Do you need a new Marketing Plan?

Has your company been doing the same marketing strategy for years?   If so, it may be time for you the change.  Social media  and QR Codes have introduced several  new marketing strategies.  See which ones may work best for you to help grow your business.

You will need to figure out  what marketing activity worked from your marketing plan last year.  There is a simple way to find out, just  ask how you are doing.  Publish an online survey, phone calls or ask customers in-person.    Feedback may be difficult to hear sometimes but listen to everything your customers are saying.  They will give you a different view of which promotions worked and which ones did not work as well as you had planned.  

When considering changing your marketing plan, remember to consider your Return on Investment.   Look at each marketing activity and evaluate if it was worth the Return of Investment instead of evaluating your marketing budget.   Make changes to marketing activities that were lacking.   Keep the marketing activities that had a good Return on Investment, you may want to think of ways to improve them.

Getting people to talk about your business offline

Social media is an essential way to get customers talking about your business.  Word of mouth is still an effective way to keep your business on customer’s minds.  Here are a few ideas to create buzz around your business:

Since MarketMailPrint offers free delivery and pickup, we try to engage with our customers when dropping off a business card order or customer brochures.  Customers have a busy schedule and appreciate staying at the office to handle their day-to-day operations instead of driving in busy traffic to pick up an order at MarketMailPrint.

Tell a story about one of your staff’s accomplishments, achievement or recent trip.   Feature this story  in your business window or front counter.  The story does not need to be very personal but make it interesting to spark conversation.  A table tent may help to make the display even interesting.

Put a guestbook on the front counter or by the receptionist desk.  The presence of a guestbook with help the staff focus on customer service.  Encourage customers to sign in and to write their thoughts about their experience with your business.  Leaving colorful markers or pens by the guestbook may get more customers to participate in signing the book.

Take some of these ideas and incorporate what works best with your business.

What is a Landing Page?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a specific page on your website that is dedicated to a product or service.  Landing pages are created to help online users/customers to find what they are searching for without navigating through an entire website.

Create keywords for these landing pages for SEO so that when a user searches on those keywords in a search engine, the return result will be a link to that specific page on your website not your Home page.   This takes the user/customer to the product or service their searching for.

Landing pages have to be structured well to get the attention of your audience.  Make these pages visually interesting and not complicated.   Focus on one product or service per landing page.  Your content should be easy  for anyone to understand and relate to.   Try to keep your content to a computer monitor length.  Avoid too much text which causes the user to scroll. 

Add a clear call to action comment for the user to take.   Adding a simple statement  such as "call us" or "like us on Facebook" will get this user one step closer to becoming a potential customer.
Tracking these landing pages by analytics will help you see how many visitors came to that landing page and what they clicked on.   This gives you valuable information about your website and landing pages on which ones work well and which ones need improvements.

We, MarketMailPrint, created a landing page that list all our product categories.  This allowed us to create another landing page for one specific product so when clicked, the user is taken directly to the product page not the Home page.  See a sample landing page for MarketMailPrint business cards.

Scoring

     Scoring is creasing a paper for the purpose of making folding easier. If you were to take a sheet of card stock and try to fold it in half, it would look cracked and uneven, and pretty much not very attractive at all. But when you score a sheet of card stock, it indents the paper where it is intended to fold, giving a nice clean and even crease without the cracks.

     In the past, whenever a customer ordered a job that needed to be scored [cards, booklet covers, table tents, pocket folders, etc] we were setting up and scoring these jobs by hand. Even though it proved as a pretty decent arm workout, it was very time consuming. But, good news! We recently obtained a new Auto-Creaser that scores jobs over 10 times faster than before, and just in time for our yearly slew of Christmas and New Years card jobs. With this new machine, we can finish folding job faster and more efficiently.

     Another benefit of this machines is that it can even helps text weight papers look better. Text weights can be folded without scoring because they are light weight sheets. Unfortunately, for many small quantity jobs that are printed on digital copiers, there can still be cracking where the artwork meets the fold. As you may or may not know, copiers lay toner (a polymer/plastic) on top of the paper. Because it's not a real ink and hasn't soaked into the fibers of the paper, digital will crack when folded. Scoring these jobs — especially brochures — dramatically improves the look and quality. Once you see the difference you won't ever want to go back to the old way again.