Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Ever Wondered Just How Effective a Call to Action Really Is?

While it's true the larger goal of your marketing efforts involves spreading the word about the products or services you sell, this isn't the only thing you're trying to accomplish. Gently guiding your customers through the various stages of the sales funnel, from the moment they begin looking for a solution to the moment they choose to do business with you, is arguably even more important. When it comes to that particular goal, perhaps the most important weapon in your arsenal is and will always be the call to action.



What Is a Call to Action?

A call to action is some type of statement, link, or graphic that provides potential customers with instructions regarding exactly what you'd like them to do next. It may be as simple as telling a customer to provide their phone number so you can contact them and discuss their options further. If your site runs a blog containing helpful articles that are relevant to your brand, the call to action might be "Click here to read more about this interesting new study we found." Regardless of the wording, the intention is clear. You're telling the customer exactly which step they should take next, all the while moving them closer and closer to an eventual sale.

Calls to action are incredibly effective when done properly. According to a case study conducted in 2013 by Inbound Marketing Blog, one company was able to generate up to 12 times more new, high-quality leads per month after effective calls to action were placed on various types of marketing materials.

Tips for Effective Calls to Action

Though calls to action are incredibly important, they're also something you can do "wrong" if you proceed in exactly the wrong way. For effective calls to action, you need to consider where a customer is in the sales process when they're viewing a particular type of content. Is your customer discovering your brand for the first time by way of a direct mailer? An effective call to action in that scenario might be something akin to "Visit this URL or call this number to find out more."

Did your customer just arrive at the general landing page for your brand? A better use of the call to action here might be "Click here to read this article about how effective these types of products can really be."

When customers discover your brand or are exposed to your marketing message for the first time, they're in an inherently impressionable state. At the end of the day, they just want to confirm for themselves that they're making the right decision regarding how they're about to spend their hard-earned money. By inserting properly designed, well-placed calls to action in your marketing materials, you can not only increase the quality of the leads you generate but also gently guide those leads through the sales funnel until they reach the point where they're ready to buy.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The Power of Personalization



Print marketing is still one of the best and most effective ways to connect with your target audience and create brand awareness on a large scale. For starters, print marketing is tangible -- you're giving a person something they can hold in their hands and, more importantly, something they can pass along to a friend or family member.

Despite the many benefits of print marketing as a medium, many people still seem to miss one of its most powerful and most natural tools: personalization. When you take a look at just how effective personalization can be, you'll be shocked you weren't embracing it in the past.

Personalization: By the Numbers

In 2012, the industry organization InfoTrends conducted a study on marketing communication. It revealed several interesting facts, all of which are important to know when planning your next marketing campaign. The good news is that print marketing is alive and well, even in an era where everyone carries a smartphone or other type of mobile device with them at all times.

The better news is that marketing materials featuring high levels of personalization yield a dramatically higher ROI over ones sent out in a uniform or more generic manner.

The InfoTrends survey covered more than 1,000 businesses in 10 industries. Nearly two thirds used personalization or segmentation techniques to increase response and conversion rates. One of the respondents who used personalized print materials exclusively experienced a response rate of around 6% and a conversion rate of over 16%. Compare this with the average 2% response rate more generic materials generate, and the power of personalization becomes abundantly clear.

Things get even more impressive when you combine personalization with other best practices of modern marketing, like combining print and digital to reach a wider audience. For example, the respondents who utilized print and e-mail materials with high levels of personalization reported a response rate of 7.6% and a conversion rate of over 18%.

Why Personalization Matters

When you personalize your marketing materials, you're taking that extra step to show your target audience how much you really care about them. Instead of addressing a direct mail brochure with the generic and calculated "Dear Sir or Madame," you can take advantage of the basic technique of including their name -- which, keep in mind, is information you already have if you're sending them something in the mail.

Believe it or not, this does go a long way. It instantly creates a much more organic connection with the person reading your materials and subconsciously separates your mailer from others that may not be personalized at all.

Personalized print marketing is also inherently more impressive than personalized digital materials of the same variety. Everyone has a computer, and they know how quickly you can change an e-mail to include a name. Changing a print mailer, however, takes a little more thought and effort (though not as much as you'd think). Your effort will definitely be appreciated by the recipient.

Not only is print marketing alive and well, but one of its most powerful assets is something many businesses aren't even using. Personalizing your print materials will go a long way toward creating a more meaningful and long-lasting connection with your target audience and increasing your ROI.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Marketing Lessons From Movie Trailers

If you want to see a clear cut example of the power of marketing in action, look no further than the trailers released into cinemas each weekend for the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Nowadays, many feature films cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, so a trailer needs to fire on every last cylinder in order to help that film succeed. Because of the high stakes involved, there's actually quite a bit we can learn from successful movie trailers in planning our own marketing campaigns.


Consistency is Key When it Comes to Your Brand

There's perhaps no more perfect example of the power of consistency in branding today than Marvel Studios. The company's films include such successful titles as The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor: The Dark World, and Iron Man 3. Marvel keeps churning out hit after hit, and the studio has learned how to leverage the power of its brand in a pretty interesting way.

For Marvel, it all begins with the Marvel Studios logo. Every single trailer for every single Marvel film begins with the Marvel Studios branding. Even the title cards on these previews don't say "From the Director of X" or "From the Producer of Y." Instead, they say, "From the Studio That Brought You The Avengers." What Marvel's doing is making their own brand synonymous with the type of quality entertainment people are coming in droves to see. They're making Marvel Studios a more powerful brand than the characters in the films, the stars of the films, and even the filmmakers themselves. Pretty soon, it won't matter which movie features which character. As long as it says Marvel Studios on the front, people are going to go.

In many ways, your brand is the most powerful marketing tool you have -- even more powerful than the products or services you provide. If you can turn your brand into one that people can't help but pay attention to through marketing consistency, your bottom line will benefit.

Leave Them Wanting More

Another important marketing lesson you can learn from movie previews is the idea of "always leave them wanting more." A movie trailer should never show all of the best parts of the film. Yes, it should show some of them, but not all. The best trailers leave audiences excited for a film and confident they'll find a whole lot more waiting for them when they go to see it.

Your marketing materials should be the same way. People should get a general idea of the benefits your products or services provide and a desire to experience those benefits firsthand. Your marketing can never recreate the feeling of joy customers get when they start using your products, but it can get them excited about giving those products a try.

Marketing lessons can be found in the unlikeliest of places -- even at the cinema on a weekend excursion with your friends or loved ones. Sure, you'll probably never make a Hollywood feature film and don't have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, but you can still learn a lot just by paying attention to the way movie studios attempt to sell you on the next big blockbuster coming soon to a theater near you.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The Re-Branding of Curious George


Many people are unaware of the origins of Curious George. For the youngsters who love the books and TV show today, George is just an adorable little monkey who happens to live with a man in a yellow hat. The children watch as George gets himself into all kinds of trouble, learning along with him how to problem solve.

The stories didn't begin that way, though.

When the very first Curious George stories came out back in the 1940s, George was a monkey who had lived in Africa. The man with the yellow hat tricked George into coming out of hiding by playing on his curiosity. He originally planned to take George back to Europe and put him in the zoo. Instead, the two began to develop a relationship.

It's interesting to note the prevailing opinions of the time. Many people looked at explorers who went into the jungle as heroes. They wouldn't have had as many negative associations with an explorer kidnapping a monkey from the jungle as we would today.

The new books that children read today came out in the 1990s. These later books don't really talk about how George came to live with the man in the yellow hat. The authors of these later books, which are modeled after the original books, focus on George's curiosity and how he manages to solve his problems. The authors of the newer books recognized that people today wouldn't appreciate the story of the man with the yellow hat kidnapping George from the jungle.

When the newer books and television series first came out, the authors focused on creating a fun story centered around a lovable monkey and the trouble he could create. Rather than focus on how the monkey and the man with the yellow hat came together, they just developed an entertaining story focused around the present.

You could say this was a re-branding of Curious George -- and it was a complete success.

Successfully framing your company for success

When you set out to market your company to your customers, you must understand your audience and what they seek. The new audience of preschoolers in the 1990s and 2000s wanted an entertaining character without the baggage that came with the original, so that's what the authors delivered.

Similarly, you should familiarize yourself with your customers enough to predict what's going to resonate most with them. Use this to guide your marketing and re-branding efforts. Audiences might change over the years, particularly if your company's been around for several decades, so don't be afraid to shed parts of your original message and add in something new if it will help you reach your customers.

When it comes to advertising, nothing matters more than understanding your audience. Those familiar with the saga of Curious George will find the comparisons between the popular monkey and the marketing campaigns of evolving companies intriguing. If you're interested in developing a new marketing campaign, speak to us today. We'd be happy to help you get started.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.