Businesses handing out free calendars to their customers is a long-standing tradition. Loyal clients come to expect the calendar year after year, and new ones are just excited to get something for free. A calendar makes for good marketing because it is displayed year-round, usually in an eye-catching, high-traffic manner – in a kitchen, on a desk or near a telephone.

Creating a calendar is pretty simple – templates are readily available. So all you really need to do is select your images for each month. Be sure your contact information is visible on every page, including your website and phone number! You can even add value to the calendar by including stickers and coupons.

Random fact: According to Wikipedia, the sale of physical calendars is restricted in some countries and given as a monopoly to universities and national academies – just another reason to take advantage of your freedom to create your own!

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Use the four ideas below to create successful business invitations that also market and promote your company or service.

1. Introduce yourself
To get the conversation started, try formally introducing yourself to potential guests and clients. Include a business card in each mailing, offering your name, title, website and any social networking links relative to your company or the event. This way, guests will know who the invite is coming from and can seek more information about you and your company. As long as you can respond to each message, include your telephone and/or e-mail address, allowing guests to contact you with questions.

2. Market the event as “exclusive”
Events are always more appealing when they are billed as “exclusive” or “for ticket holders only.” Printing up tickets or event passes, and inserting them into each invitation, can generate a feeling of exclusivity around your event. Remind guests to bring their tickets to the event. Print all the relevant event information on the ticket, including the date, time, event summary and URL, so that even if guests throw away the invite, they’ll still hold on to the ticket as a reminder with all of the necessary details.

3. Collect information and register guests
There are two ways to use a business event invitation to collect more information about guests. One is to set up a Web page with a digital registration form and direct people to the URL from the invitation. Another way is to include a response card in each invitation with a return, postage-paid envelope (or include a postage-paid postcard reply). Having guests fill out and return a response card or registration card, helps with head count and updates to your customer database. By including a few marketing questions, you can also learn more about the people on your mailing list.

4. Double your attendance levels
The tell-a-friend tactic works hand-in-hand with business event marketing. If you are mailing to a list of 500 potential attendees, chances are those folks have at least one other interested friend or colleague who’s not on your list. Try including a “Tell-A-Friend” postage-paid postcard in each invitation. All the guests need to do is drop that card in the mail to a friend, and you’ll get two participants instead of one.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Promotions are always a good way to get noticed. People love getting something for free or for a bargain. So here are a couple of promotional ideas:

Have a sale: Play off a “fall into savings” theme; or “leaves are falling, and so are our prices.” Get it? It can be corny, just so long as it grabs people’s attention.

In addition, hold a contest. Ask your customers to submit their favorite fall recipes. This can even be done through your website, and ask readers to vote for their favorite. Industrious businesses could then have the recipes made into a book and then distribute that to customers. This is a marketing item that lasts and lasts!

Another form of promotion that is both a sale and a contest, in addition to being interactive, is handing out sheets of paper with a leaf outline and instructing your customers to return with it decorated – by themselves or by children. When they bring in the decorated leaf, give them a 10 percent discount and then decorate your store with the leaves. In a month or so, award a prize to the best leaves in the adult and children’s categories – make the prize a discount to your shop. This type of promotion works on several levels: recognition, reputation and repeat customer.

Advertise for your sale and contest with posters, flyers and postcards distributed to your customers. Decorate those materials with leaves and other fall-related items. Abduzeedo has a free set of high-resolution brushes intended for autumn graphic design projects.

Don’t forget to advertise for your promotions online as well. Update your website’s homepage with fall accents. For inspiration, check out RNEL dotNET’s list of autumn-themed Photoshop tutorials that include how to create leaves (as seen in this post), autumn glows and trees. Also be sure to include your promotions in your e-newsletter.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But you don’t need millions in revenue to amp up your business’ brand. In fact, with a little bit of reflection and creativity, even freelancers and small business owners and can craft successful branding initiatives.

Just try the easy four step process below to begin building a brand for a new business or to rebrand your current materials.

Step 1 – Consider leading brands across many sectors.
Think about the heavy-hitters in automotive, software, retail, food and beverage, resort and other major sectors. Include your favorite brands that you are loyal to and also any favorite publications and magazines, which are really good resources for this exercise. Go to each company’s website and click through, download brochures, go to product and order pages. Check out the companies’ logos, fonts, color schemes, copy writing and design tones, and take notes on what stands out the most about each brand. Try to write down a list of adjectives that describe each brand.

Step 2 – What is your brand like?
Keeping Step 1 in mind, go through your own website, business cards and any promotional materials such as letterhead, brochures, or mailings, which represent your business. Take stock of fonts, logos, tone of copy and design, and again note the adjectives that come to mind which could describe your brand as it is. It’s important to note any inconsistencies you may find.

Step 3 – If you could be any brand, what would you be?
What brand would you want to be if you could choose any? This question is a bit out there, but just think about it. If you were a car, any car, what would you be? What about if you were a retail clothing store? What is it about the brand that you are drawn to? What does the brand reflect about you? How are these points communicated in the company’s own branding, logo, color palette, design?

Step 4 – Rebrand.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery. By analyzing what makes leading brands tick, and which brands you admire the most, you should be able to generate a great list of ideas for use in your own branding. Whether it is how you treat your logo, what color palettes you use, or how your fonts work with your logos; all of these things can affect a graphic designer or copywriter’s success. If your business is well branded it will communicate your professionalism, credibility and marketing knowledge to potential clients. Happy brand-storming!

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Food

If you work in an office, host a potluck. Or if you work in a brick-and-mortar shop and don’t have to worry about food inspections, lay out an eye-popping spread. Dye white frosting with orange food coloring for festive cupcakes or make a meat hand courtesy of Not Martha (I’ll bet vegetarian ground beef would work as well).

Speaking of creepy hands, I like to make a simple punch of orange sherbet and lemon-lime soda and float an ice hand in it. Simply fill a plastic glove – make sure it’s not one of those powder-lined ones – with water, tie off the end and freeze. Then cut away the glove, being careful not to snap off the fingers, and float it in the punch. You can do this with a red beverage, too, like cranberry juice or fruit punch.

A fun dessert is to take a sheet cake or cheesecake, crumble up just the dark part of Oreo cookies over it to look like dirt, and then decorate your cemetery cake with those Milano cookies from Pepperidge Farm – use black or red icing to write “RIP” and the like on the cookie gravestones and then shove them in the dirt. Also add gummy worms or candy pumpkins to your cemetery.

Music

I had a lot of fun compiling a spooky soundtrack during the past couple of weeks. I posted a starter list on Facebook and asked friends to contribute their favorite Halloween songs. This is a compilation you could play in your shop or in your office’s breakroom and reception area. The best part: You can keep adding to your setlist and play it year after year. Here’s a sampler of the one I made:

• “Everyday Is Halloween” – Ministry
• “Werewolves of London” – Warren Zevon
• “Dead Man’s Party” – Oingo Boingo
• “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” – Bauhaus
• “Thriller” – Michael Jackson
• “The X-Files” theme
• “This Is Halloween” – From “The Nightmare Before Christmas” soundtrack
• “Pet Sematary” – The Ramones
• The theme from the movie “Halloween”
• “Don’t Fear the Reaper” – Blue Oyster Cult
• “Living Dead Girl” – Rob Zombie
• “Ghostbusters” – Ray Parker Jr.
• “Scary Monsters” – David Bowie
• “I Put a Spell on You” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
• “Monster Mash” – Bobby “Boris” Pickett
• “Goo Goo Muck” – The Cramps
• “I’m Your Boogie Man” – KC & the Sunshine Band
• “Welcome to My Nightmare” – Alice Cooper
• “People Are Strange” – Echo & the Bunnymen
• “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” – Concrete Blonde
• “Red Right Hand” – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
• “The Future” – Leonard Cohen
• “Down in the Park” – Gary Numan
• “Season of the Witch” – Donovan
• “Science Fiction/Double Feature” – From “Rocky Horror Picture Show” soundtrack
• “Spooky” – Atlanta Rhythm Section
• “Ghost Town” – The Specials
• “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” – Charlie Daniels Band
• “Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads
• The theme from the movie “Psycho”
• “Bark at the Moon” – Ozzy Osbourne
• Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5
• “Somebody’s Watching Me” – Rockwell
• “Enter Sandman” – Metallica
• “Halloween” – The Misfits
• “Devil Town” – Daniel Johnston
• “Superstition” – Stevie Wonder
• “Time of the Season” – The Zombies
• “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” – Tom Waits
• “Attack of the Ghost Riders” – Raveonettes
• “Paint It Black” – Rolling Stones
• “Witchy Woman” – Eagles
• “The Number of the Beast” – Iron Maiden

If you can think of any others, please let me know – this is a work in progress!

More Halloween marketing tips

• Hand out treat bags.
• Host a costume contest.
• Stay open late.
• Hold an online contest.
• Advertise with Halloween themes.
• Host a haunted house.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Hand out treat bags. Wrap up some miniature candy in a few layers of black and orange tissue paper, tie it up and attach your business card or a coupon to the ribbon using a hole puncher. Keep the bundles on hand for visiting clients and customers.

Host a costume contest. All week leading up to Halloween, suggest customers drop in on Saturday in costume. Then, that day, snap a photo of each ghost, witch and kitty cat that walks through your door. Upload the photos to your company’s Web site and encourage visitors to vote for their favorite costume in the Comments section. (If you’re not enabled for Comments, then suggest your customers e-mail you directly, but really, check into allowing them to comment, because customer engagement is itself a great marketing tool!) Then award the winner free service at your business.

Stay open late. Stay open later on Friday or Saturday, make some Halloween punch (orange sherbet and lime soda), play some scary sound effects and welcome customers to shop. Just the darkness sets the spooky mood, and you’ll need little in the way of decorations.

Hold an online contest. Don’t have a storefront? You can still mix up your homepage by hosting a trivia contest. Ask questions about Halloween legends (Wikipedia is your friend for this type of research) and have your clients e-mail you answers. Or have Web site visitors submit their favorite ghost stories. Post the best and have other customers vote for the scariest. Make the prize free services that you provide.

Procrastination is often the enemy of the small business – there always seems to be too much to do! But it pays to get a jump on marketing ideas early. Check out PsPrint’s Resources section for tips on making the holidays pay off for your company. Start thinking about Thanksgiving marketing NOW!

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.