I thought not. You run a small business, and you already know success takes a lot of hard work. What you might not be aware of is the proven power of personalization. When each individual prospect feels as though you really have them in your thoughts, your overall response rate will skyrocket. It’s a proven fact: make them feel special, and they will respond.

Whether you’re hosting a conference or you’re simply inviting new clients to a free consultation, personalized invitations will go a long way toward making your campaign a success. It starts with sending your invitations to a specific person (and not a title or the dreaded “current resident”). But there’s more to personalized invitations than a printed address label:

• print stationery and hand-write your invitations
• hand-sign all invitations
• print matching envelopes and hand-write the addresses (this will fetch far more opens)
• print greeting cards or response cards with a spot for you to hand-write an individualized note

All of these take extra work, but they all yield big results. Yes, I know: You don’t have the time. I counter with this: You’ll actually save time because you’ll land more sales. That’s less work you have to do per customer in the long run. In addition, you can recruit co-workers, spouses and employees to help hand-write your personalized invitations. Unless your customers would recognize your hand-writing, the effect will be the same.

Personalization equals profits, ask any marketer in the know. Try it out and see for yourself.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The "Kick Me" sign concept draws on the same impacing power as the flyer printing and distribution strategies listed here. BONUS: You can get your own "Kick Me" sign here.

Flyer printing is perfect for marketing to the masses, yet it still allows you to control your targeting. Everyone who has studied marketing will tell you that you have to get attention first, and so you have to have a compelling image, a powerful headline and on and on.

Spare me the Marketing 101 lesson, right?

The best way to guarantee your flyers will get noticed is to focus on placement, and the more shocking the better. People remember the unexpected; it catches them off-guard and forces their brains to recognize, analyze and remember. Isn’t this exactly what your flyers should be doing for you?

So let’s establish that flyer placement is just as important as flyer printing in the first place. Let’s also acknowledge that shocking your audience with creative placement will be far more effective than, say, tacking your flyer to a community bulletin board (where everyone is competing for attention). Additionally consider that sometimes context and placement work together to make a flyer shocking. For example, a flyer inside a grocery store is not shocking. A PETA flyer inside a grocery store, on the other hand, has the potential to be rather shocking indeed.

Thus, here are my five favorite shocking places to post flyers:

1. Restroom stalls – Shock your target audience by giving them something to read while they’re taking care of business.

2. Ceilings – Anywhere your customers are forced to look up is a great place to catch them off-guard. Good examples include the ceilings in dentist and chiropractor examination rooms, and you can also pull this off in hair salons and in tandem with a wall-based flyer that says “Look up!”

3. Inside books – Work out an arrangement with a bookstore or library to stuff targeted books with flyers. Imagine your customers’ surprise when they flip open to your “page”!

4. Coat racks – Coat racks are perfect for a “what’s this?” moment between you and your customers.

5. On people – Remember the “kick me” signs of our youth? We’ve been compelled to read anything taped to another’s back ever since.

Image use via Riding A Buttertub

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

You might be wondering how free bookmarks can grow your business. Let me illuminate: distributing relevant bookmarks to your target audience (assuming, of course, that your target audience reads) lets you brand your company and pitch your products and services every time your customers sit down to read.

Let’s look at a hypothetical real-world example. A T-shirt company makes shirts in a macabre style, and their research has indicated that a majority of their customers read horror novels written by the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul. The company decides to print bookmarks based on similar themes.

The bookmarks might include a list of the top 10 must-read horror novels, or they might depict images of werewolves, ghosts and psychotic lunatics. Perhaps they’ll draw from a long-dead author whose work is in the public domain, such as Edgar Allan Poe, for macabre poetry reproduction. No matter what they use, we can say that the bookmarks are designed in a vein that the T-shirt company’s customers will appreciate.

On the back of the bookmarks, the company features some of its top-selling products and offers a discount coupon code for online or phone ordering. Then it partners with bookstores, libraries, book clubs, and online book distributors to have them include a free bookmark with every King, Koontz, and Saul purchase, rental, borrow and order.

The customers get a free bookmark they’ll use because it is relevant to their tastes, and they get to discover a great product line they’ll love. Profits from the campaign (tracked via the coupon codes) are shared between partners, so everyone wins!

Image use Creative Commons license via Flickr.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Reem Rahim at work.

On starting a business:
“I started a business because I am an immigrant, and I was told to do something stable,” says Rahim, who was born in Iraq and moved to the United States in 1971. “One of the reasons was I wanted to do something my parents would be proud of, but I also had ideas.” Rahim, who had become an engineer, says she was miserable in her career and had always taken art classes. “My father said to choose one thing” to focus on for a business. Oddly enough, when Rahim told her brother, Ahmed, that she decided to open a tea business, he said he had come up with the same idea based around “numi,” a lime tea they drank in Iraq. Running a green business was very important to the siblings, as seen in their fair-trade tea, biodegradable tea bags, recycled packaging and carbon-offset program.

On creativity in the workplace:
“My artistic sensibility really created the brand,” says Rahim. “And people love our packaging.” Each box of Numi tea has a different picture, which Rahim often paints them based on her brother’s photography. The look, tone and feel of all the packaging was created by Rahim. Being artists influences how the brother and sister do business. “Artists are ultimately visionaries,” she says, “so we see outside the box – we see things different.” Though Rahim had taken art classes all her life, she didn’t have graphic design experience when she co-founded Numi. At that time she collaborated with a designer to put together the company’s materials, and since then Rahim has taken design classes herself. Now Numi employs a vice president of marketing, who manages a handful of staff, as well as two in-house designers.

On the future of Numi:
“We want to grow – the sky’s the limit!” says Rahim, as Numi crosses the 10-year mark of being in business. “We’ve learned so much about human resources, budgets, etc. And we’ve been branching out by developing our nonprofit.” Personally, Rahim says she’d like to scale back on the day-to-day responsibilities to avoid burnout and to focus on her art as well as the nonprofit arm of Numi and the social and environmental causes it supports. “We didn’t set out to make money,” Rahim says. “And I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to make the world a better place. With a soothing cup of tea, you feel like a whole person.”

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

When designing for your client, remember that anything that you do represents that client and therefore represents their brand. From a small business owner’s logo, to a kid’s birthday invitation, you must always be mindful of the font choice. It plays just as much of a part in the overall look and feel of the brand as the imagery.

P.S. All of the fonts listed below are free courtesy of urbanfonts.com

Font name: African

Font name: PS2 font

Font name: fruitopia

Font name: harry p

Font name: Hot Pizza

Font name: Kitty Katt

Font name: Loki Cola

Font name: Oreos

Font name: Pez font

Font name: Simpsons font

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Last week I attended a screening of the 2010 Oscar-nominated animated short films. Among them is “Logorama,” directed by the French collective H5. The 17-minute film presents a world entirely made up of familiar brands: the Michelin man, Esso, Mr. Peanut and Merck, among them. The hills have the Hollywood sign, the tank engine is named Thomas, and the zoo is filled with Izod alligators, Linux penguins and the MGM lion. But “Logorama” doesn’t present an idyllic world – Mr. Pringle cops a feel on his waitress, Bob’s Big Boy and Haribo children are profanity-spewing hellions, and we learn that while M&M’s don’t melt in your hand, they certainly crack into a zillion pieces when slammed into by a speeding car.

PsPrint Facebook fan Stacey and I discussed “Logorama” afterwards. We both enjoyed the heck out the film, though we pondered what the point of it was: That we’re consumed with advertising? That we’re so inundated with brands we don’t notice them anymore? That mega-corporations will violently take over the planet?

Another question Stacey and I had is about the logos themselves. Did the filmmakers get permission to use them – all 2,000-plus? All Internet research pointed to “no.”

On the one hand, “Logorama” is nominated for an Academy Award and is making the film festival circuit, so it’s free advertising to all the companies included. On the other, Stacey said she can’t imagine McDonald’s being pleased at the representation of its iconic spokesclown as a hostage-taking murderer.

For a revealing look at the making of “Logorama,” check out this interview on Creativity Online with H5’s Francois Alaux and Hervé de Crécy, discussing the directors’ rise from graphic designers to music video directors to Oscar nominees. “When people see the film, they have very different versions of the film depending on their knowledge of the logotypes,” says de Crécy.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.