Put Your Core Values on Display Through Marketing

The core values that you've dictated for your business play an important role in just about every decision that you make. What many people fail to realize is that they need to play an important role in your marketing, too. Marketing isn't just about communicating what services you provide or what products you offer, but what type of business you represent. The customer/business relationship is one that is built on trust, and putting your core values on display through marketing is one of the best ways to strengthen that relationship both now and for all time.

It's About Clarity

In many ways, the most important part of marketing has nothing to do with whatever new product you're touting at the time. It's about distilling everything - your products, your services, your employees and more - into a single message that lets the customer know who you are, what you're trying to do, and why you're trying to do it.

Consider the message that ends every Visa commercial you've ever seen, the message: "It's everywhere you want to be." This message isn't overly reliant on how shiny the cards are or what perks or rewards you might get for signing up. It's beautifully simple and conveys an important message: by signing up for a Visa card, you've got access to a trusted financial resource anywhere you could possibly need it. You've got a partner that you can depend on, day in and day out.

That one simple message is one of the single best examples of putting your core values on display for your audience through marketing in the modern era. It says everything that you need to know about what type of company Visa is AND what type of service they offer in six short words.

Honesty and Integrity Can Also Mean Humility, Too

If you've decided that two of the most important core values for your business are honesty and integrity, you need to accept the fact that the best way to display this to your audience will not necessarily always be positive.

Consider what happens when you make a mistake as a business owner. Maybe you released a product and said that it did one thing, while it really did another. Maybe you claimed that it did one thing really well, when in reality, it was barely functional and not ready for public consumption. These are the types of mistakes that business owners make on a regular basis - it's a fact of life.

The thing that separates the successful business owners from the ones who quickly disappear, however, is what they do next. If you've always told your customers that you value honesty and integrity, the path is clear: you own up to your mistake in your marketing. You acknowledge the problem as a learning opportunity and pledge to take the experience and use it to do better work in the future.

It's something that you see time and again. Coca-Cola introduced the stunning disaster that was New Coke in 1985. Microsoft released the Windows 8 operating system. What do these businesses have in common? They're still around, thanks to the fact that they understood that the core values of honesty and integrity sometimes mean humility, too. They admitted that they made mistakes, apologized to their customers, and pledged to do better in the future.

Far too many business owners label the core values of their business as "not for public consumption." Now, more than ever, the relationship between a business and its customers is one that is forged from a strong sense of transparency. One of the best ways to show your customers what type of business you are is to let those core values reflect outward with your marketing materials.

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.


#print #directmailmarketing #chooseprint

Resilience: Withstand the Hardship

One of the more important characteristics of a successful business is resilience. Without resilience, a business that suffers any setback is far more vulnerable to hardship or even complete collapse. In fact, failures frequently precede success in many people's efforts in business or otherwise. Just look at some of these examples.

Walt Disney was fired once because he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas." A recording company executive told the Beatles that he just didn't like their sound. Stories like this are accounts of people with the persistence to avoid defeatism in the face of difficulty. They had the needed resilience to keep going, to strive for future successes instead of wallowing in failure.

Another lesser known example is that of Thomas Carlisle, who took more than a year to compile his monumental history of the French Revolution. A housekeeper mistook it for trash and out it went. Carlisle dedicated himself to re-creating it, and with three more years of hard work, recalled it from memory and produced the replacement--a monumental history produced with an equally monumental reserve of resilience in the face of defeat.

One of the most familiar such stories in the business world is that of Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl. Frankl survived Nazi Germany's, Auschwitz to become a leading proponent of a humanistic therapy approach for motivating more productive decision making. In Frankl's best-selling book, "Man’s Search for Meaning," he details the critical moment when he realized the objective of creating this revolutionizing form of therapy.

Frankl had fallen into self-pity over his concentration camp existence. He now saw his life as meaningless and trivial, but he suddenly realized that to survive, he would have to overcome this feeling. He would have to find some overarching purpose. He would have to have the resilience to form some positive objectives in the face of so much negativity. Frankl envisioned himself delivering a lecture after the war on the subject of the psychology surrounding a concentration camp. From this simple beginning sprang his entire school of thought, which he called, "Meaning Therapy," with a mission of recognizing and creating significance in the lives of others. With resilience, Frankl turned around not only his life, but the lives of countless others. Today, employee resilience training is common in the work place.

Frankl's resilience was born of an ability to find meaning against all odds in a horribly negative situation. Finding meaning is just one of the characteristics of those with high resilience, though. Another, perhaps strangely, is an acceptance of reality - for only from a realistic acceptance of a challenging situation can an adequate response be generated to fix it.

The investment bank, Morgan Stanley, had its offices in the World Trade center before that awful day on September 11, 2001. As it happens, Morgan Stanley had a diligent concern for preparedness, which included preparing for possible disasters requiring building evacuation. When the first tower was hit, it took them exactly one minute to begin the evacuation of their offices in the second tower. Only because of their preparedness and training were almost all of the company's 2,700 employees saved when the second plane struck its target fifteen minutes later.

Their realistic approach, accepting the reality of the existing threat of terrorism, brought about the preparedness plan that allowed Morgan Stanley to remain in business. This resilience in the face of potential disaster saved them when the danger became a reality.

Some people and some businesses break under pressure. Others succeed due to their resilience in overcoming adversity or planning for its resolution. Which one are 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.

#print #directmailmarketing #chooseprint

Buyer Personas: What They Are, Why You Need Them, and What Should You Do About It

In marketing, one of the most important terms that you need to keep in mind at all times is "focus." In order to run a successfully executed campaign, you need to remove as much of the superfluous noise from your materials as possible and boil it down to the core essentials. You can't appeal to all people all of the time, which is why focusing on creating the right message and using the right delivery channels is so important. Buyer personas are a concept that allow you to do just that in a host of different ways, all of which are beneficial to you and your team moving forward.

What is a Buyer Persona?

In marketing terminology, a buyer persona is essentially a person that doesn't exist. They're a fictional representation of the type of person who is most likely to buy your product or service after hearing your marketing message. Buyer personas are created using as much actionable information about your ideal customer as possible: How old are they? Where do they live? Do they have any children? How much money do they make? What types of products have they purchased in the past? What do they like? What do they hate?

If you knew all of the answers to those questions when talking about a real person, you'd already have a pretty vivid picture about how that person acts and what their personality is. You'd certainly have an easier time talking to that person and relating to him or her - which is what buyer personas are all about in the first place.

Why Are Buyer Personas Important?

By creating a fictional representation of the person who makes up your ideal customer, you always have something to refer to when crafting your marketing materials. Say your business' buyer persona is Jane - she's a 35-year-old mother of two with a combined household income of $150,000. Instead of "throwing everything and anything at the wall and seeing what sticks" in terms of your marketing campaigns, you have something to compare your techniques to. How does your product or service fit into Jane's life? How does it solve a problem that she has? How does it align with past purchases she's made? The answers to these questions will drive your marketing decisions moving forward.

Crafting Buyer Personas

Creating a buyer persona requires you to be two things at all times: detailed and accurate. After you've been in business for an extended period of time, you have access to huge volumes of data regarding things like market research and even your past customers that you can draw from. To a certain degree, all of this data should dictate the buyer personas you create, which in turn should dictate the direction of your marketing. Are a significantly large number of your past satisfied customers men between the ages of 18 and 34 who have no kids? Congratulations - you have the basic framework to begin building a buyer persona. Any marketing technique that isn't directly appealing to that specific type of person is one that you now need to re-think.

It's important to not go "too far" when creating buyer personas, however. If buyer personas are all about focus, going out of your way to have too many personas is a great way to instantly undo all of the benefits that you've just worked so hard to build for yourself. Focus on a few core types of customers and craft buyer personas for each, and then compare every marketing move that you make against the information you've compiled for guidance on what to do next.

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.

#print #directmailmarketing #chooseprint

Avoid These Common Print Marketing Mistakes

We tend to talk a great deal about all of the things that you should do in your print marketing campaign for maximum effectiveness. You always want to make sure that your message is clear and concise, for example, and make sure that your pages are designed in a way where you can naturally control the flow of how people are taking in your important information. As a change of pace, we thought it would be fun to talk about some of the things you SHOULDN'T do if you want to unlock the maximum value of your campaign. A good piece of print marketing material is an incredible investment, but a bad one will quickly have the exact opposite reaction that you intended.

Remember the End Product - Particularly Its Size

Unlike the old days, most print marketing materials today are designed on a computer. After all, it's never been easier to get the exact look that you want with just a few, quick clicks of your mouse. One of the most important things to keep in mind, however, is that the way a material looks on a crystal clear HD computer screen can be quite a bit different from the way it looks in real life if you're not careful.

More specifically, pay attention to the font size that you choose to use - particularly if your print material is something that you'll be blowing up to a much larger size later. Even small printing looks perfectly legible when you're sitting a few inches away from a 1080p computer monitor. When you print out the banner or other item that you've just designed and blow it up to its intended size, though, you may find out that the small font size you chose to fit as many words on the page as possible is suddenly impossible to read unless you move closer. You can pretty much guarantee people who are just going about their busy lives are not going to take the time to slow down and move in closer to your marketing.

Forgetting to Account for Light

Any print marketer will spend a huge amount of time making sure that their materials look and feel just right. You'll go over everything with a fine-toothed comb and may even spring for that extra glossy paper to really sell the look of professionalism you're trying to get across. If your print material is going to be hanging in a well lit area like a store window, however, you may want to skip the glossy paper for a very important reason.

Forgetting to account for the lighting in the environment where the material will be viewed is a disaster you want to avoid at all costs. At worst, the shine from something like the sun on a glossy window banner will make it difficult to read. At just the right angle, it can actually create a dangerous situation for drivers who suddenly have the full force of the sun beaming directly into their eyes. Always remember where your material will be viewed and under what conditions when designing.

These are just a few of the things that we think you need to keep in mind when designing your print marketing materials for maximum effect. Remember, it isn't just your message that is important - it is ultimately who will be viewing those materials, how they'll be exposed to them, and under what conditions this will happen that you also have to focus on for the best results.


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.

#print #directmailmarketing #chooseprint