MediaCorp Overland Park Kansas Marketing Strategy

By Remy Lebeau

The promotional item is an $18 billion industry that presents you thousands of customizable giveaways to promote your business. And even though the wide selection of marketing products represents a growing and dynamic industry, this can also be viewed negatively as this multitude of selection contributes to the confusion for many marketers.

Promotional Items

Using marketing products to promote your business may seem to be a simple thing. And indeed it is as a promotional product strategy just requires you to choose any promo item to imprint with your logo and distribute to your target market. And this strategy will often work, but to fully maximize your ROI, there are a lot of factors to consider in your giveaway decision process, such as marketing budget, target market segment, and promotional event, just to name a few. And this is where the complexity of a promotional item strategy emerges intimidating new and old marketers alike from integrating such an effective strategy in their marketing mix.

In order to help marketers to fully optimize their promotional item strategy, a simple guide for using the top promo products are presented below. These condensed strategies can be used as a starting point for a customized marketing product plan that will fit your own business.

Promotional Apparel

The logo apparel category is the top marketing product in terms of sales, comprising more than a quarter of the total annual sales for the promotional product industry. This shows the clear preference of companies in using company shirts in their promotional item strategy. Though company shirt is very versatile since it is capable of targeting different market segments, the optimal use for this marketing product is for the development of your company’s most important asset: your employees.

Distributing company apparel in your organization will improve employees’ morale which is directly related to their productivity. It also builds the team spirit of your personnel as uniformity provides a sense of security and belongingness.

By Joe Love

The most important part of any marketing you do is direct marketing. This includes letters, postcards, brochures, newspaper or magazine coupons, telemarketing, TV or radio direct response commercials, e-mails, and the copy on your web site.

For any direct marketing campaign to be successful, you need to have a combination of marketing tools in order to make your offer repeatedly. One of the most potent tools you can use in your direct makreting is the direct mail letter. The letter, whether you’re using it through the mail or the internet, is the actual sales pitch. It relays what your product or service is, and how much it can benefit the prospect. In short, the letter should do everything that a traditional person-to-person sales pitch does.

Here are ten things that will make your letters more effective:

1. It must have a headline. The headline is the ad for the letter. It flags down the reader to read more.

2. Present the facts. Begin with a statement of basic truth, known and accepted by the reader. By introducing known facts, your create believability for later statements in the letter.

3. Do as much personalizing as possible. Personalize name, address, special interests, and anything else you can.

4. State your offer in the beginning, again in the middle, and again at the end.

5. Create a sense of urgency by giving prospects a cut-off date by which time your readers must respond to your offer.

6. Always include a P.S. The P.S. is the second thing readers read, following the headline.

7. Stress your main points with underlines, bold type, all caps, or a yellow highlighter effect. But don’t stress too much.

8. Use short paragraphs, sentences, and words. In lettes of two or more pages use subheads.

9. Use black ink, plus blue to underline more important points. Print your signiture and make notes in the margins or hand-write a P.S.

10. Tell the reader exactly what to do upon completing the letter, along with how to do it, and when to do it.

A succesful direct marketing campaign might consist of four pieces sent at two-week intervals: a two page letter, then a one page letter, then a postcard, then a telephone follow-up. It is important to remember that even the best letters don’t get read if the envelope doesn’t get opened. So make the envelope enticing to get your recipients to open it. You can do this by putting a “teaser” line on the outside, motivating the person to open it. You could use a window envelope with a photo of free gift, resemblance of a check, or some other unique design. This increases curiosity and gives the recipient a reason to open the envelope.