Part 2 of Millennials, “The Greatest Generation” and Direct Marketing. Time magazine recently profiled as the “Me Me Me” generation and described on the cover as “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” Here are ways that these assumptions might be off base, and how marketers can reach this new generation.

Millennials are responding in adaptionary/evolutionary way to technology. A recent experiment,“One Laptop per Child,” delivered tablet computers to Ethiopian villages – with no instructions or teachers, and with preloaded programs. The results were staggering, but reflect what we already know about the technology the Millennial generation has grown accustomed to. Read an excerpt from the study:

• Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

I cite this example not to parallel children in an Ethiopian village to the Millennials discussed in Time’s article, but moreso to point out that technology has gotten so user-friendly, that younger generations can be portrayed as lazy, where they may, in fact, be quicker problem solvers and efficient.

The use of social networks is a shining example of this phenomenon, where collaboration between teams and organizations will be an expectation of doing business for the Millennials. That being said, a collaborative approach to social media is imperative within businesses, as well as when trying to use social media as a marketing vehicle for your business. Additionally, since social media is becoming more and more of a mobile activity, marketers are charged with reaching Millennials on their smartphones and tablets. This compounded with “second-screening” and interactions through console gaming devices make the marketer’s job challenging.

A key fact to remember in all marketing campaigns is that the Millennial is born into a “social” technology world – one that is inherently multichannel, and seamlessly so. Most of all, marketers must adapt to the new generation of customers the same way they have adapted to the rapid technological changes that have occurred in their short lifetimes so far.

There are many danger zones you need to dodge as you send out your mobile marketing messages. There are so many different moving parts with marketing to an “on the go” audience. And it’s easy to leave out a key element or forget something that can make or break your mobile marketing efforts. Here are five danger zones you need to avoid as you work your mobile marketing plan:

1. Forgetting a call to action

Think this is basic Marketing 101 stuff? Well, it sort of is. But it’s easy to get dazzled by the brilliant message you cooked up and then not have a clear call to action at the end.  Every single marketing message should be reviewed to ensure that the call to action is crystal clear. Is the end user supposed to check in? Post a photo? Answer a poll? Tell the audience what to do, and make it obvious. Because if you don’t, your marketing message was just a wasted effort.

2. Forgetting the legal aspects of mobile marketing

Marketing isn’t all fun, outside of the box thinking. You also have to stay within legal regulations and industry guidelines. Someone on the marketing team should know what you can and cannot get away with. And, just because you can get away with something, doesn’t mean you should do it. So make sure that your message is not misleading or illegal and that your delivery is completely above board. You don’t want to deal with the clean-up from a messy mobile marketing campaign.

3.  Not testing your mobile site or message

Once you have a mobile site in place, you need to test it to ensure that it embodies all that is user-friendly for your mobile device audience. No excuses here…for site testing, you can use ready.mobi for free. It even whips up a report for you that will tell you how well your mobile site works on a mobile device. And don’t forget the marketing messages themselves. Test them out – within your business or a small portion of your demographic. Something you think will be a huge hit may go over like a lead balloon. Testing helps take out some of the guesswork with your mobile marketing.

4. Forgetting the delivery method

You always have to keep in mind that your audience is not on desktops or laptops. They are using a smaller screen and it’s not easy to maneuver around. Don’t require a kazillion click-thru actions or force them to scroll back and forth. They also don’t have a printer (so don’t send a message that requires them to print out a coupon!). Some end users may be limited on the amount of information they can receive, so keep the information and images within limits that don’t overload their bandwidth. Of course, as with any marketing message, keep it relevant, and in this case that relevancy should be to those who are on the go.

5. Not using the capabilities your audience does have at its fingertips

Think of all the functions a smartphone or tablet has. Should your call to action include a request to call? To download an app? What about taking advantage of its camera or video-taking capabilities?

I am (barely) a Millennial. Born in 1980, I rest on the cusp of what Time magazine recently profiled as the “Me Me Me” generation and described on the cover as “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”

Guess which magazine isn’t getting a Christmas card from me this year.

Overall, the article has received a great deal of exposure and backlash because of the attention-grabbing, slightly hyperbolic title and the overarching assumptions that Millennials crave less responsibility, still live at home and are obsessed with themselves. I’ve read many opinions on this feature that debate the statistics and accusations the article boasts, but the core of what separates the “Millennials” from prior generations is the advancement of technology during their (our) lifetimes.

AdAge makes a troubling assertion (for direct marketers, at least) that “Among other things, baby-boomer marketers need to accept the fact that Millennials have not inherited their parents’ love for the “touch” of paper.” There is some truth to this statement, but as a Millennial that checks his mailbox every day, there is also a major balancing act that every marketer must accept in marketing to Millennials – the same tricks don’t work anymore, they just work in different ways.

Millennials may not “crave” the touch of the physical printed piece, but still will interact with it given the right pairing with technology. Whether this comes in the form of augmented reality, near-field chips or smartphone-based apps and QR code scanning, ways that allow this connected generation to interact with their mail and magazines using a smartphone or tablet will be key in keeping direct mail relevant to this generation. For example, I LOVE to get coupons in the mail, but I’d like it even more if I could scan and save them to my iPhone. The ideals demonstrated by Google Glass also give insight to how this generation will consume information in the years to come. Whereas the newspaper or Yellow Pages may be less relevant to a younger generation, the information contained within will not be.

The past ten years have spawned the buzzword “multichannel”’ marketing, but Millennials are leaps and bounds ahead of the curve. They were raised on multichannel marketing. Television based off of their video games; magazines that point to websites; College acceptance letters that point to social media sites. This technology has never been new to them, so it has become an expectation in the way they do business and the way marketers HAVE to market to them. So there’s another way Millennials are here to save us, they will push companies to try harder and smarter and the best, data-driven messaging will rise to the top.

Marketers are taxed with using all of the data at their hands, especially from “Big Data” via social interactions and from employing advanced segmentation techniques in marketing to Millennials. Without these methodologies, messaging will be ignored, as it competes with the constant stream of stimuli coming from smartphones, emails, social networks, television, postal mail, video games and soon with augmented reality and wearable computing.

It’s Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend, so it’s time for some levity. Once again, my husband and his much-targeted facilities budget is to thank for this one.

You don’t see hand-addressed business letters much anymore, so this was something that stood out. But since it was a business letter, not a personal letter (like the hand addressing used in nonprofit solicitations), that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

The company strove for the personal touch with the hand addressing, but the message inside left much to be desired. Home-grown printing in toner-saving mode, the name of the company emblazoned across the top but the marketing copy promoting a different product entirely, pricing of “$1.69 each!” but for what? The sticky note covered most of the clear lightbulb printed on the white background the pricing applied to.

Then there was the question of the personal touch itself. The letter was hand-addressed and the sticky note hand-written, but why wasn’t the recipient’s name included? If the salesman wanted to use the folksy, personal approach, mightn’t he have written, “Stewart, do you still have T12 light bulbs?” But the personalization obviously didn’t go that far.

Nice glossy business cards, though. Two of them inside, in fact. So how does that match up with the in-office toner-saving mode for the flyer?

Sometimes marketing is just a train wreck, and you’ve got to wonder, where was the fail? Was it a company that had been approached by qualified print service providers and rejected their help? Thought they could renegade it on their own? Did this one get missed by the sales forces of the MSPs in the local area? How about the printer that produced those nice, high-gloss business cards? Are they promoting ancillary services to their business card customers? If so, was this company made aware of them?

So many questions when you see something like this. The moral of the story is, there are still lots of marketers out there who need your help! (And not just for the printing!)

When it comes to marketing blogs, there is always a flavor de jour. Currently, it’s big data. If not “big data,” then at least more data. So it was interesting when Thorin McGee, editor of Target Marketing, asked the question, “Can you ever have too much data?”

The question was asked on a LinkedIn board, along with an online poll, and the responses so far are limited and not yet useful, but there were two comments to the post that are worth thinking about.

The line is to stop collecting data, when the cost of collecting it exceeds your ability to use it to improve your profitability. — David Himes (Direct Commerce Advisors)

You can never have enough of the “right” data. Data that is collected should provide insights and [be] collected for the purpose of answering questions that are important for the future health, development and achieving the marketing objectives of the business. Too much data is collected because it can be collected and not because it is useful or needed. And, often or not, not understood or acted upon in any case! — Rob Wilcox (WebMedia Inbound Marketing)

Print businesses are frequently talking about helping their customers collect data, but what kind of data? You append your database and set up PURL surveys to collect all sorts of information, but is that data actually going to help your customers market better? What questions are being asekd to determine which data is the right data to improve marketing results? After all, you can personalize something without making it relevant.

How do you know what questions to ask to make sure you’re gathering the right data to help your customers?

Sometimes I don’t write about QR Codes for a month. Then there are times when all sorts of QR Code related things pop up. This seems to be one of those times.

I saw a QR Code this week that seemed like a neat opportunity for printers to sell to their customers. I was sitting in the doctor’s office with one of our daughters, and there on the back of the exam room door was a poster with three QR Codes, each taking me to a different social media site (Google+, Yelp, Yahoo!) where I was encouraged to write a review of the practice.

What a great idea, I thought.  The office benefits from positive online reviews, and I benefit from having something to do while I sit and wait for the doctor to arrive. Win, win! Could I write those reviews at home? Sure, but chances are, I won’t. But if I’m sitting there waiting, chances are, I just might. (I did.)

It’s a great, simple idea that offers an excuse to contact local businesses with print solutions. There may be only one poster per business, but how many doors do they have? It also gets your services, your ideas, in front of them and presents you as a solutions provider. What additional opportunities might that open up?

Just a thought.

What is NFC?

NFC stands for Near Field Communication and the short answer would be that NFC identifies us. It allows smartphones to be identified and it establishes a radio communication. Think short range wireless RFID technology.

You may have heard of NFC and its ability to make mobile payments easy. Account information is stored on the smartphone and when in close contact with the payment receiving technology, it passes along that account information, enabling a payment to be made.

However, NFC can be a great marketing tool for mobile marketing. And there is also talk of how NFC will help in terms of rewarding customer loyalty. The bonus is that NFC is more interactive and engaging than your typical marketing message. It’s not a “look at me” marketing strategy. It’s more of a “hey, look what we’ve got for you, are you interested?” kind of connection with the audience.

How does NFC work?

NFC is like your short and skinny pal. He can’t reach very far. And he can’t throw a weighty punch. But he’s scrappy and useful in certain situations.  This low power and short-range wireless link allows for information to be passed between a smartphone and another device. While it is short range (think inches), it does not require contact. But most importantly, it allows for the information to relay back and forth between two devices instead of that relay being a one way street.

Not only is it short-range, NFC is slow. Especially when you compare it to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. But the perk is that NFC consumes very little power. It won’t strain a smartphone battery and suck it dry.

A smartphone enabled with NFC can share and interact with another NFC device, or with a “passive” NFC tag. No app needed. And the NFC tag is like a tiny chip that may be embedded (in a poster, a business card and so on) somewhere and has data ready to transfer to a NFC enabled device. The tag doesn’t even need power. Instead, the radio frequency field generated by the NFC device (like your smartphone) does the work, and the data from the tag is transferred to the device.

• What’s so awesome about NFC?
• How is NFC used in the real world?
• How can you put NFC to work for your business?

Get the answers to these questions and more in:

Taking stock of your fulfillment company is an important part of achieving and maintaining success. You rely on your fulfillment company to fill orders, and to do so with a high degree of speed and accuracy. Even if things seem to be going well, it’s always a good idea to take some time to assess your fulfillment company and make certain that it’s the right “fit” for your needs.

Click on this image to receive a white paper on integrated marketing!

Head Back To School

Well, not really. But if you remember back to business classes, your instructor likely had you do at least one quasi-SWOT analysis. Need a refresher? SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities. And a great way to evaluate your fulfillment company would be to look at the strengths and weaknesses. We’ll call it a SW analysis.

Working on an in-depth SW analysis of your fulfillment company requires you to dig deep. This isn’t the time for listing superficial issues or problems. This is when you really get to the nitty-gritty of what’s working and what’s not. What strengths your fulfillment company consistently displays, such as efficiencies within their systems and what weaknesses (such as order inaccuracies) have popped up on your radar.

Don’t forget to do some basic research. Things may have easily changed over the time you have been working with your fulfillment company. Look for customer testimonials. Search for reviews or forum threads that may dish on your fulfillment company. If a former customer is not happy, you may want to know why, so that you can try to prevent any similar issues occurring for you.

If you have never physically evaluated the facility, or it’s been a long time, then you should take a tour. This isn’t time for a white glove test. It’s not about being squeaky clean, but you most definitely want an orderly and organized warehouse for your materials. You want to know that it’s OSHA compliant. That safety is taken seriously and policies are in place. You also want a secure location and a warehouse that has security in place to deter theft. You want to know what your fulfillment company is doing to protect your inventory.

Check The Data

You should have metrics in place. If you don’t, you need to put them in place now, though it’s hard to make a true assessment of how things are going if you haven’t been tracking anything.

Look at costs. Have any costs been reduced since working with your fulfillment company? Is your fulfillment company working towards reducing costs? Have they identified ways to reduce costs and made it clear to you what needs to happen in order to achieve those numbers?

Your fulfillment company should have a clear organizational structure and should be set up to optimize the ROI on everything from employees to inventory to fulfillment software.

Here are some measurements and information you should ask your fulfillment company for:

• Delivery / distribution speed (broken down at points such as picking, packing, shipping)
• Number of errors per day (in order fulfillment process)
• Length of time inventory sits
• How often inventory is tracked / updated
• Who is accountable for data, and how is accuracy of data confirmed

Click on the image to read more of my team’s take on fulfillment.

Would You Like Fries With That?

Everyone knows that fast food chains are notorious for upselling when a customer places a food order. Sure, you were only there to pick up a soda, but those fries sound pretty tasty. And hey, it’s easy to say “Yes.” The point is, your fulfillment company should have value-added services they can offer you. And they should make you aware of them, whether you need them or not.

Imagine working with your fulfillment center for a couple of years and not knowing that they have additional services that would have made your working relationship easier or more advantageous for you. Something like this would make you question whether your fulfillment company has your best interests in mind. They should always be thinking about ways to make your working relationship better and more advantageous on both ends. And leaving out important information like other services they could offer you is a huge oversight.

Pull Out A Scorecard

Scoring your fulfillment company may sound hokey, but it’s not. When you assess your fulfillment company and look over the strength and weaknesses of that company, keep score. It can be as simple as a range of 1-10, and then developing 5 to 10 key components of your relationship and their ability to provide accurate and on-time fulfillment. As you score each component, you may have a little light bulb going off over your head. Maybe things haven’t been going as smoothly as you thought. Or maybe things aren’t as bad as you imagined. It’s easy for one or two situations (especially bad ones) to really cloud your vision.

At the very least, you should score your fulfillment company in the areas of customer service, inventory management and tracking, warehousing and shipping. But you may want to drill it down to more specific components in order to better see where the issues (if any) are.

Keeping score and then coming up with the overall tally can paint the big picture for you. If your fulfillment company is hitting mid-range scores on every key component then you really need to decide if mediocre work is going to cut it. In fact, as you create your scorecard, you should determine an overall score that will mean it’s time for some major changes, time for a meeting of the minds or time for a big high five for all involved. In the end you want to feel 100% confident that you are getting what you are paying for and that you’re not paying for more than you actually need.

The term “multi-channel marketing” is a mouthful, but the actual reality of what it is and what it can do for your business is certainly far from intimidating. The concept is not new, but as technology evolves, the meaning of multi-channel marketing and all that it embraces also evolves. Multi-channel marketing is all about using various methods (channels) to get your marketing message to the people who matter the most – your target market.

It involves the integration of websites, phone, email, texting, print and other available channels to market relevant messages. It’s all about sending the right people the right message using the right channel. By failing to maximize your opportunities using multi-channel marketing, you shoot yourself in the foot and lose out…losing future customers and future profits.

Download A Free White Paper On Integrated Marketing From Me! 

One of the key elements behind multi-channel marketing is consistency in your branding. Using various ways to get your marketing message across to your prospects is pointless if that message isn’t consistent. In fact, if you muddy the marketing waters with different messages to your target market using various channels, you will in fact turn off your prospects.

While it’s easy to get caught up in the marketing game and think only of the message and reaching that target market, there are other points to consider. You have to make it easy for those prospects to contact you. You have to make it effortless to do business with your company. If your prospects experience any speed bumps along the way you are bound to lose them.

Think about it – perhaps you perform all your research of companies you want to deal with online without batting an eyelash. But not everyone is so trusting of or at ease with the internet. Those people want to talk with a warm body. They’d rather place a phone call and speak with someone directly to get all their questions answered. In this case, if your marketing messages lack a phone number for your prospects to call, you’ve just lost potential profits.

Click on this image to receive a case study outlining how one printer reinvented themselves into a marketing service provider.

This is where personalization comes into play. By personalizing your marketing messages to the recipients across the various marketing channels, you are increasing your odds of success. It doesn’t take in-depth market research to understand that a mobile text campaign targeted at senior citizens may fall flat on its face. But a well-crafted direct mail piece might be a home run!

Demographics are key to a successful multiple channel marketing strategy. You want your message to be heard, to be understood…but you need it to be received by the targeted group of people via the correct method in order for it to work.

Multi-Channel Marketing is all about a seamless, almost effortless (for the target market) process. Getting your message to your prospects using various channels. Keeping those messages and your branding consistent and understandable. And making it easy for your prospects to contact you to inquire further or step up and make a purchase of your products or goods.

Remember, “convenience” means different things to different people. A sound multi-channel marketing strategy will keep this in mind and be able to deliver that convenience to a receptive target market.

Thanks to my VP of Sales, Karen DeWolfe, for helping on this one! 

Fulfillment is a process. Not one specific task. It involves everything from warehousing materials, to filling an order, to packaging and shipping it in a timely manner. The materials may go directly to the end user, or it may go to the business in larger quantities so it may be sent out to the end users, taken to conferences and trade shows or used in other ways by the marketing and sales departments. From the initial placement of the order, to the final shipping of the order, fulfillment requires the actions of employees across various departments.

It’s understandable that many businesses outsource fulfillment because it takes up valuable time and resources. As their business grows, the needs for materials grow. Let’s face it, while every business has to work on various tasks to get them to the point of profitable marketing and sales, if they spend too much time dealing with fulfillment, they might be diverting too many resources from their end goals.

They should be concentrating on what they do best. Outsourcing fulfillment also means that a business doesn’t have to deal with the possible highs and lows with the demands that go hand in hand with the need for electronic and physical literature. A good fulfillment center has the employees and the resources to deal with a sudden onslaught of orders.

Competition in the fast-paced business world has pushed fulfillment centers to a level of automation and precision that can (and should) work like clockwork. The right software can mean 24/7 access and real-time reporting. Inventory levels can be easily tracked and needs forecast. Metrics are in place to determine what is working and what’s not.

Learn more about our warehouse operations  > >

A couple of crucial aspects to fulfillment are accuracy and timeliness. It makes sense. Order fulfillment is important, but can you imagine filling an order without regard to getting the items correct? The end user should be getting items A and B, but somehow items C and D get picked instead. Or what if the shipping information is wrong? So the correct items get picked, but they get packaged up and sent out to Jill Schmill in Idaho rather than your intended recipient, Joe Schmoe in Maryland.

Inaccurate orders can be a nightmare. And even an accurate order can go wrong if too much time lapses from order placement to order shipment. We live and work in a world where people want what they want – and they want it as soon as possible.

Order fulfillment – on-time and accurate order fulfillment – is crucial for today’s business. Both electronic and physical literature fulfillment is vital for e-commerce. The idea for the average business is that by using a fulfillment center, that business can reduce costs associated with fulfillment (ranging from employees to warehouse space) and spend their financial and time resources instead for the business’ core competency…meaning, doing what that business excels at doing.

Learn About interlinkONE’s Fulfillment Software

Like many others, you may have thought of LinkedIn as a place meant for posting resumes and searching for jobs. Think again.

LinkedIn just may be the best online marketing venue in the business – especially if you have a business-to-business company.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has recently emerged as a bonafide marketing behemoth within the social media landscape. It surpassed both Twitter and Facebook as a platform for posting marketing content, according the Content Marketing Institute report, 2013 Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

LinkedIn has recently amassed an astounding 200 million members. Plus, it acquires 172,800 new members every day. LinkedIn also generates the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate — 2.74% — nearly three times more than Twitter and Facebook, according to a 2012 HubSpot study.

If you’re like other business owners, you know that you need to build an online brand presence. But, like many, your eyes glaze over at the infinite number of social media options.

So, let’s simplify this. If you had to choose just one social network for marketing your business online, LinkedIn would be a pretty good place to start. It’s easy to set up. It’s free, unless you spring for the Premium plan, and it won’t take up your entire workday to follow or maintain. Here are some simple action items:

1. Sign up. If you haven’t already done so, stop everything and set up a LinkedIn account for your company. By the way, a newer, sleeker LinkedIn Company Pages, launched last year, makes it easier to connect your business with those 200 million other users.
2. Introduce yourself. Write a company profile with strong, relevant keywords. Let people know who you are, what you do, and how to reach you. Maintain your page with regular company updates and news.
3. Join LinkedIn groups. (FYI: My favorite LinkedIn feature.) Join LinkedIn groups — either within your industry or in those you’re targeting to grow your business. See what people are talking about and sharing.
4. Build contacts. LinkedIn is ultimately a great place to network. Invite people you know to be “contacts” and, likewise, accept invitations from others to join their contact list. LinkedIn etiquette generally frowns on asking complete strangers to be contacts, but you may ask existing contacts for referrals to their connections.
5. Contribute. While LinkedIn is generally a promotion-free zone, it nonetheless encourages you to share and respond to relevant news, trends, observation and opinion with your groups and contacts. It’s a great way to build brand awareness for you and your company and widen your network of professional connections.

So, thinking about giving LinkedIn a try?  Good call. May be the best thing you do today for your company.

Editor’s Note: Bob Boucher is President of Boucher Communications. A communications professional for 30 years, Bob is an experienced marketer, copywriter, journalist and content generator for enterprises and agencies. He has spent much of the past 20 years in the graphic arts and digital printing industries.

It’s natural to avoid asking for help.

You worry that it makes you appear weak. That it makes you appear ignorant or uninformed. Like you can’t do your job, or are just plain unable to get the job done. Asking for help doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, it can lead to innovative ideas, new collaborations and more. But do you know when it’s time to ask for help?

It’s time to ask for help when:

• You need to think outside the box. You may be a highly creative person, but after a while it’s easy to get in a rut. 
• By not asking for help, you put your company in a bad position. You should never let fear or pride get in the way of doing what is right for your company. If you need help from someone within your department or a different department, just go for it. You know your colleagues. And perhaps one choice is better than another. But don’t forgo help and jeopardize the business (and perhaps your job).
• You need clarification. Sometimes, you may just need something cleared up. A quick question or two may do the trick. If you refuse to ask others for a little clarification, you will be making decisions based on erroneous assumptions. And that makes for bad business.
• You don’t understand what is being asked of you. This can come from inside the company or outside. And this goes hand-in-hand with clarification. If you don’t understand what is being asked, then you obviously won’t understand what your next step to take is.
• You don’t know how to do what is being asked of you. This seems fairly obvious. But it’s easy for someone to get embarrassed or think he / she will come across as looking inept when admitting help is needed. But it’s best to ask and then learn how to do it, rather than attempt to do things when you don’t know how.
• You are totally overextended and crunched by time. Sometimes it feels as if everything falls in your lap at one time. You are only one person. It’s okay to reach out and ask for some help to get things done, especially when deadlines are looming.

So you know you need to ask for help. But how? Here are a few tips on getting professional assistance.

• Ask from a point of strength, not fear. Don’t play dumb and don’t go in asking with your proverbial tail between your legs. Two heads are better than one, right? And the other employees in your company are part of the same team – yours. So ask for help from one team member to another.
• Asking for help, means asking for help – not having another person shoulder the load. If you are late on a deadline and need help closing a deal, then ask for that help. But you should never offload the bulk of your responsibilities onto another.
• Show your appreciation. When you ask for help, make it clear that you are very appreciative if your colleague can provide assistance. After, express your gratitude. Write a personal note. Get your teammate a cup of coffee or offer to treat for lunch. A little appreciation goes a long way and will result in willing helpers later on.

On April 3rd, your business can get a little help from Dr. Joe Webb and Wayne Lynn in a free, 60 minute webinar. > > > 

Spring is the perfect time to make a proverbial clean sweep of your marketing efforts and see what needs to be cleaned up, decluttered or re-vamped. (Of course, scheduling something like this once a year, no matter what time of the year, can be a great thing). By springtime, all those resolutions you made at New Year’s have either started their implementation or have possibly been forgotten.

Here Is Your Marketing Spring Cleaning Checklist:

- Dump The Old Stuff

Time to look at your materials, both online and offline. Anything that is old and out of date needs to go. If the material has some merit, then put it to the side and use it to repurpose later (after your spring cleaning efforts are done). But you may be surprised to find old brochures with incorrect contact information. Or web pages that show pictures and details of employees who no longer work for the company. Things like this make it appear as if you don’t pay attention to detail. So it’s imperative that you dump the old and make way for the new.

- Scrub Your Social Presence

Spruce up your avatars and cover photos. Make sure all the contact information and other details are current. Then look at the past year’s updates. Determine what the “hits” were and what the “misses” with your audience were. Focus on the content that resonates and as you go over your editorial calendar for the year, make sure you are concentrating on the content that clicks.

- What Are You Missing?

While you’re working your social media profiles, make sure that you’re not missing another social media platform that would fit in with your goals and your audience. There are many, many social media options out there, and new ones popping up all the time. You don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to connect with your audience. And thankfully, it’s not like you have to take on additional work beyond setting up your profile. There are services available that allow you to synchronize your tweets, posts and updates so that everything can be scheduled out. (There are also companies who can do it all for you – like Grow Socially – which makes it easy to stay on top of it all and reach your audience.)

Click Here For The Next 3 Tips > > > 

Your online image is a huge component of your business reputation. Just because you haven’t (hopefully) been embroiled in any controversy or involved in a major business showdown that made you come out smelling anything but roses, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a bit of polishing to do. Let’s face it, we all need our fair share of grooming. You don’t take a shower and then think you’re good for the next decade.

First and foremost, you need to make sure you are projecting the image you want to present to your audience. Everything, from your website to your LinkedIn page to your Facebook page and beyond, should be consistent in your branding but also be putting out the business image you intend. If your company places a great importance on the environment, are you displaying that green `image to your audience across all platforms? If your company is fun and snarky, is that snark obvious on your LinkedIn page? Again, you want consistency, and you want to make sure the image that you want to project is obvious via all your online interactions.

Next, keep in mind that it’s easy to miss out on things when you are so close to them. Ever whip something up – a paper, a blog post, a marketing idea – and just know that it was awesome? And then you read it later, and it’s still got its awesomeness? And then later, someone points out the most glaringly obvious typo ever? In your head, everything was in its awesome glory, looking perfect. But things happen and our fingers aren’t always as fast as our brains. Or we just leave a little something out. And no matter how many times we look, everything looks fine. It takes an outside pair of eyeballs to catch it.

The same rings true for your online presence. You can easily be too close to your websites and social media profiles and not see what is looking you right in the face. The solution to this is easy. You ask an “outsider” with a fresh set of eyes to take a look. This can be an employee from a department that doesn’t work on anything online. Or it can be by a trusted colleague outside of the company. But by asking one, or perhaps more, set of eyes to take a look you may receive some in-depth feedback with thoughts and ideas that never would have even occurred to you.

The evaluation should encompass both words and images. Both have impact on your audience’s senses. Your words should be your own (don’t ever take someone else’s work and pass it off as your own) and your images should be properly attributed. Everything might look “pretty,” but if it’s not yours by either copyright or proper and clear attribution then you are most certainly damaging your business reputation, and that’s something that is so difficult to recover from.

Your online image is often the first your audience comes into contact with. It’s important for you to stay on top of things and keep that image polished in order to put your best online foot forward.

Don’t take your online strategy for granted – enlist help when you can. 

We are hearing a lot about content marketing these days.  Much of this is being done online, but have you thought about how your clients’ online content can drive their investment in print?

According to the Content Marketing Institute:

• 26% of B2B marketers’ total budgets are spent on content marketing
• 60% of B2B marketers plan to spend more money on content marketing

Of these content marketers:

• 58% of those plan to use case studies
• 51% of those plan to use white papers
• 31% plan to use print magazines
• 20% plan to use print newsletters

Yes, I’m fully aware that many of the case studies and white papers are downloadable PDFs. I have a hard drive full of them myself.

But I remember a speaker at one of the Print Solutions conferences a few years back making a great point. He pointed out that online content can be used a powerful filter for investment in print because it becomes a proving ground. If you have content that is wildly popular online, it justifies the expense of producing the print version.

For example, if your clients are attending a trade show and are using downloadable case studies or white papers in PDF format, they might want to print out 500 copies of the top three or five to distribute at their booth. It’s worth the investment because they know that the content has power for that target audience.  (Also think personalized versions for key prospects and clients.)

How about “best of” booklets to give away to clients, prospects, or long-time, highest value customers? Canon/Oce´ is currently doing this with Digital Nirvana blog content — collecting the most widely read posts into a “best of” booklet for print distribution.

If you aren’t tracking your clients’ online content downloads, this is a great reason to start. Even if they aren’t tuned in to the value of knowing those metrics, as a PSP, you certainly should be.