Is Your Marketing Program as Attention-Grabbing as a Tricorn Hat?
Create a three-cornered marketing communications powerhouse to open doors, get recognized, and make yourself indispensable. I am a huge believer in print plus email as a powerhouse marketing combination, and I write about that topic a lot. When you add a third element, you become irresistible. Adding a third marketing channel to your powerhouse combo […]
Helping Customers Improve Their Game and Other Advice from the Trenches
Remember the 1988 romantic comedy Bull Durham? Every season baseball groupie Annie Savoy adopts a single-A league player from the Durham Bulls as her project, to improve, using her own homegrown rules. Like Annie, every year I, too, take on a project (just the business part, NOT the romantic side!). It’s a passion project that […]
Taming Your Business Marketing Beast – Here’s How!
I’m sitting down with a solopreneur to help get marketing under control. “It’s been about five years since I really worked on marketing,” she says. “It’s a real beast.” Beastly — ha! — I like that. Yes, I can see how business owners would view their marketing program as a beast. So how do we TAME […]
How to Add Seasonal Content to Print and Email for Fresh Engagement
Using seasonal content across your marketing program — in print, direct mail, social content, and email — helps our audience engage, remember our content, and share it. The key is to create seasonal content that is fresh, original, memorable, and with a unique point of view. Here’s how to add seasonal elements to your printing […]
Whether it’s Time or Tea… Always Leave Them Wanting More
Freshman year in college, a friend “willed” me her work-study job in a campus library. Located in a beautiful white marble building, the library was a simple room with glass-front barrister bookcases, glossy wood tables, and clerestory windows. In the afternoons, the sun would shine from above, illuminating the director of the library and giving […]
The Compound Benefit of Raising Your Rates
“Marilee is distraught,” said my friend, “So I gave her your name.” My friend’s boss, Marilee, published a highly-targeted magazine, printed and mailed to a paid subscriber base. She wanted to talk to me not about her readers but about her advertisers. Marilee had not raised her advertising rates — ever — although all her […]
Print, the Cool King of Content
My client, King, sold new and used videos, games, and fan collectibles. He printed a newsletter every month. When I started working as his marketing consultant, King’s newsletter was mostly canned, with syndicated reviews. He wanted to produce something original, distributed in-store to bring customers in the door. The world was changing, though, and people […]
What Printers Can Learn from Start-Ups
There are lessons printers can learn from other people’s businesses…. especially when those businesses fail. Start-up companies are a good source of research because the timeline is short, the mistakes stand out, and the founders are often willing to talk about what went wrong. “Why did your business fail?” I asked a group of founders […]
What Do You Think? Was This Marketing Campaign a Success?
Does everyone on your marketing team know what success means? Does the owner know? Here’s an example of the disconnect between the owner and the marketing department. I asked a printing company owner to give me an example of a marketing campaign that was successful and one that was not. This one, he said, was […]
Print, Text and Email Create a Recipe for Marketing Success
Print, text, and email are a delicious mix in this restaurant marketing campaign. To gain new customers (and keep them coming back), ask for permission to interact in all the places where they spend time — and then reward them lavishly. I’d like to share an example of a restaurant that successfully led the way […]
What Can Glamping Teach Us About Customer Experience?
My husband’s parents are known for taking us on memorable family vacations. One year, all the adults and grandkids navigated down Oregon’s breathtaking McKenzie River in drift boats. We learned to fly fish like they do in the movie A River Runs Through It, with the long fishing poles whipping back and forth. We camped […]
Is Your Email Marketing on Life Support? Revive it Now!
Did you take a gap year with your email marketing program? You’re not alone. Printing businesses often launch their email marketing with an ambitious schedule and then settle down to a reasonable pace once they see the discipline it requires. When the program stalls or stops completely, however, that’s bad. From a marketing perspective, your […]
