers feel like you are there for them no matter the time of day. Posting regular articles through Facebook and Twitter updates customers regularly in regards to your company. Any relevant useful tips are also great posting material. Starting a blog and allowing customers to leave comments allows them to feel involved in your day-to-day operations, and builds a relationship with your customers.

Print Materials
What, exactly, do print materials have to do with Internet marketing? Everything, in a sense. Even if your business is solely Online, you have to have business cards to hand out at business conventions or to the prospect you meet at the grocery store. Even brochure printing, flyers, poster printing, or any other print media will help spread the word about your website. If you have an office or storefront, advertise this information on your website, and advertise your website on print media. This technique gets you more results for your marketing dollar.

In short, no online presence equals an old-fashioned appearance. Keeping your company image updated with current marketing trends will show that your business can handle your customers’ needs more efficiently than your competitor who barely has a working website.

The concept of a print and mail service is simple: you send a digital ad file to a company that will print and mail your ad, usually along with many others to make up a packet of ads, and the company will use their own mailing list for your ad. Bam! – thousands of new clients, just like that. You pay them one fee and they do all the work. If you use a few services at a time, you could potentially mail your ad to thousands of prospective buyers within weeks.

Sounds good, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite that smoothly.

Many print and mail companies don’t have a high level of return on the offers they churn out. I say churn because these companies often take as many advertisers as they can without care about the quality of the ad presentation. That means that you’d have to reach tens of thousands of people to get the same return on your offer that you would if you mailed out your postcard or print ad yourself. If you get a 3 percent return from mailing your offer by itself, you can expect to get about .5 percent return if you use a print and mail company, and oftentimes it’s even lower than that.

Why Such a Low Return?

The reasons for the low return rate are speculation from many differing Web sites and marketing experts. No one has done any official research into why the print and mail companies have such a low return rate. Here are a few reasons:

They have a non-targeted mailing list. For products or services that only a chosen population needs, a print and mail company’s list won’t do just because it’s not targeted. The list might be geographically targeted, but that’s about it. The mailing list is one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial, part of a successful direct mail campaign. Your ad can’t do any good if you don’t get it into the hands of the people who are likely to be interested in it.

Poor quality materials. Many print and mail companies use the thinnest paper they can and don’t use quality inks or quality printers. Many of the ads come out looking amateurish or even worse, smudged from the printer.

Double-sided printing. To cut costs and make a bigger profit, many print and mail companies will use double-sided printing, with two ads on one piece of paper. This makes the consumer have to choose between the two ads if there are coupons on each side: which one will the consumer give up? There’s a good chance it’ll be yours unless your product or service appeals to everyone, which is pretty hard to do.

Dishonesty in number delivered. There is no way of knowing if the company actually sends out as many ad packets as they say they do. If the company says it’ll charge only $3 per 100 ads sent out, how do you know that they are actually sending out 100 ads? Many companies cut costs and pocket profit by sending out a smaller number of ads than promised.

With all of these negatives associated with print and mail services, it’s smart to research the company before you hand over any of your hard earned money. Your best bet is to look for complaints on forums and Web sites and to compare the price of the print and mail service with the separate prices of using an online printing company (which is generally cheaper than an offline printing company) and mailing the ads yourself. It might take some time, but time is money and you don’t want to waste either element.

The low cost and easy design and printing of postcards is not the only reason that they tend to be one of the most popular direct mail ventures. They can also be incredibly easy to mail. Just follow a few simple guidelines to avoid returned mail or information covered by postal markings.

Mailing Layout

The back of the postcard can contain other information besides the mailing information but must follow postal placement rules. The bottom 5/8^th inches of a standard 5×7 postcard should be free of information, since this is where the post office prints bar codes. Keep the mailing address on the right, preferably no higher than 2 3/4^th inches from the bottom of the card. Also be sure to keep it above the bar code area. Leave enough room for the postal stamp in the upper right hand corner along with the postal date that the post office will stamp onto the card. If you include any other address on the back, besides the return or mailing address, be sure to leave off the state and zip code. The post office scans the lower 2/3^rd of postcards for the mailing address.

Mailing List

Whether you address the postcards yourself or use a mailing service, an updated client mailing list will save both time and money. One way to keep this list current is by including your return address. That way, the post office will be able to return the postcards with invalid or outdated addresses, and then you can delete those from your list. Two programs that can also help keep your list current are the NCOALink 18 and NCOA. These two programs alert you to whenever a change of address has been made at the post office. The difference between the two is that the NCOA keeps track of 48 permanent address changes, while the NCOALink 18 only provides information of 18 changes per address.

Use these guidelines for easier mailing whether you do it yourself or hire a mailing service. Just be sure to check with the service providers for their postcard mailing requirements, if you do decide to use help.