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July 27th, 2010

Don’t Buy Cheap Plastic Junk: Things to Think About When Purchasing Promotional Items

The biggest advantage that promotional products have over other advertising media is that the recipient usually keeps the item, giving the advertiser repeat exposure at no extra cost. You want to make sure you buy a quality promotional item they will use over and over and not fall apart or stop working. Here are some mistakes you don’t want to make when choosing promotional items:

Don’t Buy “Throwaways” If you buy something that your target market won’t use over and over again, you’re wasting your money.  Choose something that has some value to your prospect. If you choose the right product, your return on investment will go way up and be far more effective. Items people use everyday have the largest return.

Don’t Forget To Qualify Your Recipients Market your item towards the decision makers who may use your product or service. Don’t just set out your items for anyone to pick up, hand them out to qualified leads you have a conversation with. Use your time wisely and don’t waste your promotional products on those who just want “free stuff”. This way you can spend your money on fewer quality items that you know will produce a return.

Don’t Buy Items Based on Price Everyone is watching their pocketbooks right now, but when you look for “cheap stuff” you find cheap stuff. Look at your budget and buy the best promotional item you can buy for that amount. Your prospects can’t use the item over and over again if they fall apart or don’t work because they are cheap.

Order in Plenty of Time for Your Event Lower your price by ordering in plenty of time and eliminating extra shipping and production charges. When you need something done fast because you put it off or forgot to order on time, you rack up more charges. Put the date you need to order on your calendar so you don’t forget!

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July 21st, 2010

How to Bulk Up Your Contact List

Every business should see their contact list as one of their most valued assets. Each contact you make can become a valuable lead and generate more business for your company. Promotional items and gifts can be incredible lead generators.
There are several different ways to generate more business leads and bulk up that contact list:

  1. Offer an attractive gift at a seminar, trade show or conference to those who schedule a follow-up appointment with you or your staff or to those who leave their contact information with you. Decide what that lead is worth to your business and choose promotional items and gifts similar to that value. Choose your promotional items based on the audience you want your business to attract.
  2. Give customers and prospects gifts with your logo imprinted on it as much as possible. Everyone, including current clients, could bring in a potential lead. Items like pens and adhesive notepads for a desk are always useful. Handing them out increases your visibility and reach.
  3. Use direct mail to send out a teaser gift to a list of prospects and offer them a larger gift when they respond to your offer. This is a great way to measure the success of your efforts and will also give you a list of qualified leads.
  4. Offer a gift to current customers as an incentive for referrals. You can also give them a larger incentive if that referral leads to a sale.
  5. Give employees gifts as incentives for their sales and lead generation.

I’ve shared with you only a few ideas for generating leads to grow your contact list. A professional consultant can help you further with choosing promotional items and incentives that will work for your business.

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July 19th, 2010

Do Something Unexpected This Holiday Season: Send Thanksgiving Cards!

Avoid getting lost in that pile of Christmas/Holiday cards this season and send Thanksgiving cards to connect with your clients and peers. Don’t overlook the opportunity that sending Thanksgiving greeting cards can provide. Thanksgiving is a natural match for thanking clients, employees and vendors.

Giving Thanksgiving cards shows that you took the time to send them a card during a normally busy time. In this economy, a small business can’t always afford to send gifts for Christmas, but they can consider sending Happy Thanksgiving cards, as well as Christmas cards, to stay in front of the customer with a thoughtful touch.

Why should I send business greeting cards?

You should send business greeting cards to:

  • enhance your current business relationships
  • attract new customers
  • remind old clients that you exist
  • show appreciation to supportive clients

Because Thanksgiving is about giving thanks, giving Thanksgiving cards lets everyone know how much you appreciate their business. Sending thanks goes a long way.

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July 12th, 2010

Silly Bandz

One of the biggest crazes this summer with kids is Silly Bandz. These crazy shaped colored rubberbands are hot! You may have noticed them on arms of grade school children or the empty display boxes at the store as they sell out. This fad has grown quickly and is still growing.

Kids are going nuts putting these crazy shaped, brightly colored, silicon bands on their arms. Some schools have prohibited children from wearing them in class, increasing the frenzy to have the bands even more. It’s a perfect marketing scenario.

Promotional Silly Bandz in custom shapes will be one of the top products this summer for any event involving children. Silly Bandz can tie into your theme or goal of your promotions this summer. Be the first in your market with a custom promotional Silly Bandz designed just for you.

Silly Bandz

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June 22nd, 2010

Why is the cost of clothing going up?

If you haven’t noticed the price of clothing and other goods rising, you soon will. The current challenges will not only affect the promotional apparel market, but other industries where products are globally sourced.

• Raw material costs (i.e. cotton, polyester, nylon, etc.)
• Inflation in developing countries
• Labor costs
• Duties and tariffs
• Transportation costs
• Foreign exchange rates
• Non-market costs

These factors, of course, do not affect every product in the same way, and suppliers also have many ways that they can help control prices. Nonetheless, current pricing is being affected by two primary factors: raw material and labor costs. Raw material costs have been rapidly increasing over the last several years. Taking cotton as an example, the following chart illustrates this dramatic increase over the last five years.

Cotton Price Chart

The other key factor is labor costs. China is undergoing rapid business growth, which is resulting both in a shortage of labor and in workers’ demand for higher wages, as we’ve recently seen affect the automotive industry. Meanwhile, factories in other regions do not have sufficient infrastructure to support an increase in consumer demand.

Amid these two driving factors, there are smaller factors at play, as well. Most notably, the Chinese government, in anticipation of the upcoming G20 Summit, announced that they will allow their currency (RMB) to appreciate. This will increase import prices across Asia, negatively impacting the price of industry apparel.

With so many influencing factors, it is impossible to predict the full extent of the price pressures on all industries. But best estimates suggest that we face a near-to-mid-term period of rising costs until new production capacity is possible.

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May 25th, 2010

Google Has Made Image Rendering Changes in Gmail

A few weeks ago, Gmail implemented some changes to their webmail environment that affects how images are displayed in FireFox, IE 8, Chrome, Safari and some mobile devices.  As I’m still getting tons of emails with images not rendering properly, I wanted to pass this information along so you can ensure that images in your emails continue to render properly in your recipients’ inboxes.

What changes did Gmail make?
With their recent webmail update, Gmail now adds a few pixels of horizontal white space when a certain style reference is omitted. This is especially noticeable for images that are stacked vertically (like image slices) or for images displayed on a non-white background.

How can it be fixed?
Add an in-line style reference to control the image display. Note: Gmail does not support cascading styles which are those referenced in the head or style tags at the top of the HTML. So, it must be in-line. Here is an example with the additional style inclusion in bold:

PROBLEM CODE:
imgXsrc=”http://www.someurl.com/images/image.jpg”Xheight=”100″Xwidth=”100″

CORRECT CODE:
imgXsrc=”http://www.someurl.com/images/image.jpg”Xheight=”100″ width=”100″Xstyle=”display:block”

Note: This style element can go elsewhere in the img src tag if preferred

What else should I know about this?
The practice of declaring the display:block style for images is already a best practice because Windows Live webmail also adds this white space to images if you don’t declare this (again visible in FireFox and Webkit browsers). But remember, Gmail doesn’t support cascading style sheets, so this style—and all other style references—must be referenced in-line, like in the example above.

I hope that helps some of you!

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May 24th, 2010

Need To Bulk Up Your Contact List? Use Promotional Items!

Trying to generate more business leads for your company? Promotional items can be a great asset to your business if used in the right way. Not only that, it creates brand awareness and keeps you top of mind to all business customers old and new.

Here are just a few ways you can use these products to generate leads:

1. Use direct mail  to send out a teaser gift to a list of prospects with a promise of a larger gift when they respond to your specific offer. Sending “Lumpy Mail” ensures they will be intrigued and open your promotion to read your larger offer. Make sure you put an end date on your offer so you can gauge the success in a timely manner.

2. Make sure you have business giveaways that are practical and will be used by your prospective client. Promotional items like printed pens or sticky notes are useful to almost everyone. Handing them out increases your visibility and the chance that you will reach customers.

3. Offer a larger printed promotional gift to existing customers and clients for referring other customers. Referrals can be your greatest asset. A great book that will help you with the understanding of this concept is The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself(affiliate link).

4. When at a trade show, conference or seminar event, offer a great giveaway to those who schedule a follow-up appointment with you or your business. You can also offer this to people who offer to share their contact information with you at the event, you must decide what a qualified lead is worth to you and choose the promotional product that fits. Make sure you fit your promotional item to the audience you want to attract.

5. Promotional items can also be great incentive gifts for your sales team. Be sure to have a range of scaled promotional items for reaching certain levels of appointments or leads.

If you’re looking for more ideas, be sure to contact us here for a free consultation. We can help you come up with promotional plans to publicize your business and maximize your opportunities.

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April 22nd, 2010

Will promotional products work for you?

From pens to stress relievers, promotional products are everywhere. Look around you. I’ll bet you have logoed items all around you that you either bought or received from a business or event. But do promotional products work?

That’s a big question. There is a lot to think about when choosing your products, such as what you’re using them for and what kind of business or event you have. That’s where we come in. But if you want to know the pure numbers using promotional products, read on.

In a survey done by Promotional Products Association International, they found:
83% of respondents like receiving a product with an advertising message.
63% Stated that the product was serving as an advertiser/business service reminder.
69% stated that they keep the product if they have a use for it.

In another survey conducted by PPAI, Promotional Products ranked first over TV commercials, Print Media and Online Advertising over recall of the Company advertising, recall of the product, and recall of the message.

You can read more about the study and results here. We can assure you, it really works!

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April 13th, 2010

How does Apple do it?

With 300,000 iPads purchased the first day and most people buying them sight unseen, it seems Apple has a hold over many of us. What makes a person drop $500+ on new technology not knowing how it may be relevant for them? Trust, originality and brand loyalty.

Apple has done an amazing job of creating these three things in their brand. From the “I’m a Mac” campaign to in-store education, Apple seems to be there for their customer. Case in point, my father got caught up in the hype on the first day of iPad sales and they practically held his hand throughout the purchase and then set up his iPad and offered free workshops right in the store that day. He was able to walk out of the store with his receipt on his iPad and the knowledge to use it on many levels.

We should all be offering this kind of service to our customers/clients in our own way. At PMG, we like to get to know our clients so we can help create the perfect marketing plan for them. We educate on current trends and help determine what will bring the most ROI.

We all still have a lot to learn from Apple and from each other. Share with us how you encourage trust, originality and brand loyalty in your brand.

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April 9th, 2010

Promotional Items as a Marketing Tool

With the use of promotional items as brand marketing tools increasing, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Everyone enjoys receiving gifts and “free stuff” and your clients, customers or associates aren’t any different.

Remember, before selecting promotional items you should match them with the occasion and audience. You wouldn’t want to choose an ice scraper for an event in Florida or a blinged out pink mug for a lumber jack event.

Promotional items are long term reminders to the recipients as well as their colleagues and family and create a presence for the brand in the market much effectively than other forms of marketing would.

Read more about using promotional items as a marketing tool here.

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