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Will You Add? - Postcards - Picture Perfect Promotion
This is the time of year when many of us are reviewing our plans for our local annual golf event. Since most of these events are for charity, budgets can be lean.If you have not already considered a ‘Sponsor’ donation category, this is a good way to raise the total contributed quickly. Local companies can be persuaded to contribute – sometimes in a fairly large way if you know what they are really looking for.In a word, it’s publicity. Good publicity is not a commodity easily come by. So by giving them good publicity, they are more likely to open the corporate wallet. Many events have local companies sponsor a hole. For this to work well, not only should you provide a listing in an event flyer but you should invest in some quality signage at each hole that proudly lists the sponsor.Now get even more creative. Ask one or more sponsors to donate for event gifts for the participants. Their take? Their name listed with yours on the items given away. For example, you can get towels with the event logo and the sponsor’s logo imprinted for a very reasonable price. This is an item that will last for quite some time so it has real value for a local company. Other popular items can be golf tees or logo’d golf balls. In either case you can sometimes co-brand with a major sponsor.Use the publicity angle to your advantage to get local news coverage. Local TV stations and radio stations are always looking for local news to announce. Be sure to contact them well in advance (4 months or so) and arrange for some coverage. Invite a local sports caster to partic
Have you had it up to “here” in your present job? Are you thinking that another job would provide a better fit and mean a true commitment to the job? Well, welcome to the club…and it’s a large one. Employment experts believe that over 50 percent of the working population, at any given time, is ready to move on and find another job that is a better fit.Of course, now might not be the right time to make that move for any number of reasons, not the least of which might be finances, family or fear. But here are 7 things you can do to create a better work situation for yourself in your present job. If you practice these actions, you will have more energy and challenge, create new connections with your environment and be seen as someone who is working to help your organization succeed. And that’s all good—for you and your career!1. Identify - and get to know - your strengths. When you know them, you can be conscious of how to best apply them to your work. When we use our strengths, or our natural talents, we are doing our best work…and that provides satisfaction. In their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton identify 34 core strengths or talents that people possess, and we each excel in five or six of them. Discover your top strengths, and you will forever look at the work you do and the contributions you make differently. When you are aware of your strengths you can purposefully use them to create work satisfaction. It’s a matter of doing more of what you do best.2. Use your strengths every day to improve your work a
It isn’t a fact that registers easily and it almost takes faith to follow this dictum until you have seen it work over and over in all sorts of different businesses and organizations (as I have).
This law transcends market conditions, the activities of your competition, acts of terrorism, time of year, the alignment of Mars with Jupiter and all the million and one explanations we frequently fall back on when business is slow. All these conditions may be present but there is still a way to rise above them: just promote more heavily and frequently and business will start to pick up again. It never fails.
It’s almost a natural instinct when times get a little tight or business is slow to cut down on expenditure. You hear people talking about tightening their belts. Too often the first expenditure companies seek to cut is their marketing and advertising dollar, and that is a serious error, a guarantee of contraction. You have to step up the promotion, not
How profitable are your biggest customers? How much of your capital and operating expenditure is tied up servicing different customers or customer segments? Work it out and you may be surprised to find that your "best customers" are in fact your worst customers.Activity Based Costing is normally accountants and finance department employees' purview and shunned by line managers as being too difficult to understand and impossibly difficult to execute.It need not be as difficult as some people imagine and can be very useful in understanding and doing something about the cost drivers of your organisation.In simplest terms, activity based costing operates on the following premise.Cost objects e.g. customers, products consume activities e.g. packing, warehousing, planning or maintenance.Activities consume resources e.g. labour, electricity, (direct and indirect costs).Resource costs can be allocated to activities by a reasonable method.Activities can be allocated to cost objects by a reasonable method.The first step in conducting an activity based costing exercise is not to determine the activities but to determine the end use of the ABC analysis.If the exercise is to provide a clear costing analysis to evaluate slight differences in margins available in a very competitive market place, then the exercise will be lengthy and expensive and will use as much direct measurement as possible. For example, electricity consumption will need to be measured by electricity meters and labour consumption by time cards or even electron
It isn’t a fact that registers easily and it almost takes faith to follow this dictum until you have seen it work over and over in all sorts of different businesses and organizations (as I have).
This law transcends market conditions, the activities of your competition, acts of terrorism, time of year, the alignment of Mars with Jupiter and all the million and one explanations we frequently fall back on when business is slow. All these conditions may be present but there is still a way to rise above them: just promote more heavily and frequently and business will start to pick up again. It never fails.
It’s almost a natural instinct when times get a little tight or business is slow to cut down on expenditure. You hear people talking about tightening their belts. Too often the first expenditure companies seek to cut is their marketing and advertising dollar, and that is a serious error, a guarantee of contraction. You have to step up the promotion, not
Chachkas (sp)…Freebies…Giveaways. Through the years, promotional items have taken on many names…most not very complimentary. We’ve all been on the receiving end of promotional items, and typically our overall impression is synonymous with throw away, little or no value, worthless, not an essential business tool. If you’re on the giving end, certainly this is not the desired response. Time and money have been spent with the ultimate goal of promoting your product and raising awareness of your brand.Let’s use a few other terms. This time I’ll pick words that are synonymous with business in the 21st Century. How about runaway competition; skeptical, hard to reach audiences; slow growth; and low price focus? This second set of terms should shed a new light on the use of promotional items as part of an overall branding strategy.Before you can appreciate how promotional products and branding fit into the solution, let’s expand on the problem. There were more than 33,000 new product introductions in 2004. The more staggering point, more than half of consumers could not name a single product that was introduced. It’s estimated that all of us receive 5,000 messages a day. Think about all the email, voice mail, snail mail, and advertising you receive, not to mention product emblazoned pads and pens, and most people can see how cutting through the communication clutter requires far more effort today than in the past. Actually success is generated more through strategic thinking than just effort.What can you do about this? First, decide on a brand. My definition of a brand i
This law transcends market conditions, the activities of your competition, acts of terrorism, time of year, the alignment of Mars with Jupiter and all the million and one explanations we frequently fall back on when business is slow. All these conditions may be present but there is still a way to rise above them: just promote more heavily and frequently and business will start to pick up again. It never fails.
It’s almost a natural instinct when times get a little tight or business is slow to cut down on expenditure. You hear people talking about tightening their belts. Too often the first expenditure companies seek to cut is their marketing and advertising dollar, and that is a serious error, a guarantee of contraction. You have to step up the promotion, not
Strong brands prompt strong brain reactions. Radiologists are proving what marketers have been preaching for decades.Dr. Christine Born, a radiologist at the Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich conducted a series of MRIs exposing 20 adults (upscale for income and education) to logos of strong and weak German brands. The results, reported in the Wall Street Journal, were that bigger brands make bigger brain waves. This comes on top of previous data indicating that shopping can alter blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rates.Apparently well-known brands fire synapses associated with positive emotions, self-identification and rewards. Weak brands either don’t register or provoke activity in parts of the brain associated with negative emotion.The surprising conclusion was that the big brand buzz exists regardless of the category. Dr. Born found that the reaction to an automotive brand like Volkswagen that has significantly greater media weight and probably stronger creative executions was as strong as the reaction to Allianz, an insurance brand. Both leading brands prompted much bigger reactions than the logos of smaller, less-known competitors.The implication is that investing in building a strong, memorable brand pays off. What isn’t clear is how to do it and which components of branding give you the best bang for the buck.The other, not-so-surprising, evidence was that strong brand recognition did not stimulate the decision-making centers in the brain. So now we have scientific evidence that awareness and purchase motivation are two separate
It’s almost a natural instinct when times get a little tight or business is slow to cut down on expenditure. You hear people talking about tightening their belts. Too often the first expenditure companies seek to cut is their marketing and advertising dollar, and that is a serious error, a guarantee of contraction. You have to step up the promotion, not
Remain Competitive in Today’s IT Market…Build a Knowledge Portfolio! Times have changed. The competition here and abroad for jobs is tough, to put it mildly. As a programmer you are going to have to work hard to stay in the rat race – to stay relevant…but how? Take the initiative for your career – for your future Your greatest assets are your knowledge, experiences, and the ability to apply these to developing solutions. Dave Thomas, author of “The Pragmatic Programmer, states in a talk “How to Keep Your Job”, that you must “invest in yourself”. He suggests that we treat our knowledge assets as if they were a financial portfolio. By investing in – and managing – your “Knowledge Portfolio”, you ensure that your knowledge assets maintain or increase their overall value and endure changes in the industry, hence remaining more marketable. The Keys to a Successful Knowledge Portfolio 1. Plan…Set a Goal and Stay the Course… “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.”– Tom Landry A successful Knowledge Portfolio starts with a plan. Would you build a house, plan for retirement, or put aside a nest egg for your child’s college tuition without having an appropriate plan adapted to reaching that particular goal? No! Why should your career be any different? Your Knowledge Portfolio should consist of the never-ending learning process I mentioned above. Do not assume that the knowledge base you ha
You don’t have to open a postcard!
We have found more and more brokers are turning to high quality, four-color postcards as the best form of direct mail. It’s time to pass on the information for those who haven’t yet discovered this cost-effective way of getting the word out and the business in.
This is especially timely advice as the national anthrax scare – whether you give credence to it or not – has resulted in a certain caution when it comes to opening envelopes from unknown sources. One great advantage of the postcard is that it doesn’t have to be opened – there is nothing hidden about it and nothing to be scared of.
Quite aside from the anthrax angle, the fact that a postcard doesn’t need to be opened has another advantage: it has a chance to get its message across before it is dropped into the garbage can as “junk mail.
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