PGP Tip: 3 Things to Avoid in Your Marketing Materials

To improve the quality and effectiveness of the messages in your marketing materials, train yourself to avoid three things:

1. Listing product or service features without translating them into benefits. This forces the prospect to figure out why a feature is important or how it might be useful. Don't let this happen - the prospect may miss an important benefit or ascribe a benefit that doesn't exist. To determine the benefits associated with a specific feature, name the feature and say the phrase "what this means...."
2. Providing vague and unmeasurable benefits. A vague benefit is one that can't be quantified, such as "reduces cost" or "improves productivity". Make benefits tangible by attaching a numeric value that the prospect can calculate: "reduces cost by $3 per item" or "improve productivity by 37%". Any business can make a vague claim. Set your business apart by using a concrete example.
3. Describing benefits in generic or jargon-laden words. A benefit description written in industry jargon risks confusing the prospect or causing him to lose interest quickly. It also fails to articulate why the benefit is unique.

When Your Marketing Materials Talk, Does Anybody Listen?

When Your Marketing Materials Talk, Does Anybody Listen?

Businesses today have an immense arsenal of marketing materials, ranging from printed material (business cards, brochures, product and service flyers, newsletters and direct mail marketing pieces) to digital formats (web sites, web-based marketing and social media). While there is significant potential power in having so many ways to reach customers and prospects, this comes with a responsibility to align all the materials with their interests and behaviors. Marketing materials now bear the burden of being consistent, relevant and beneficial to the intended audience. As marketing guru Seth Godin puts it, "In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff."

Avoiding the ordinary

It may surprise you that avoiding the ordinary is rather simple: know yourself, know your audience, and tell an accurate story clearly.

Know Yourself

Why does your business or organization exist? How would things be different if your business or organization wasn't operating? What are its core values? Is it industry leader? The answers to these questions are embodied in the mission and vision statements and tell your employees and target audience exactly what to expect form doing business with you. Having a mission statement provides focus for marketing activities, while the vision statement describes the business or organization's future aspirations.

Know Your Audience 

Who is your ideal customer? To help answer this question, create a customer profile to include age, gender, job title, ethnicity, material status, skills, interests, personality traits, values, frustrations, likes and dislikes. Think about who specifically is looking for the products and services you offer rather than everyone you might possibly sell to.

Your target audience can be defined by demographic information - the physical attributes of a population. The most commonly used demographic information for marketing is age, gender, income level, race and ethnicity. Psycho-graphic information adds to demographic information by incorporating the interests, attitudes, opinions, values, lifestyle and personality of a population. Psycho-graphic information is used to predict why a prospect might buy.

Tell Your Story

A business or organization's story uses clear language and visual images to explain how customers will benefit. The focus of the story is on the customer, not on the business or its products and services. Here are some questions that help craft the story:

• How will your products or services benefit you audience (i.e., what's in it for me)?
• What needs do your products or services fulfill? What problems do they solve?
• What value does your business or organization bring to the audience that can't be found from your competitors?

Creating a brand identity

The brand identity of your business or organization is embodied in its visual images: logo, printed materials and web site. Taken together, they define the character of your business. Because most successful sales are based on establishing a trusting relationship between buyer and seller, it is important that the brand identity accurately represent the values of the business and that it be consistent across all marketing channels.

Here are some of the elements of brand identity:

• The promises you make to customers and how well you keep them. Besides the promises related to specific products and services, this also includes overall business practices like meeting deadlines and delivery dates, delivering added value, and the process for solving problems or making good on mistakes.
• The benefits that accrue to customers from using your products and services. These include tangibles like more time or money and intangibles like enhanced status or greater feeling security.
• How you nurture the business relationship. Regular communication via printed and web-based newsletters, social media, in-person visits, and personalized messages demonstrate that the relationship with the customer matters to the business.

Brand identity extends to the communication style used by your business or organization to provide information. The elements of communication style are words, grammar, syntax and meaning. The most effective communication style is clear (uses commonly-understood words), economical (uses simple sentence structure), free from jargon and obscure references, and has variety.

Pamela Wilson, a graphic designer and marketing consultant in Nashville, Tennessee, suggests that all brands have a personality, such as friendly, reserved, classic or contemporary. The brand identity embodies this personality in the choice of visual elements - color palette, typography, symbols, graphics, photographs, logo, communication style. For a traditional, established business, Pamela suggests using a classic typeface, conservative, rich colors, and more formal, corporate communication style. In contrast, a contemporary, high-energy company can use more edgy visual elements, a non-traditional typeface, and a friendly, casual communication style.

By carefully establishing your brand identity, all your marketing materials will appear to be coming from the same source over time, creating a sense of dependability in the mind for the customer.

Basic marketing package

A basic marketing package consists of five elements: business cards, company brochure, product and service flyers, newsletter and web site.

• Business cards: Business cards are often the first point of contact for a prospect and start the process of establishing a relationship. To avoid visual clutter, edit the information down to the essentials: company name, address, logo and tagline; the individual's name, title, and preferred ways to contact; and company web site URL. The business card will look best if it has sufficient white space. Consider using the back of the card if needed.
• Company Brochure: The company brochure introduces the company, defines the most important benefits that will accrue to the customer, tells how results have been produced for others, and issues a call to action. It also includes company contact information- company name and logo, address, telephone number, e-mail and web site address.
• Product or service flyer: A product or service flyer defines what the company is selling. It discusses the features and benefits of a single product or service or group of related products and services, and includes photographs and illustrations to attract the reader's attention and draw him into the message. The flyer needs a call to action and the specific way to make contact about the product or service. Company information- name, logo, address and web site address- is also part of the flyer.
• Newsletter: A newsletter is an effective way to stay in touch with customers or introduce the company to prospects. A rule of thumb is that at least 80% of the information should be of interest and relevant to the customer or prospect, and not more than 20% sales message. The newsletter can be delivered by the USPS or sent digitally.
• Web site: Because the company web site effectively has no space limitations, it can incorporate all the information from the company brochure and product and service flyers plus tell an expanded version of the company story- its history, specialty area, geographic reach, size and client base. Customers and prospects are free to browse at will for the information they desire.

Use us as an extension of your marketing department

If you don't have the time to write, design and or print your marketing materials, call us to help. We will work with you to plan the creation of marketing materials, ensure consistent brand identity, and help with any or all of the production steps. To get started, call Dennis Smith at 254-773-7391 for an appointment.

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PGP Tip: Promotion on a Budget

PGP Tip: Promotion on a Budget

The lifeblood of any business or organization is keeping current customers interested in your product or service while finding prospects to become new customers. This necessarily means that your business or organization must devote time and resources to promotion – using various methods to reach a target audience with a specific message.

Effective promotion is not limited to large businesses with substantial budgets. Smaller businesses and organizations can be successful by understanding how promotion works and adapting strategies and techniques to fit the available resources.

Promotion objectives

There are many possible objectives for a promotion strategy. Each is intended to produce a specific outcome and can be used singly or in combination. Here are the most common objectives:

• Build awareness. Although your current customers know you well, your prospects – the businesses or individuals you have identified that you want to have as customers – may not know you at all. Promotion helps introduce your business to your prospects, and is often the first step in gaining a new customer.

• Create interest and build trust. People buy things they need or have an interest in from those whom they trust. And long-term, loyal customers are the result of many positive interactions and transactions that become a trusting relationship. Promotion begins the process of building a relationship.

• Provide information. If you are launching a new product or service, whether to existing or new customers, the object of a promotion may be to explain it and its benefits. If your product is well established, an information-based promotion establishes you as an expert and creates interest among prospects who don’t yet know your company.

• Sell something. Some promotions are intended to drive demand and increase sales by getting customers and prospects to try the product. Free samples, free demonstrations and free trial periods are the type of promotions that stimulate demand.

• Establish loyalty. A repeat customer is one who has product or brand loyalty. Promotions based on establishing loyalty are useful after a customer has made one purchase, to start the process of building a strong relationship.

Target audience

Effective promotion begins with determining what audience you are trying to reach, since both the message and the promotional method may change depending on whether you are targeting current customers, past customers or prospects. Most small and medium-sized businesses are equipped and staffed to offer a specific and well defined complement of products or services. A successful promotion matches these products and services to the audience most likely to be interested in them.

Purchase motivators – the things that cause someone within the target audience to become a buyer – are different for individuals and businesses. In general, individuals purchase products or services to satisfy a basic need, to solve a problem or to feel good while businesses purchase to increase revenue, maintain the status quo or decrease expenses.

If your target market is individuals, learn to describe them with measurable characteristics such as age, gender, level of education, income, marital status, ethnicity, and family status. The corresponding characteristics for businesses are number of employees, annual sales volume, location and years in business.

Selecting the promotion method

For a promotion method to succeed, it must first reach the target audience. This sounds simplistic, but is often overlooked by businesses that haven’t adequately profiled the target audience. It is important to change your perspective from the business owner or sales manager to the target audience – simply put, to sit in their chair or walk in their shoes.

Begin by asking yourself how your target audience accesses information. Are your customers and prospects more likely to seek information using traditional media like reading newspapers and magazines, watching television, reading newsletters or responding to a direct mail campaign? Or do they seek information by reading e-mail, searching the Internet or reading blogs? You’ll need to set aside your personal biases – though you may be intrigued by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, if your target audience isn’t, then a promotion using these methods will not be effective.

Keep in mind that no single promotional method works all the time for every target audience, so rotate several methods and vary your approach. In addition, use promotions regularly. Over time, consistency and frequency will influence the buying decision more than the specific type of promotion.

Promoting on a budget

No matter the size of your business or organization, it needs to have a budget for promotions. Pick a time period – we recommend quarterly, semi-annually or yearly – and commit both a sum of money and some time for a designated person to manage the promotional effort. It takes both a budget and someone to manage the budget to ensure a successful promotion.

Promotions don’t have to cost a lot of money or take a lot of time. A simple way to start is by targeting your best customers and introducing them to products or services you offer that they may not be using. Here are seven ideas for promoting on a budget.

1. Send a monthly informational newsletter. That’s what we do! In fact, we send both a printed and digital version that gives us a chance to demonstrate our expertise, introduce you to new technologies like QR codes, and remind you of the full scope of services we offer.
2. Highlight the specific products and services that represent what you do best. Develop a series of post cards, flyers or mini-brochures that showcase the things that provide the majority of your sales. These are the things that, because of equipment or skills or experience, you can offer a true competitive advantage to buyers. The series can be distributed individually or as part of another communication.

3. Follow up a purchase with an additional offer. A customer who has just made a purchase is an excellent candidate to make another one right away. This is especially true if the customer receives an offer with additional value attached – a discount coupon or a buy one/get one promotion. To create urgency, include an expiration date for the offer.

4. Target past customers. Revive an old relationship by contacting past customers. There may be a negative reason (such as a bad customer service experience) that explains why a customer became inactive, but don’t worry about it. Something may have changed within the past customer’s company that again makes them a good candidate for your promotion.

5. Put a sticker with teaser copy on an outbound envelope. Teaser copy – a few words that creates interest – is often printed near the address on the outside of an envelope or a self-mailer. Teaser copy is just what its name implies: something that teases the reader to open an envelope or keep reading. If the teaser copy is printed on a sticker and affixed to the envelope, it becomes dimensional and attracts even more attention.

6. Offer a guarantee. Changing suppliers presents some prospects with a risk factor they may be reluctant to deal with. This is true even if the current supplier is not performing well. Alleviate the anxiety and eliminate the risk by offering a guarantee to your prospect.

7. Self-promote. Get the word out about your company’s accomplishments. When you win an award, land an important new customer, expand your capability or capacity by adding equipment or staff, let everyone know. People like to do business with successful people. Use a press release directed to the business editor of your local newspaper to announce something you are proud of. Add a line to your e-mail signature and announce your accomplishment on your web site.

Promotion builds business

Regardless of the size of your budget, it is important to continuously promote your business. At PaperGraphics Printing  we've been helping businesses, organizations and individuals with promotions to customers and prospects for 42 years. To brainstorm promotional ideas to help your business or to get started with your promotion, contact Dennis Smith at 254-773-7391 . We’re ready to help.