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Showing posts from April, 2017

Make Customer Loyalty a Bigger Part of Your Marketing Efforts

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In the early days of your business, the goal of your marketing program was essentially a singular one: you tried to get your product or service in front of as many eyes as you possibly could. Once you've established yourself, however, it's time to switch gears a little. According to most studies , it's between five and twenty-five times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep one of your existing ones. This means that if you're not already making customer loyalty a significant part of your marketing efforts, it's about time to get going on it. What a Difference Customer Loyalty Makes According to a study conducted in 2014 , seventy-three percent of consumers said that loyalty programs should be the way that brands show loyalty to their existing customers. Regardless of which way you choose to look at it, even instituting a modest customer loyalty program can have significant benefits across your entire organization. It can help make your ma

Don't Fear Your Marketing Competitors. Learn From Them

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Regardless of the products you're trying to market, the audience you're trying to cater to, or the industry you happen to be operating in, all businesses face competition. This is just a fact of life. But it's important to realize that a competitor isn't just another company that is trying to go after the same pool of customers that you are. Competitors are invaluable learning opportunities that are just waiting to be taken advantage of, provided you approach things from the right angle. Learn About Your Audience One of the most important lessons that you can learn by taking a closer look at your marketing competitors has nothing to do with your competition itself and everything to do with the shared audience you're both going after. For the sake of argument, let's say that your number one competitor offers products or services that are very similar to yours. How is your competition marketing those products and services to that audience? What types o

Don’t Let Paper Get BORING!

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W hen it comes to grabbing customers’ attention, one of your most important tools is paper stock. It’s what recipients see first, even before they read your message. People are visual. They also respond to touch. If you pick the right paper, it can make a strong first impression.  Studies show that tangible materials leave a deeper footprint in the brain, making paper a powerful marketing tool. These are just a few examples. Talk to us about how today’s array of options can give a boost to your next print campaign! Astronomical Results! When Quinn’s Quilts wanted to get people — lots of people — into its store, it needed more than a promotional message and a discount. To get that WOW! factor and ensure that its message got seen, it selected Lift-Off Lemon 80-lb. cover paper from Astrobrights. When people opened the mailbox, the bright, intense yellow jumped out from the rest of the mail like a spotlight. Combined with a powerful geometric pattern overlaid with the Quinn’

Leadership Sometimes Means Showing You're Human

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Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, has seen her share of tough times. She took on the CEO mantle as one of the first female company leaders in the auto industry, only to get slapped with a faulty auto ignition switch recall. Barra had already done her time in the trenches while going through the GM bankruptcy in 2009. However, when Barra faced down her first big CEO challenge with an ignition switch that was being attributed with killing consumers, she did something no one expected - she apologized. The Road That Leads to Trust Barra's apology rang the auto industry like a deep bell of the apocalypse. Everyone heard it, everyone saw it on TV, and everyone was in shock. Her apology wasn't the end of the matter, of course. She had to go through multiple congressional hearings, fire managers and engineers she had known and trusted for years, and put the reins on employees to turn the company around. But her leadership was and continues to be rooted in a basic, inhe

large-format printing

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The range of substrates offers tremendous options in application. In addition to paper and vinyl, wide-format printers can print on privacy film, canvas, static cling, magnets, wall covers, and many others. Specialty printers can print on less common substrates such as PVC, styrene, ceramic tiles, Coroplast, and foam core. Run lengths are flexible, too. Print multiples. Print just one. Choose the length that’s right for your needs. With high-quality graphics, flexibility in run length, and variety of substrates, the applications are nearly endless.  Personalized consumer products.  Some of the biggest innovations in wide-format are coming in the form of personalized consumer products such as personalized wallpaper, lampshades, and even curtains. With wide-format printers able to print on an increasingly wide variety of substrates, the options are exploding. Stage and theatrical graphics. The same techniques used for building wraps can be used to create fantastic theatr

April Fools' Day and the Art of Humor Marketing

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Did you enjoy some April Fools' Day marketing jokes this year? Make no mistake about it: coming from a business, April Fools' Day jokes are every bit as much an art as they are a science. It's an opportunity to inject a breath of fresh air into your marketing efforts, as the day is one that has quickly become synonymous with pranks and practical jokes. If you do it properly, adding humor to your marketing campaigns can also be an excellent conversation starter - it's a unique way to add new members to your audience and engage with existing ones at the same time. As with most modern day marketing, however, it's often best to learn from example. April Fools' Day, 2017: The Good The clear winner of April Fools Day 2017 has to be Netflix, who released the elaborate prank "Netflix Live." Capitalizing on the wave of live streaming video spearheaded by services like Facebook, "Netflix Live" was supposedly a 24-hour live video feed of actor W

How to Take the Lessons Learned in Online Marketing and Apply Them to the World of Print

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Print marketing isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Over the last few years, people are coming to the realization that digital and print isn't an "either/or" scenario. Many use one to supplement and compliment the other to great effect. Despite this, people still tend to think of them as two different mediums, thinking you have different rules that you use online than those that you follow in print. Because online marketing has become so prominent, it has taught us some very valuable lessons. One of which is that those lessons aren't reserved only for the digital market. You can apply those lessons to your print collateral and come out all the better for it. Marketing Is About Intimacy Perhaps the biggest lesson that various digital and online marketing channels have taught us is that at the end of the day, you're not trying to "sell" to someone at all. You're trying to connect with them. The best marketing reaches out to customers and

It's Okay to go Niche: How One Unusual Brand is Turning Trash into Specialty Surf Bags

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Sometimes, we stumble across an answer to a problem that we did not know existed. Alec and Aric Avedissian are solving two problems at once with their business Rareform. Rareform's customers get durable, one-of-a-kind surfbags while the company helps reroute some of the thousands of pounds of billboard material that is discarded in the U.S. every day. The average billboard goes up for four to eight weeks, then is discarded. While there are no firm figures on how many billboards exist in the United States, the number is high. The Los Angeles area alone is host to over 6,000 boards. Since billboard material does not decompose, that is a lot of waste. Inspiration in the Strangest Place Avedissian stumbled on the idea of surfbags from billboard vinyl after spending time volunteering with a fishing cooperative in El Salvador. While there, he saw people using discarded billboards to make roofing. The sight was a revelation. He'd previously never considered the material an

Mail Delivery: Greener Than You Think

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Need more reasons to love direct mail? Try the U.S. Postal Service’s commitment to environmental sustainability. Here are three ways the USPS continues to improve its environmental footprint and reasons you can keep loving the mail.  1.Use of Alternative Fuels The U.S. Postal Service has a long-established alternative fuel vehicle (AFV) program. Since 2005, it has purchased 13,384 AFVs, most of them Ethanol 85 and hybrid vehicles. This represents more than half of the USPS’s total vehicle acquisitions. The USPS is on track to increase alternative fuel use 10% annually.  The USPS’s investment in AFVs isn’t just about reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil. It also supports U.S. jobs. The ethanol for E85 vehicles is produced right here in this country. It creates jobs at home! 2. Use of Eco-Friendly Packaging  Paper- or cardboard-based packaging is generally recyclable, but when the USPS produces it, it meets an even higher standard. USPS packing containers m

3 Tips for More Emotional Print Marketing Collateral

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Despite what you may believe, most people don't rely on information when it comes to making a purchase. While people do love to do research in advance of parting with their hard-earned money, they rely much more heavily on emotions to guide their decisions. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you want to motivate someone to take action, you should work hard to inject as much raw emotion into your print marketing collateral as possible. Luckily, there are a few key tips you can start using today to accomplish exactly that. It's All About Those Colors Even if you don't want to fill your marketing collateral with text that drives home emotions, there are a number of subtle steps you can take to instantly provide a richer, fuller experience for your readers. Case in point: depending on the colors that you choose , you could be saying a great deal with your marketing collateral without actually saying anything at all. Do you want to create a sense of urgency, for

Never Be Afraid to Take on the Big Boys

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Something strange is happening on the yogurt shelves: the most popular yogurt is not from a big maker like Dannon or Yoplait. It's a product from a small, 12-year-old upstart from New York. In March, Bloomberg wrote that Chobani had overtaken Yoplait to become the most popular yogurt in the U.S. The story of how this independent took on the big brands and won has lessons for all of us. Distinguish Yourself From Your Competitors Big yogurt brands had become complacent and did not anticipate how new products would catch customers' interests. Instead of sticking with the same types of yogurt already popular in the U.S., Chobani made their name with Greek yogurt, a thicker and richer product. By the time the larger yogurt companies introduced their own versions of the product, it was too late. Consumers had become loyal to the brands that made Greek yogurt popular. If you craft your marketing materials and your products to fill a need that your competitors are not, tha