“Best Of” winners aren’t necessarily the best, however. There’s a lot of campaigning going on. So if you sit back and just hope your customers enter your name on the ballot, think again. Business owners have been known to stoop to cutthroat tactics such as stuffing ballot boxes with fake names and launching smear campaigns against competitors.

You can play fair, though, by reminding your customers new and old to vote for you. Here are three campaign strategies.

1. Print and hand out postcards to your customers that urge them to vote in your local “Best Of.” Include a link to the ballot or remind them when the publication is distributed with the ballot. Be sure to include which categories are relevant to your business, and think beyond your niche. For example, I’m urging people to vote for a lunch spot I like for more than just sandwiches but also “Best Staff.”
2. As soon as the “Best Of” ballot link goes live, post it on your website, again asking clients to vote for you as well as suggesting specific categories.
3. Do you have a newsletter – e-mail or snail-mail? Do the same as above, and don’t hesitate to remind customers if you send another newsletter out.

When the “Best Of” winners are announced, publicize your achievement outside of the newspaper or magazine – order stickers to hand out and post on your door, print a banner proclaiming your victory and announce it on your website and through your newsletter. You worked hard to be the best – now let everyone know it. After all, a crowning achievement given by your peers is some of the best marketing you can get.

Photo credit: earl53 from morguefile.com

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

In honor of St. Paddy’s day, I want to give a shout-out to my local liquor store. This is not just a gratuitous plug for alchohol, my local liquor store is actually behind one of the best flyer printing campaigns that I’ve seen in a while.

I frequent this liquor store because it’s close to my house and has an immense beer selection and a make-your-own six pack policy, so that customers can sample many different kinds of beer at once.

The store is owned by a guy named Mark, who I feel like I know. The reason I know Mark’s name, and talk about him like he’s a friend of mine, is because of the flyer that his cashiers hand over with every purchase.

The flyer is a simple double-sided 8.5-inch by 11-inch paper that acts as a newsletter of sorts. It is written by Mark and advertises for the store itself, recommending great wines under $10 dollars, or different sales throughout the week, like the 10 percent off liquor on “Thirsty Thursdays.”

But Mark goes beyond plugging his own merchandise and includes recommendations for other local businesses. For example, he recently purchased a new grill at a mom-and-pop barbecue supply store. He wrote up his experience at the store in the flyer and even let folks know to “ask for Bill.” This information makes me feel like an neighborhood “insider,” and I want to pass along all of these tips to other neighbors and friends.

Somehow there’s always something noteworthy or relevant to me in the liquor store flyer, and when I come home with my six-pack, I always post the flyer on the fridge. The flyer acts as a sort of newsletter, communicating with customers and supporting other small, independent businesses with word-of-mouth referrals.

Flyers are an inexpensive way to better communicate with your customers and show how your business is integrated with the community and its customers. They can be distributed at the cash register, through the mail or in person. And with only two pages (front and back) to fill, it is relatively easy to come up with content weekly, monthly or even quarterly, depending how frequently you interact with customers.

Talk to your print vendor about the unique die-cut shapes, paper colors and other printing options to design your own flyer and make it a success!

©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.

If you’ve never designed a catalog before, this can be a lot to take in at once. There’s so many elements that go into a catalog, including photography, product descriptions, pricing, layout strategies and order forms. It’s not the same as setting up a simple page layout. You’re going to want to have a strategy and a template in mind, way before you start designing.

In this economy, with such tight budgets, designers may be asked to do additional work such as editing photos, paginating and maybe even writing headlines and other copy to break up the page layouts! For some guidance on how to get started in catalog design, and get a sense of how the pros do it, here’s a round-up of articles and resources from design firms, trade magazines and printing experts. These materials will cover basic catalog design principles and tips for creating catalogs templates that work!

All About ROI (formerly Catalog Success)
This trade publication focuses exclusively on catalog and e-commerce sales and marketing. Try searching on the site’s “Creative” tab, or check out these two tip-laden articles:

• 5 Creative Catalog Techniques That Save Paper
• Catalog Doctor: Break Out of the Catalog Mold

AllGraphicDesign.com
If you’ve got a graphic design question, this site can point you in the right direction. For cutting-edge catalog inspiration, check out their roundup of catalog design samples. And for catalog tips and techniques, here are three helpful articles that AllGraphicDeisgn.com links to:

• Catalog Tips and Tricks
• 10 Tips on Catalog Design
• The Catalog Production Process

Direct Magazine
A leading trade publication for direct marekters, Direct Magazine includes sister publications Multichannel Merchant and Chief Marketer under its content umbrella. Here are four helpful catalog articles found throughout Direct’s sites that include tips on design and making the multichannel connection work between a print catalog and website.

• Mind Your Creative – Tips on Catalog Design
• A Powerful Back Cover Can Help Cover Your Catalog’s Back
• Breaking Creative Rules
• Multichannel Mix

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Photo cards are a great way to share with family and friends.

Are photo cards addictive? I’m just wondering because I see them everywhere anymore. Every Christmas our mailbox is full of photo cards of family and friends. Every time one of her four children takes a new school photo or joins a sport, my cousin sends us a photo card commemorating the event.

Not that I’m complaining. I love photo cards. They’re so much better than off-the-rack greeting cards, especially since I can tack them on the fridge and build my own wall of family and friend portraits with little effort whatsoever.

My grandma loves receiving them, too, and it’s a cheap way to send out new family photos that can be used in frames and on fridges alike. My mother has a curio cabinet that she sticks received photo cards in; my sister-in-law frames them in a large display on her kitchen wall. My son tacks them to his bulletin board.

Ten years ago, photo cards were virtually non-existent. But today it seems as though we receive a photo card every other week. I’m considering sending one of my own every year – Grandma would probably like to get one of the kids – but I’m a little concerned. With the proliferation of photo cards (they’re obviously extremely popular), I don’t want to get hooked into something I can’t get out of.

I mean, I already have hobbies – like aimlessly surfing through television stations when nothing is on – so I’m a little afraid that if I start sending photo cards I won’t be able to stop. I could get hooked, unable to do anything else until I get my photo. It’s already has a hold on nearly everyone in my family!

So, are photo cards addictive? Either that, or… they’re simply fun.

Image use Creative Commons license via Flickr.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.