4 Reasons Why it Pays to Poll Your Customers

What are your customers saying about you?

If you’ve ever wondered whether your small business is hitting the mark with the people it serves, a survey may be in order. Consumer surveys give you insight into every facet of how well, or how poorly, your business is performing.

Who’s Buying What?

This is probably the most important reason to survey your customers — finding your product’s demographic. How old are the people who are buying what you have to sell? Are they male or female? College-educated or blue-collar all the way?

A well-written survey form collects this type of personal information which then gives you better insight into who your customers really are.

How Are You Doing?

Are your customer service representatives friendly? Do they go the extra mile to assist each customer that walks through your brick-and-mortar store or who logs onto your website? Do they say “Thank you” and “Please come back again”? If they don’t, a survey is one of the most-efficient ways of finding out this important piece of information.

What’s the Next Step?

When it comes time to expand your operations, which direction should you take? Try asking your customers. A survey that asks clients what new features, products or services they would love to find inside your place of business gives you an idea of where you should begin and what products you should focus on next.

What Are Your Opportunities for Improvement?

Is your parking lot too small? Do you keep your store cool enough in the summer? Are your credit card readers and cash registers fast and efficient enough to keep people coming back for more? If you’re not sure, get a survey into the hands of every customer and find out which areas need improvement.

The future of your business is in the hands of those you serve. Make sure your consumer surveys are there as well.

Common Marketing Mistakes

Common marketing mistakes fall into general categories; failure to understand your customer, resistance to change, and ignorance of current strategies. These categories can overlap but we will use them for our discussion.

Failure to understand your customer is the basis of all marketing mistakes, because marketing is about understanding people. Do you collect data from your current customers so you know who your base is, how they heard about you, why they come and why they come back? Do you know who else might need what you offer? General marketing research is a tool, but it has limits. The more you connect with your actual customers and understand them, the more focused your marketing will be. People buy with their right brain (connections) more than they do with the left (logic) and they rarely buy the first time they hear a message. Do you know which message connected and how long it took to get a response?

Resistance to change plagues all of us because it takes effort and money to adapt to what is happening. It’s easier to do things the way they always have been done. Identifying your unique selling proposition (USP) means analyzing your business honestly and stepping out in new territory might involve taking decisions out of committee. When was the last time your committee agreed on which donut was best? If they can’t agree on donuts, how will they agree on marketing?

Ignorance of current strategies is easy to fix: invest in professional marketing advice. All the social media techniques, website and SEO strategies, and understanding how to mix the traditional with the cutting edge is what a professional marketing firm does every day. They already know what it will take you valuable time to find out on your own.

Tools for the Print Industry

The print industry is still very much alive. Throughout the industry, there is more technology than ever before and this has led to a better quality image that can be produced. As a result, when you work with a printer, you can enjoy such things as a clear image of the photos you wish to print, a full bleed on your flyers, and colors printed in the exact hue that you need them to be.

One of the primary tools that everyone in the print industry should be using is a digital printer. Digital printers ensure that there is no pixelation on larger prints and that the images are as clear as they can possibly come out in a printed format.

Large printers are also a must to ensure that you can get the banners and posters that you need. If you need a 24×36 poster, then it should be made available to you without having to work with a company clear across the country, which also involves shipping, handling and a longer wait time.

Various die cut tools should also be available so that you can get the shapes that are important to you. Whether you want club cards to hand out that are round or you want business cards with rounded corners, you should have the options available to you.

Not everyone in the print industry uses the same tools – or uses them in the same manner. It’s important to ask questions of a print company before you submit your order to ensure you are getting the quality that you need.

A significant amount of technology is available and anyone in the print industry should be tapping into this technology to provide you with a superior product to enhance your business.

Design: Dos and Dont’s

When it comes to designing anything that is going to be used for marketing, be it a logo, business cards or flyers, there are some things that you don’t want to do. Marketing dollars need to be stretched and used effectively. If you make some basic design mistakes, you could be doing more harm than good for advertising your brand.

Choose the Right Logo

You don’t want to choose a logo that is so intricate that it is hard to read or duplicate. There have been countless businesses that have created a logo that looks great when it’s blown up on a banner. However, as soon as they try to print it on a business card or a T-shirt, it looks too blurry and is impossible to read.

A logo should be clear and crisp. Don’t overcomplicate it because it is the logo that will be used on everything pertaining to your business. It should be easy to read and only contain a few colors so that it can be produced easily.

Brand Yourself

Branding needs to occur with your designs, which means they should look similar. Whether you are printing banners, posters, flyers, business cards, company t-shirts, or anything else for the purpose of marketing, you need to have a similar look. This means using the same logo, colors, and font so that people recognize you.

Don’t Confuse

You cannot afford to confuse your consumers. If you continuously re-design your logo or change the feel of your marketing materials, you are going to have brand confusion. People won’t know who you are and what you stand for.

All marketing materials have to be clean, crisp, and well branded in order to effectively penetrate the market and ensure that your marketing dollars are stretched properly.

E-Commerce Trends for 2014

Fast and Free

If you are involved in any form of e-commerce, you’re feeling the heat to provide your customers with prompt and free or inexpensive delivery services. Heavily influenced by the pressure of the popular Amazon Prime program, online businesses find customer expectations center on getting their orders in as fast and cheaply as possible.

These pressures are forcing many e-commerce players to turn to 3PL firms to control costs and take advantage of automated warehouses and order processing capabilities. In fact, there is a national boom in the construction of modern distribution centers and shipping centers.

Marriage of Inbound and Outbound

Speed is only one trend for e-commerce in 2014. While the early rush to digital marketing found many companies ignoring their traditional and successful marketing techniques, maturing marketing strategies are now including a carefully planned mix of the old and the new. For example, e-commerce companies are now including sales sheets and brochures with each shipment, returning to this tried and true way to pick up incremental revenue.

It only makes sense that a customer buying an electronic device or other items might want to know about cases, chargers, or other accessories that make the product more useful. In fact, offering a time-sensitive offer will result in a solid return and additional sales for many products shipped out the door.

A Global Market

Increasingly, being in e-commerce means participating in the global marketplace. According to research by eMarketer, it is estimated that Asia will become the biggest contributor to B2C e-commerce in 2014, generating $502 billion, or nearly a third, of total e-commerce spending.

This fact means a need to focus on multilingual printed materials, as additional research show customers respond much more favorably to marketing materials professionally prepared in their own language.

A rapidly growing e-commerce marketplace means new challenges and exciting opportunities for 2014.

Why You Need a Multi-Channel Strategy

Marketing in today’s day and age needs to focus on more than just the Internet. While the Internet is a major forum for advertising a business, it’s imperative to look beyond the search engines for marketing opportunities – and this is where many business owners fail. There is still a need for offline marketing, which includes such things as postcards, banners, flyers and direct mail campaigns.

This multi-channel strategy ensures that you tap into all of your target demographics. You may want to target the 18-30 demographic, which spends a significant amount of time on the Internet. However, if you are also targeting the 60+ demographic, you will need to use other channels beyond what is found online.

Additionally, people need to see a business at least three or four times before they have any kind of brand recognition. This means that multiple channels will ensure that you get noticed more often. Someone may see a banner for your business in town, then receive a postcard in the mail, and then locate you online.

By the time a person comes across your ad online, they are then ready to follow the link and be taken to your website. Without using all of the channels, however, people may have been hesitant to do business with you because they hadn’t heard about the business.

Many of the multi-channel strategies that exist are available locally. You need to tap into your own community before you take things to a national or international level. There may be many ways for you to market in your backyard, which is affordable and will get you noticed to the level that is important.

The Internet is one way to market, but it is important to remember that there are still many other ways to market as well.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Online Marketing

If your business has an online presence, and it should, there are ten simple tips you need to follow to make the most out of your online marketing tactics. Let’s dive right in and take a quick look at them.

Tip #1: Go social

If you don’t have a social media profile, you need to create one. More importantly, you need to post often. Keep in mind that the more social media profiles you have, the better. The most well-known platforms include Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tip #2: Distribute press releases

Press releases aren’t limited to print publication only. In fact, you can distribute them via social media profiles, your company website and emails.

Tip #3: Write an eBook

An online eBook can help you to appear as a leader in the industry your business is operating in, and once you achieve leadership status, you’ll notice your profit levels soar beyond anything you ever thought imaginable.

Tip #4: Stay engaged

You have to show your customers that you care, and the best way to do this is by staying engaged with them via online platforms.

Tip #5: Outsource content creation

If you’re not a good writer, you’ll definitely want to outsource your content creation. You can even outsource ideas, allowing you to come up with today’s most trending topics in relation to creating content that is relevant to the consumers in your target audience.

Tip #6: Create how-to videos

The best way to sell your products and/or services is to show customers how they can benefit from them. To do this, you need to create how-to videos and distribute them via online sites.

Tip #7: Create and maintain a blog

You need to blog, even if you pay someone else to do it for you. Statistics show that “61 percent of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post.”

Tip #8: Provide incentives

One of the best ways to attract consumers to buy your products and services is by providing them incentives. For example, for every $25 that they spend, you could offer them a $5 gift card for a future purchase.

Tip #9: Keep track of your online reputation

Your online reputation will go a long way in making sure that you make a profit. To keep track of your online reputation, you may want to consider employing a reputation manager.

Tip #10: Be personable

Your customers don’t want you to act as if you are above their level. You need to be personable in all content that you display. And most importantly, always remember to provide contact info. Otherwise, your online efforts will prove to be useless.

Analyzing Your Corporate Social Media Efforts

Analyzing your corporate social media efforts can be a Catch-22. No matter what avenue you use to advance your company’s social presence, quality content is your vehicle. But you cannot design content if you don’t know where your customer is. If you’re posting on Facebook while your customers are on Linked-in, you’re preaching to an empty church. Therefore, the first step in analyzing your corporate social media efforts is knowing your potential customers’ social media haunts.

Where are they? There are several ways to determine if your social messages are taking root. The personal route – make it company policy to ask customers how they learned about you; or the virtual route – use Google Analytics, Clicky, or GoSquared for metrics showing which social media sites are sending the most visitors to your landing pages.

Why are they there? Once you know where your buyers are, you need to know why. Are they seeking information? Entertainment? Do they want to see pictures? Videos? Well then, entertain, inform, snap photos, run video. Grab their attention.

How do you get their attention?. Does your content stand out? After all, no matter how creative or informative your message, no one will get it if it fails to grab their attention. Remember you’re not the only company turning to social media. There’s a lot of competition, and the prize is your customer. Which brings us back to where we started.

Is your content worthy of their attentions? Content is too important to your brand to take a chance on it. Have you assigned the creation of quality content to a competent person or group to take ownership of posting YouTube Videos, Facebook posts, LinkedIn Discussions, Twitter attachments, if not daily, on a defined regular basis?

Remember social media never sleeps. Regular posts attest to the fact that you’re a legitimate company with expertise in your field.

The State of the Print Industry – A Quick Recap

The recession that seems to be getting better but for which many companies are still recovering and/or feeling the effects, impacted the printing industry in numerous ways. Conventional manufacturers, for example, have taken the biggest hit as printers took many steps to try and conserve cash and are now trying to revitalize their businesses. Typically, as noted by the National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL), when the economy recovers, demand for print grows and the industry returns to normal. However, that is no longer the case as companies cannot simply sit back and expect recovery to simply happen.

Those in the printing industry must fully participate in the recovery, value their clients, put an emphasis on competitiveness, and, more importantly, build productivity. This is how the industry will not only survive but thrive in today’s economy. Also, there is now a shift in the industry to digital technology, such as inkjet. The addition of workflow automation and web-to-print becoming increasingly utilized in the printing industry, those companies that don’t adapt or outright ignore change are likely to fall behind.

One of the standards in the industry that will keep traditional printers afloat will be the fact that physical print boasts a security and virus-free nature. Nevertheless, a change toward catering to the client on an individual basis is really the trend that is driving the current industry. Clients now expect streamlined workflow, personalization, and very high quality, especially in light of the incredibly media-rich world.

According to the NAPL printing establishment categories, smaller operations rule the industry with more than 70 percent having 10 or fewer employees. Yet, nearly half of all industry sales come from companies with 100 or more employees. The result: Small companies focus on personalization while large companies focus on bulk printing.

Tricks for Powerful Printed Materials

The real trick when it comes to creating powerful printed material is that it’s not a trick. Not really. There is a bit of a formula to it, though. Once you master this simple formula you’ll be able to create printed material that gets read time and time again. That’s where the real power comes in.

Make it Visually Appealing

Printed material, especially if you’re creating bulletins, brochures, and posters that are supposed to catch the eye of readers, needs to be visually pleasing to the eye. It’s as simple as that. Don’t use bright colors that are difficult to read. Keep it plain and simple and keep the letters big enough (and the font neat enough) that people have no trouble reading what you have to say.

Deliver a Message that Matters

Another important factor for powerful printed material is that it needs to be a message that matters. You need to know who your audience is and make sure you’re delivering a message that’s meaningful and relevant to them. Your audience must come first if you don’t want the message to fall on deaf ears. Make the message matter to your audience and they will be far more receptive to it.

Don’t Bury the Lead

In many cases, people recommend that you wait to the end of the message to make your point. The problem is that audiences have gotten spoiled by the Internet. If they don’t find value in the information quickly, they’re going to miss the point you’re trying to make. Lead with the important information and use the remaining page space to add flavor or lend credibility to the meat and potatoes portion you lead with.

Simple things are the true tricks to creating powerful printed material in the digital age. So many other people are going overboard with printing tactics and techniques and have forgotten the importance of the message above all else.