Six Tips for Strengthening Your Value Proposition

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Anyone who’s spent time in sales knows that the buying process often boils down to one or two key questions: Why should I buy what you’re selling? And why should I buy it from you? A well-conceived value proposition will go a long way toward answering those questions.

But what is a value proposition? Simply stated, a value proposition is a brief statement that clearly outlines the benefits customers get from using your products and doing business with your company. It cuts through all the noise and focuses squarely on the customer and their needs.

So how can you create an effective value proposition? Here are six tips to get you started.

Get to know your customers. What makes them tick? What principles do they value? What challenges do they face? And how can your product or service help them reach their goals?

Study the competition. Start with their website, product line, and marketing literature. Visit their facility, meet their staff, and talk to their customers. Learn how they’re positioning themselves and what you can do to counteract their claims.

Discover what makes you different. Take some time to assess your own company. Look at your culture, values, and product line. Ask your top customers why they buy from you. Get input from your employees, too. Find out what’s unique about your company — and how those qualities can benefit your customers.

Focus on benefits instead of features. Benefits tend to be more customer-focused, while features can seem self-absorbed. If your value proposition doesn’t tell your customers what’s in it for them, keep trying.

Be specific. Avoid the temptation to talk in generalities. Consider Geico’s “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” versus a more generic “we’ll save you time and money.” Both may be true, but the first is far more specific.

Make it tangible. What real-world results can people expect from your products or services? Will they save time? Cut expenses? Improve efficiency? Increase revenues? Include the answers in your value proposition.

There you have it: six tips for strengthening your value proposition. Can you think of any others? Or maybe you’d like to share a favorite value proposition (your own, perhaps?). Whatever the case, we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

Does Your Marketing Need a Workout?

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A successful marketing strategy often resembles the five steps of an exercise plan. And just like exercising, finding the motivation to get started is often the hardest part. Here are a few tips to help you give your marketing plan a workout:

  1. Follow a regular schedule. Remember that erratic actions will not bring results. Just as an occasional jog will not make you fit, marketing requires a regular, ongoing schedule.
  2. Exercise all your muscle groups. Like fitness plans which incorporate several variables, including diet, aerobic exercise, and strength training, successful marketing plans should also include several well-balanced strategies working together. Just as everyone’s body is different, every company should have a customized combination of print marketing, social media, online/web marketing, e-newsletters, and the like to meet their specific needs.
  3. 3.Don’t overdo it in the beginning! Too much exercise can exhaust you and cause your muscles pain, making it hard to think about exercising again. An overkill on marketing can have the same result. Start slow, then build momentum and strength gradually as you develop your plan of attack.
  4. Maintenance is key. Don’t let your firm’s marketing efforts turn flabby with a lack of follow-up actions. Regardless how popular your brand becomes, ongoing marketing is essential to keep your name at the top.
  5. Look to professionals if help is needed. Our creative team is available and eager to help you develop marketing materials your customers are sure to love. Give us a call today!

Create a SWOT Marketing Campaign

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It’s important to understand how your business compares to your competition, especially when marketing your products or services. By creating a SWOT analysis, you can gain helpful insight to your business success.

A SWOT analysis focuses on your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats that may impact your business. By recognizing both positive and negative factors that affect your business, you can take an objective look at your business and use the results to improve your marketing messages. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when creating your SWOT analysis:

  • Strengths refer to what your company does well. List all positive attributes and advantages you have over your competition, such as an industry-leading warranty, in-house support staff, outstanding reputation, or established customer base.
  • Weaknesses include areas you need to improve in order to better compete. Examples might include high pricing, inferior products, limited resources, poor location, and so forth. An outside viewpoint of your company’s weaknesses can be very valuable, since company perceptions lack the customer perspective.
  • Opportunities refer to external chances for your business to grow and prosper. Opportunities typically occur when markets grow, demand for products increases, or you’re able to provide new solutions to a common problem.
  • Threats include external factors beyond your control, such as consumer trends, technological developments, business mergers, government regulations, political decisions, economic downturns, the like. While many things could threaten your business, give most consideration to items with a greater probability of occurring.

After completing your SWOT analysis, you should not only make a plan to reduce your weaknesses (either by minimizing the risk they represent or making changes to overcome them), but you should also ensure your marketing materials highlight your strengths to their full potential. If you need help upgrading your print materials, give our creative team a call today.

Break the Barrier

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During the mid 20th century, the one-mile run was a centerpiece event in track and field. In its illustrious history, no one had ever broken the four-minute time barrier. For years, doctors, scientists, and the general public believed that it was physically impossible for humans to run that fast. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister came along and proved all the experts wrong by running the race in less than four minutes.

What’s more amazing is that within one year of Bannister’s record-breaking race, 16 more runners broke the four-minute mile as well.

How could it be that all of a sudden so many athletes were able to break a seemingly impossible record that had stood for so long? There hadn’t been a new technological breakthrough, nor could it be explained in any outward way.

One possible explanation is that none of those athletes truly believed it was possible to run the mile in under four minutes. Roger Bannister not only broke the physical barrier of running a sub-four-minute mile. He also broke a mental barrier that had been holding runners back for years.

We all have these types of mental barriers in our lives. We all have reasons in our minds why something can’t be done. Most are self-made inner doubts and excuses.

Isn’t it time to break through your four-minute-mile barrier?

Appreciation Marketing

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Everyone likes to feel appreciated. That’s especially true when it comes to your customers. Appreciation marketing can help you develop lasting relationships and make customers think of you the next time they’re ready to purchase. Here are a few ways to show customers your appreciation:

  • Send a hand-written thank you card every time someone does business with you.
  • Reward repeat customers with special deals, exclusive discounts, and coupons.
  • Send holiday, birthday, or anniversary cards. These simple, pressure-free greetings will help increase top-of-mind awareness throughout the year.
  • Offer useful information and helpful tips to educate customers and promote your expertise via blogs, newsletters, social media, and the like.
  • Invite customers to an exclusive appreciation event designed for existing customers.
  • Collaborate with non-competitive local businesses to create a coupon book or discount program across a range of industries.
  • Create a customer loyalty program, such as a loyalty punch card, upgrade offers, or cash rewards after reaching a specific purchase level.
  • Respond quickly to customer questions or requests, and follow-up to be sure all questions were thoroughly answered.
  • Ask for customer feedback in the form of surveys and response cards.
  • Send out a voucher or postcard for a free gift, redeemable at your business.
  • Send discounts and coupons “just because” to thank customers for their business.
  • Include statement stuffer coupons with bills not only as a thank you but also to encourage customers to make additional future purchases.

If you’re interested in any of the above print marketing ideas or need help brainstorming the perfect promo to show customers your appreciation, our creative team is eager to help. Give us a call today!

Bounce ‘Em Back to Your Site

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After all your work hard and marketing efforts enticing prospects to visit your website, it can be frustrating to see high bounce rates. Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term that represents the percentage of visitors who enter your website and bounce — or leave the site — rather than continuing to view other pages within your site or complete a desired action.

Here are a few common website mistakes that are often responsible for driving away potential customers:

  • The basics. An unattractive design, spelling errors, broken links, images that take forever to load, and other annoyances will quickly cause visitors to lose trust and confidence in your business.
  • Poor navigation. If visitors can’t tell where they are, where to click next, or how to get back to your homepage, they will likely just exit.
  • Complicated, lengthy web pages. Instead, provide information that is brief and organized with headlines and sub-headings, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs.
  • Too many distractions. Popup ads, flashing information, and similar devices can easily frustrate or lead visitors away from your site.
  • Dated content. How will visitors know if anything is the latest and greatest information if you don’t take the time to update key areas on your website?
  • Music or sound effects. These are not only annoying, but also embarrassing for visitors viewing your site from a public place. Users will likely close out of your site as quickly as possible.
  • No contact information. While a “contact us” form is helpful, your website should also include your telephone number and physical address. The more contact information you include, the more visitors will be reassured you are legit.
  • Asking too many questions. Requiring too much information from visitors may scare some away. Make it easy for visitors to request additional information by simply asking for their name and basic contact information. Also provide quick turnaround in response to show you respect their time.

Our creative team would love to help you develop outstanding marketing materials to supplement your website. Give us a call today!

Marketing with Posters

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Poster marketing has been a popular way to spread the word for more than 200 years, dating back to posters for everything from World’s Fairs, recruitment, and war propaganda to bicycles and bullfights. Today, posters continue as a flexible marketing tool for publicizing upcoming events, promoting ideas, and advertising new products and services. Here are a few benefits of poster marketing:

  • Versatility. Posters can be printed on a variety of surfaces, protected with UV coating or laminating, and mounted or framed. As a result, they can be used either indoors or outdoors in any number of ways.
  • Simplicity. Because posters are created for viewers on the move, some of the best posters don’t say much. Effective posters capture the viewer’s attention immediately — often with large, eye-catching graphics, a catchy headline, and a web address that is easy to remember. You can then provide more detailed information on your website and entice readers to join your mailing list for additional updates.
  • Any size you need. When creating posters, think about where you plan to display them. While the most popular posters are 24″x36,” this large size would be overpowering on corkboard displays (which would be much better suited to an 11″x17″ poster).
  • Fresh factor. Because posters offer a high-quality, low-cost marketing solution with fast turnaround, replacing posters frequently with new content is a great way to prevent your advertising efforts from going stale.

Give us a call if you need help creating posters that will make an exciting addition to your marketing materials. Our creative experts specialize in bringing great ideas to life!

What if?

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Do you ever find yourself playing the “what if” game? What if you had made a different choice with something in your past, whether a life decision or in business?

Sure you have. We all do.

When you’re evaluating these “what if” scenarios in your head, do you ever wonder how close you came to achieving some of the goals you set but for whatever reason never did?

It’s true that we shouldn’t dwell on the past, but it’s also worth mentioning that we all want to live a life that leaves little regret at the end of the day. So learning from our past mistakes (and victories) is an important part of our growth process.

When you want to reach anything worthwhile, you set goals. You put some effort into reaching your target. The higher the target and bigger the goal, the more effort it takes to reach it.

Simple concept, right? 1 + 2 = 3

Then if it’s so simple, why is it that we sometimes don’t reach the goals we set for ourselves?

On the surface, there’s a relatively simple answer. Effort. The amount of effort we needed to put in just wasn’t there. Why? Sometimes the reasons are external and beyond our control, but most often we allow internal issues to block us from reaching our goals.

Even more frustrating is the realization that we were probably much closer to reaching our goal than we ever realized. Water is really hot when it’s heated to 211 degrees. But it’s not until it reaches 212 degrees that water creates steam. Steam is what generates the power to move a locomotive, not warm water.

Whether you’re working on personal goals or business ones, the lesson here is that you’re probably tantalizingly close to reaching the top. Probably one tiny degree away.

Watch this short video to get a little inspiration to start making that one degree difference today.

Information Overload?

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The amount of information (images, videos, blogs, etc.) available to businesspeople is increasing at dizzying speeds. This can be a problem. A big and messy problem.

You see, there’s a lot of junk out there. Yet amid that trash valuable information exists that can help you and your customers achieve exactly what you’re looking for.

As with any problem, there are opportunities to be had.

Can you become the go to source for your top customers to help them find the gold? If you can manage that, you’ll become their trusted ally and vendor of choice.

That in essence is what “content curation” is all about.

You can send your customers and prospects copies of articles and links to important information — basically any resource you think will help them grow in their personal and business life.

Some think that content curation is a brand-new concept, but it’s been around for many years. Where the information comes from has evolved, but the essence has not changed.

Zig Ziglar said it best: “You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

You can’t go wrong with that kind of philosophy.

Product Naming Tips

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If you’re planning to introduce a new product into the market, here are a few tips to help you create a likeable product name that will also be relevant and memorable:

  • Choose an expressive name that describes what the product does.
  • Avoid acronyms. Give your product a full name, and use brief acronyms internally only.
  • Consider naming similar products together as a family. For example, Apple’s operating systems have used similar names such as Panther, Jaguar, Leopard, and Lion.
  • If you have a tiered product line (good, better, best), name your products accordingly to show order of ranking.
  • Add a prefix or suffix to a common name, such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod.
  • Choose a name that gives people a mental image of the benefits your product provides or how it works.
  • Select a name that is easy to pronounce. If your audience can’t pronounce it, they likely won’t remember it.
  • Creatively change the spelling of a real word. The popular cereals Kix and Trix are good examples.
  • If your products are sold internationally, always screen your product name to check for embarrassing meanings in other languages.
  • Consider using a verb as your product name, like Bounce dryer sheets.
  • Blend two descriptive words together to form a new word that describes your product, such as Miracle Whip.
  • Beware of any potential acronyms that may cause issues. For example, some people joke that Microsoft’s Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google.” Also check if there could be issues with shortening the product name.
  • Think about what you like/dislike about other product names across various industries, and compare that to the list of names you’re considering.
  • Lastly, beware that a long, drawn-out product name may cause a challenge when creating advertisements and promotional materials.

No matter what product name you choose, we have endless creative ideas to help you spread the word and increase your sales. Give us a call today!