Archive for the ‘Public Relations’ Category
Sunday, May 25th, 2008 |
Cheap promotional items are a fantastic means to attract consumers. They aid in expanding industries and placing a name for them in the market. But there are numerous sources out there to select from, so make sure you go with the most suitable one for your industry.
Businesses use promotion marketing to draw in customers in hopes to earn more money. Businesses plan the message they want to use as well as the means to send that message out, everywhere. Promotion marketing involves advertising, public relations and publicity, promotions and events, direct marketing, premium items, product marketing materials and sales force. Cheap promotional items are can be used in almost any business situation to get better earnings. As long as you get the right ones for your particular business, they can be quite appealing to the market you’re targeting.
Customers are often reminded of a product or company when presented with memorabilia, mementos, souvenirs and monograms. Customers would always like the idea of receiving something back, especially when that something is for free. Today, customers could be looking for something more, such as customized items. Know what your customers might be looking for to maximize responses.
There are actually numerous types of cheap promotional items. They may communicate various messages. They can be fairly uncomplicated and helpful gifts, decorative or simply amusing. They may resemble the items a company sells, or another totally dissimilar item that conveys a particular theme. In essence, a company should research mainly on the interests of their target and the kind of attention they desire.
What type of audience would you like to present your promotional items with? You may want to draw in potential clients, keep existing customers as long as possible, reward your employees, or a combination of these. You may then think about your brand. A great source for cheap promotional items is customization. You can simply market your unique insignia.
A company can always benefit from promotional services as a source for their growth. These services can aid you in actualizing your vision, so that you can increase the number of buyers. Creative planning is an important source for cheap promotional items because it does lower down the costs while still maintaining appeal.
Effective cheap promotional items are those that won’t be thrown off to the bin. First, determine your target audience, then how you are going to hand out the items. Plan an initial budget and determine a few promotional companies you might want to work with. To find the best sources for cheap promotional items, seek referrals from other business handlers you trust.
Once you’ve got your sources together, try to keep your items simple. Take note of consistency when it comes to your message. And finally, you might want to keep that message subtle so you know customers will actually want to use the promotional items.
Now that you have an idea of where to start, what cheap promotional items are available? There are too many to count, but popular ones are torches, plastic mugs, key chains, puzzles and toys. You can always do something different for these items. For instance, you can have those key chains engraved with your business insignia. It all boils down to balancing your message and the appeal of the item itself.
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Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 |
Having a strong market presence can be tough in today’s competitive world, especially for small to mid-size businesses. With some many companies selling the same thing, it’s hard to stand out in a crowd. Luckily, the Internet makes it possible for even the smallest company to compete today, especially when it comes to market presence building.
Online market presence building is basically like doing web PR - getting your name out there in different ways. The Internet makes many things possible and your first step to having a strong market presence online is an awesome website. After all, this is the new millennium and having an interactive, fully-loaded website is a necessity.
A fully-loaded website shouldn’t just list your products and services. It needs good, strong content; interesting, compelling design; lead generation forms and of course an industry-related blog and forum. Both a blog and forum are key to market presence building, as blog posts and forum threads often get heavy circulation across the web.
In a way, market presence building is all about marketing your company and your website. Do you ever wonder what people find when they search you company online? Is it your website popping up, as well as favorable reviews, blog posts and articles by employees? Or does a search on your company yield Rip-Off Reports and Better Business Bureau complaints galore?
You can become an industry expert online by writing 1-2 articles a week and releasing them to hundreds of article directories online. This is an easy method of market presence building. It’s also an easy way to rebuild the search engines results for your business.
It’s also important to distribute press releases and blog regularly. They are an important addition to any market presence building plan. This leads to better brand recognition and therefore higher levels of lead generation.
Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) can also help market presence building. By utilizing pay per click programs, you can make your website ad pop up for certain keywords people type in. The best part is, you only pay when they actually click your ad, which sends them to your website to hopefully be turned into a lead.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tougher topic and involves market presence building techniques that will result in your website coming up at the top of the search engines for the keywords or phrases that best pertain to your industry. SEO tends to be a longer process and involves getting many other sites to link to use yours, using your main keywords as anchor text, but in the long run can be an extremely powerful and inexpensive tool.
It’s simple: if you want a strong web presence and more leads, develop and implement a strong market presence-building plan. By including several factors like articles, press releases, SEO and blogs, you can get a great reputation going in no time. While not a short-term process, market presence building is like snowball effect - get the ball rolling and see where it goes!
About the Author:
About the Author: Ms. Lichty is a social media specialist and SEO guru with ProspectMX. Find more information on market presence building practices at the author’s website.
Tags: The Future of Internet Marketing, Market Presence Building
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Sunday, January 13th, 2008 |
How many more articles are going to be written on “safe internet shopping”? Well, here’s one more. And its the basics. It’s the basics because the basics is what you need to know, just like a store in your local mall (but a little different). Things like shipping price, security, guarantees, quality, service. Common sense things. But how do you find out when the vendor may be across the country (if not the world?)
Knowledge. Of course knowledge is power and education is the key to knowledge. I don’t mean go out right now and sign up for a class on Internet shopping, though it’s never a bad idea if you have the time, and, like me, do most of your shopping on the Internet.
Of course the obvious obstacle is you can’t see the seller. He or she may be sitting in pajamas in Mozamibique for all you know. But with a little research, you can find out rather rapidly where the seller is and how long he/she has been there. Also, many stores over an 800 number for customer service and ordering. Use it if you feel a bit skiddish but want a product from the store.
It is a rarity these days that a store is not very secure in it’s checkout system. You can see the icons at the bottom of the page to see who has verified the validity of the security. In other words, don’t just send your credit card information in an email to an online shop. That is common sense. And unless you are signing up for an affiliate program, there is never a reason to have to give your social security number to order anything. And even then, you will want to do so through a well-known 3rd party source like Commission Junction on their secure platform. But again, that is only if you have found a product or products that you like, and want to resale them on your site (if an affiliate program is available).
How stable is the shop with which you are about to do business? How long have they been in business? Can they deliver what they promise? There are ways to find that out by doing research on the firm. WhoisLookup is a great way to find out. Just type in the web address and find out when the company was formed. For instance, though many of my stores are less than two years old, as a cartoonist, we have been selling gifts and collectibles on our main comic website for a decade as of this writing. Our main manufacturer 3drose, is one of Ebay’s oldest and largest PowerSellers with over 12,000 transaction with a 99.4% positive rating. That kind of thing doesn’t hurt. Many stores have sub stores on Ebay or other auction sites. Simply check their feedbac.
Other stores, like ours all have community blogs. We show the blog address on our main sites and people are welcome to offer their experiences and feedback. This can add to the comfort level when buying online.
Does the company offer a 30 day unconditional money-back guarantee? If not, don’t bother. There is a reason they don’t and if you order you’ll soon find out why. In my virgin days of the Internet, I didn’t bother to check, and I learned quickly. This is of utmost importance whether buying locally or on the Internet. If a company won’t stand behind its products or service, there is a reason. And some still don’t. Caveat emptor.
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Sunday, January 13th, 2008 |
In my ten years of cartooning, people often want to talk about the money. They say things like, “You must be rich with all those newspapers you are in.” In the first place, I’m not in that many newspapers and not even syndicated. Even if I was in syndication, that is not where the money is in cartooning. Speaking of syndication, the lottery has better odds.
The real money in funny pictures is in art licensing. Art licensing is a huge business, almost 100 billion dollars per year, yet not many know about it. Basically it is the process of putting an art image on a manufactured product from lunch boxes to tshirts to greeting cards. Most of the public rarely sees this business activity as they are too busy buying the end product.
Art licensing can work in a variety of ways. It can be an individual artist approaching a manufacturer with an image that the artist feels will make the manufacturer’s products sell better. Sometimes a deal is made, more often not. When it is, the artist receives a negotiated royalty, a percentage of each sale. There are other types of licensing that work with sponsorships, such as an oil company sponsoring Nascar and they get to put their logo on an actual race car.
LIMA is the industry association. One does not have to be a member to be in the art licensing game but it doesn’t hurt. Such associations are a great way to make contacts.
But what if the artist is not traditional. Maybe he/she is a cartoonist. Sometimes deals are done the opposite way in this situation. A manufacturer of, say collectible clocks or lunch boxes will approach Disney and ask for the exclusive licensing deal on that product for a certain image or series of images.
I startes as an unknown cartoonist thinking I would be syndicated within the first months or so because “my concepts were so good and different”. I was fortunate to learn that was my ego talking. So I approached a several trade journals in need of theme cartoons with their articles and sold them for what I could. I slowly built a portfolio and finally was able to take it to a manufacturer/drop-shipper who was willing to take a chance and make the products with a royalty split. I did not have a licensing agent so my attorney handled the contract for me. It is always a good idea, if your strength is in art and not numbers to have a professional in another area (like an attorney or agent) do that part of the job.
As time went by, I found more manufacturers who made different products than my first ones and was able to make deals with them, using the same contract template.
The old-school tradition of cartooning was dictated by the big syndication firms. First you become syndicated, then you get to sell your products and create wealth. Those days are gone thanks to the Internet. One can enter the field in the way one feels comfortable. I am yet to be officially syndicated though my cartoons appear worldwide on a daily basis.
If you are new to cartooning, or even a veteran looking for new outlets, the Internet offers many. It does not happen overnight. It took me a decade. But it will happen if one is persistent.
In 1997, I began my cartoon venture metal warehouse in rural Mississippi. I could not even afford a website and didn’t even know how to work the Internet, much less a computer. I bought some of those “For Dummies” books and learned as I worked. Now I have eight domains, seven stores with almost 80,000 products in about 100 different categories , and the most visited offbeat cartoon site on the Internet, Londons Times Cartoons with over 8500 original images and almost 9 million visitors. That’s not so bad for ten year’s work, at least not for me.
One might say I paid a heavy price to get this off the ground. But there are a million stories like mine out there. Mine is but just one. Anything worth having takes hard work. Just enjoy the ride and you’ll see that the benefits are worth more than the pain.
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