Speak to Your Audience.

It’s human nature to pay closer attention to something when it is more relevant to you, so why not apply this methodology to your marketing efforts?  With variable data printing, you can instantly give that personal touch to your marketing pieces but having the recipient’s name, address, and a variety of additional information included in your messaging. Think bigger and incorporate Augmented Reality, QR codes or NFC in as well. This will help you stand out from the many marketing messages they may receive each day.

Address Specific Needs.

The next time you create your next marketing campaign, avoid the generic “About Us” path, and focus more on the recipient.  Ask yourself, “What are their needs, what would appeal to them, what would they request information on if they were to call my business?”  For instance, if you created athletic uniforms for schools, a great summer campaign would be a back-to-school-themed campaign featuring fall sports.  Take advantage of the information you already have about your audience and blow them away with your proactive approach to how you can help them.

Key Resource You Need Today: Guide to Selling Marketing Services

Highlight Services.

What happens when you receive a promotion and the majority of the promoted products and services do not apply to you? You discard it and usually ignore future promotions that are similar to that one.  You must remember that your customers may use your products and services differently than other audiences.  Create audience-specific campaigns by promoting the top three services that each of your audiences would utilize the most.  You want your audience to see what they need right away and be able to take advantage of the promotion that is being showcased in the marketing piece.  Avoid making them look for what they need, be the expert by presenting the best tools for them from the start.

Optimize Delivery Time.

Each industry operates differently throughout the year.  For example, retail stores may be extremely busy during the fall yet incredibly slow during the winter.  Universities may focus its marketing efforts to potential students in the spring, but then focuses on alumni funding in the fall.  If you develop campaigns around these audience-specific cycles and trends, you may be the perfect solution to your audiences’ needs during the time they need you most.

By using these tactics, your marketing efforts will grab your audiences’ attention because of its targeted messaging and strategic delivery time.  Be sure to always stay engaged with your customers’ timely needs so you will always remain relevant to them.

For assistance with your next marketing campaign, let’s connect!  Me and my team would love to consult with you and help you deliver an effective message to your audience. Learn more here. From on-site consultations to complete marketing plans, we’re ready to help your business succeed!

Recorded Webinars

Webinars are a convenient way of educating a large audience with minimal costs associated.  What is also great about them is that they can be recorded!  If you’re going to deliver a great presentation that highlights your expertise, make the most of it by saving the recording and using it as a sales tool for future leads and inquiries.

Recorded Sales Demonstrations

In sales, you may come across a situation where you have to deliver multiple demos for the same company before you can close the deal.  While every point of contact is an opportunity to get closer to the lead, make sure they don’t forget you (and can show you off to colleagues) by sending them a recorded demo.  That way, they can refer back to it at their convenience and never forget the greatest parts of your software. For example, check out our drag-and-drop demo for our mobile website builder, iFlyMobi!

Digital Company Brochures

If you have a fantastic printed brochure, turn the original PDF file of it into an electronic sales tool!  It’s a great way to sum up all of your company’s benefits and services into one well-designed package, and your leads can then save it on their desktop.  Be sure to share this via a software that handles electronic fulfullment so that you have a history record of sending it.

eBooks

Educate your audience with an enticing eBook that includes interesting facts about your audience’s pain points, and the solutions to those problems.  You can subtly promote your services and products within them, but have this eBook act as a reminder to all that you’re the answer to their problems.  Take a look at our eBook, “Guide to Selling Marketing Services” for inspiration.

Videos

Position yourself as the expert by giving tips, best practices, and a summary of services in 1-2 minute video clips.  Send this along to your prospects as a conversation starter, and let them get to know you through creative videos.

Podcasts

If you have team members who are fantastic speakers, podcasts may be the best approach to take when trying to capture their knowledge.  You can get away with longer podcast sessions as opposed to videos because the listener can listen in the car, at their desk over lunch, or on their morning run. Invite educational guests and keep folks coming back monthly for more knowledge!

Infographics

If you have a great graphic design team, and some captivating statistics, highlight both of these resources in an infographic (like this one).  They’re interesting, fun to look at, and share-worthy.  You can share information about the industries your target audiences are in, how you have increased success for clients, or how you’re keeping up with new technologies.

Service and Product Sell Sheets

Perhaps your leads don’t need the entire brochure, all they may want is a one-pager that goes over key benefits of one service or product they may be interested in.  Think real estate; they’ve mastered the 1 page sell. What’s great about having electronic sales sheets of your various offerings is that you can send a mixture of them depending on what your lead needs, and not clutter up their mind with too many ancillary services that don’t suit them.

Surveys

This sales tool is beneficial for two big reasons.  If you deliver a survey with weighted questions, you can customize the end results of what the survey would say based on the lead’s answers.  It also helps you qualify the lead in finding out what type of offerings would best fit their needs.

The bottom line?

The sales process doesn’t always have to be direct.  Take more of an inbound marketing approach and let them come to you. Sometimes the best way to keep the conversation going is to send educational and informative materials that will captivate your leads and get them excited about what you have to say so when they are ready, they come to the expert first (pssst…that’ll be you!)

Related Posts:

• 6 Ways to Get Your Sales Groove Back
• Literature Fulfillment- Electronic vs. Physical
• White Paper: Grow with Inbound Marketing

Need a reminder of these great tips? Print this handy cheat sheet:

Your marketing software should be able to automate key processes, while remaining user-friendly enough for your team to learn and use effectively.

The right software saves you time and helps increase your revenue, but the wrong software will just drain your time and cause frustration.

Here are some key things to consider if you’re looking for new software:

Make a List of What You Need

Before you begin shopping, take the time to examine your current marketing processes and requirements. Think about what processes are already covered by your current setup, and what you really need your software to do for you.

If all you need is an easy way to set up email campaigns, then you may be able to go with a far less expensive option than a full marketing automation package. If, on the other hand, your company is fairly tech-savvy, and you need a better way to handle lead acquisition, analytics, and other tasks, then you’ll want to look for a package that can do what you need it to.

Know What Your Potential Software Can Do

Here are a few key features to look for when you start shopping for marketing software:

• E-mail campaigns: This feature comes in a range of capabilities, from creating lists and automating distribution, to targeting groups of customers with different messages. A good program will also have delivery methods in place to avoid spam filters.

• Landing pages: A quality software package will let you build and edit landing pages with ease, and perform A/B testing without a lot of fuss.

• Website analytics tools: Some programs have powerful activity tracking capabilities, able to send a notification to a sales rep when a known customer or prospect visits the website.

• Lead scoring: Using the lead’s activities on the website, some software programs can calculate his readiness to buy — and assign a corresponding score.

Decide Which Features are Must-Haves

Now that you’ve come up with a list of features you’d like your software to have, it’s time to score those features on the basis of importance.

Unless you’re looking for just a couple of key features, it’s unlikely you’ll find a program that covers everything you’re looking for. Even if it does have all of the features on your list, some of those may not be as robust as you’d like.

By scoring the features now, you’ll know which ones the program absolutely must have in order for you to consider it, and which features would be nice but aren’t deal-breakers.

Shop Around

With your list of required features, you can better evaluate a potential software program.

Find all of the software packages that include your must-have features, then evaluate them based on ease of use and inclusion of some of your less-critical features.

Once you’ve narrowed down your list to two or three possible programs, you can ask the vendors for demonstrations and trial periods. Make sure your sales staff is involved in the trial phase — you want to make sure any software program you purchase will be easy for everyone to use.

Before making your final decision, be sure to ask for references to make sure the software you’re looking at has a good track record.

While you’re shopping, be sure to check out interlinkONE’s software solution

About the Author: Angie Mansfield writes on a variety of business and consumer topics, including intelius removal.

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 the image to receive a free white paper on integrated marketing!

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.

More people are connected to the internet, each other, and to companies through mobile means than ever before. Smart phones, tablets, and mobile enabled e-readers have become the new standard of connection.

Mobile marketing reaches even more people than other internet based advertising due to the ways advertisements are shared. Most ad-blocking software is designed for computers, not mobile platforms. This gives mobile marketing an edge.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing or text message marketing can be a big turn off.

When people receive ‘cold’ texts they are likely to delete the message instead of following a link. Much like telemarketing phone calls, unsolicited text messages are annoying. If you plan to use text messaging in your marketing campaigns, allow people to choose to receive the texts.

Click on the image to see how one of our newest clients transformed themselves into a marketing service provider.

On your company’s website give people a reason to opt-in to text marketing messages. Every message needs some sort of enticement for customers to click links or ask for more information. Messages that have no value to your customer will likely be ignored.

Limiting Messages

Another important aspect to text marketing is to limit the number of messages sent per month.

You can allow customers to choose how many messages they want to receive based on a number per week, month, or based on sales. Even the happiest customer can get tired of messages. Too many messages will end up seen as spam, much like unsolicited email.

 Opt-In

When you allow people to opt-in to your text marketing they need to be aware of how many messages you will be sending.

Be careful to fully disclose what type of messages will be sent. When your customers opt-in they could choose plain text or HTML/image texts. Some phones are able to handle image heavy messages, though this could hurt the data plans for some customers. Opting in to graphics texts needs to have an explanation of data usage.

To avoid problems it may be advisable to only send text SMS. A double opt-in is advisable to ensure your customers really want to receive messages and cannot report your company for spam.

 As with email, you should keep an eye on the results of campaigns.

If a mobile marketing strategy seems to be going downhill or isn’t generating any response, it might be time to change tactics. Mobile ads are not limited to text message marketing. You can also think about mobile ads on websites through Google Adwords, ads in mobile games, and on mobile websites.

There’s an avenue for every creative marketer. Mobile advertising isn’t as expensive as some advertising campaigns and has a high rate of return thanks to the ease of implementation.

If your company offers a service no one else does you might think about creating a mobile app that customers can use at any time.

Apps are a hugely popular method of marketing that is only now being fully realized.

 So, have you had good results to date when it comes to mobile marketing?

About the Author: Tina Samuels writes on social media, mobile marketing, and  business individuals like Steve Wynn.

When you hear a good song, you probably start tapping your toes, or drumming your fingers on something. You may not even know you’re doing it. We just enjoy the music and do whatever it is we are doing.

E-fulfillment for your marketing materials can be like that. Everything is in rhythm. Working effortlessly to promote your business. When e-fulfillment is working correctly, it establishes a connection between your business and the recipient. The recipient is experiencing firsthand your ability to provide a certain level of speed, performance and accuracy.

E-fulfillment can also display your expertise. Good, informative materials are what your typical audience expects. Let’s face it, it’s easy to access loads of information with the Internet at our fingertips. It’s like finding music on the radio. There are tons of stations to choose from. Your audience can stop at any channel and start to tap their toes. The idea is for them to choose you. So e-fulfillment that shows off your awesome amount of knowledge and is a benefit to the audience will make them stop, tap their toes and hum along.

Likewise, e-fulfillment that doesn’t produce – in terms of speed, accuracy or good content – will cause your audience to wince and turn to another station. And you don’t want to cause your audience to wince.

You want to be music to your audience’s ears. And e-fulfillment of your marketing collateral can make your heart sing, as it can for your audience. They will like what you’re putting out, and will want to make that connection with you.

We have the fulfillment software to get you singing – check it out! > > 

With the kit, you will learn:

•Strategies for integrating QR Codes into your print efforts, including postcards, flyers,
direct mail, business cards, signs, posters, and more

•Guidance and suggestions on design options for QR Codes, including sizes, colors,
padding, and more

•Tools and Technology to help you easily generate rewarding, mobile websites

•Case Studies across many verticals of companies that have found success with QR
Codes

Start your mobile marketing strategy today by downloading your free QR Code Success Tool Kit!

Download it here! > > 

We have all the info to selling marketing services in our handy guide. Download your copy by clicking here! > 

With marketing automation, everything is tracked and managed from one central spot. Instead of the right arm (sales) not knowing what the left arm (marketing) is doing, the two arms are working in conjunction, as a team. And with an automated marketing system, tasks and contacts are managed, and prospects can be touched multiple times without feeling overwhelmed and turned off by a pushy company.

For example, your sales team exhibits at the local home expo. Several people fill out the form requesting more information on your products. Day one after the expo, each are emailed links to the online brochures regarding the products the prospects were interested in. The sales team receives the information on which emails were opened, when they were opened and whether the link within the email was clicked.

Two days later, an automated email is sent to each of the prospects asking them if they would like a trial of the company’s product. A couple days after that, thank you notes are sent out via snail mail to each of the prospects thanking them for stopping by the booth during the expo. On day seven, the sales team is notified of which prospects have clicked on the link requesting the product trial, and are assigned phone calls to follow-up. On day nine, those prospects who did not request a free product trial are emailed a survey about their expo experience and about their thoughts on the company’s products. On day 12, the sales team learns of the survey results and are assigned follow-up calls to any prospects who have indicated they still need more information about the products.

Can you see where the marketing automation leads the prospects by the hand and directly into the sales team’s waiting arms? It’s automated but still personalized every step of the way. Everything is tracked so no lead will fall between the cracks. Prospects receive the information they need according to their responses. And by the time the sales team contacts them, they are already interested in what they have to offer. Automated marketing making life easier. For everyone.

Schedule a no pressure demo of our marketing automation software > > 

So it pretty much goes without saying that customer satisfaction is key to a company’s success.

Have you ever worked with a software program that frustrated you? It’s likely you have. Think about the times you:

• Got stuck on a screen and were unable to move forward or backward
• Had the software crash
• Had a difficult time trying to navigate the system
• Waited for what felt like forever for reports to generate
• Questioned the accuracy of the data
• Wanted to throw your computer across the room because the program wouldn’t do what you “felt” it should

Order fulfillment software can be worth its weight in gold. Your order fulfillment software can increase customer satisfaction via:

• Making fewer errors during the order and shipping processes
• Allowing for 24/7 order access
• Faster response and delivery
• Meeting goals and expectations your team and your customers have set
• Improving worker productivity (which can result in better overall service because happy employees work better, harder and generally spread their happiness into all aspects of the business)

Your customers (present and future) have the opportunity to save a good chunk of money when they outsource their order fulfillment. They save because you have the systems and order fulfillment software in place. But saving money isn’t their only concern. They want speed. They want accuracy. And your company can provide that with order fulfillment software that makes everything run like clockwork. You’ll deliver that speed and accuracy and make your customers happy. And happy customers will stay with you.

Request a Demo of our Fulfillment Software today! 

20 minutes north, my team at interlinkONE and Grow Socially could only watch helplessly as the city we know and love was rocked by senseless acts of terrorism, on a day known for international sportsmanship and good will.

Some of our team members, myself included, were in Boston to enjoy Patriots’ Day and to take in the festivities. One of the truly great Bostonian traditions was targeted, and unspeakable horror was wrought in our midst.

Our nation has endured these dark days before. And through the chaos and smoke, we must – we will – find normalcy. The operations of our company will resume today, just as they always have. Our way of life will not be altered.

A thank you must be sent to the Boston Police Department, Boston Fire Department, National Guard, volunteers, and heroic bystanders who sprung to action when duty called. It makes us proud to call ourselves Bostonians.

We will pick up our fallen neighbors in their time of need. Our prayers and thoughts have remained firmly in Copley Square since this news broke. The images have been unsettling, but the spirit and resolve of Boston have been unwavering.

Now, normalcy is making its return to our home. Justice is prevailing and those responsible have been found. In a time when words fail, I’d like to sum up my note here with one picture. One moving, powerful image, taken in our hometown of Wilmington, where Officer Sean Collier was greeted by thousands of friends, family and fellow law enforcement officials. We take care of our own.

John Foley, Jr.