Innovation: What Living Outside the Box Really Means in Terms of Your Career

Gone are the days where to really make an impact in your career, you had to prove yourself to be the best little worker bee out there. While having a strong work ethic and the determination to accomplish any task that you're given are always important regardless of the business you're talking about, they have been superseded in recent years by something much more important: innovation.

According to a study conducted by Fast Company.com, employers are increasingly looking not at the surface-level work histories of applicants when hiring new employees, but at their history of innovation. Employers want critical thinkers because critical thinkers don't just get the job done - they flip the job on its head and do it in a way better than anyone ever has before.

If you really want to use this idea to your advantage and lay the foundation for positive growth in terms of your career, it isn't good enough to just think outside the box. "Outside the box" just officially became your new home.

Innovation and Your Career: A Match Made in Heaven

Life is full of unpredictability. The major benefit of making an effort to not only think outside the box but to make it your permanent home comes down to metamorphosis. Emphasizing innovation throughout all aspects of your life doesn't just make you more adept at dealing with change - it allows you to embrace change. It allows you to go beneath the surface of a situation and take anything you find, good or bad, and turn it into something that can help propel you forward.

If you've developed a reputation as an innovator, you instantly make yourself more valuable in most businesses because "innovation" and "saving money" are synonyms. Being an innovator means that you can use limited resources combined with your passion, your drive, and the sheer force of your creativity to not just solve a problem, but to accomplish something.

Innovation: Bringing it All Back Together Again

Innovators bring true value to a situation or environment. They're not followers. They're leaders. If you can truly train yourself to think with an eye towards innovation in everything you do, you're creating the type of situation in your career where the definition of "success" doesn't matter, as it will always be well within arm's reach.

These are just a few of the reasons why making a constant effort to live "outside the box" is so important. In the short-term, it makes you a much more valuable employee who is able to solve challenges, and allows you to come up with creative solutions that allow a business to stand apart from the competition and more. In the long-term, it makes YOU a much more valuable commodity. It doesn't just teach you how to naturally overcome any curve ball that your career goals may throw at you. By creating a situation where innovation is built into your very instincts, it teaches you how to naturally use ANYTHING that life may throw at you to your advantage.

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


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When it Comes to Your Marketing Goals, Don't Forget About Consumer Education

Whenever you begin to execute a marketing campaign, you're usually trying to service a few key goals at the same time. One of your top priorities is most likely brand awareness - you don't just want to get the word out about a product or service, but you're also trying to position your company as an authority on a particular topic. You may also want to help inform your target audience about the product in question. One of the most important marketing goals that far too many people overlook until it's too late, however, is consumer education. When it comes to your objectives, consumer education must ALWAYS be a top priority for a number of key reasons.

The Benefits of the Consumer Education Push

For marketers themselves, an increased emphasis on consumer education brings with it a host of different benefits that can't be ignored. For starters, it allows you to take a deeper level of control over the narrative that you're trying to tell than ever before. You're essentially reframing the information that consumers are actively looking for in a much more positive way. Instead of making a declarative statement with your campaign like, "Here are all of the amazing and incredible features that my product or service has," you get to instead take a decidedly less sales-oriented approach and offer advice like, "Here are the problems you have, here is why you have them, and here is how my product or service is the answer you've been looking for."

Perhaps the biggest benefit of all to taking a consumer education approach to marketing, however, is that you're no longer trying to convince your customers that your product or service is necessary. Instead, you get to essentially PROVE that it's necessary and let your customer base come to the same conclusion on their own. This helps to deepen the sense of confidence that consumers get from your company, which almost always leads to loyalty sooner rather than later.

Transforming the Landscape

Another key thing to keep in mind about making consumer education one of your core marketing objectives has to do with the subtle ways in which you change the relationship between company and customer. With consumer education, marketing is no longer a passive approach. Instead, it's decidedly active - consumers are no longer HEARING about your product or READING about it, they're LEARNING about it. They're engaged with your materials in a whole new way. It officially transforms the marketing experience into a two-way street by way of empowerment. Consumers will WANT to keep learning about what you have to say and what you have to offer, helping to increase penetration rates at the same time. The more satisfied with the marketing experience a consumer is, the more confident they ultimately are with the ways in which they spend your money. If you can turn the tide of the conversation in your direction through consumer education, you're looking at a powerful opportunity that you can no longer afford to ignore.

These are just a few of the reasons why consumer education NEEDS to be one of your marketing goals at all times. Not only does it bring with it the added benefit of affecting consumer behavior in a positive way, but it also helps establish you and your organization as the authority on a particular topic that people are actively looking for.


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


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Tips for Getting Maximum Mileage Out of Your Marketing Content

Too many marketers look at the content they're creating as "one and done." You spend a huge amount of money designing the right print mailer, send it to all of the relevant people on your list, and then never think about it again, right?

Wrong.

The truth of the matter is that this content is still high-quality because you wouldn't have sent it out into the world if it wasn't. It's a shame to write it off so quickly, especially when you can use just a few, simple techniques to increase its overall return on investment beyond what you originally thought was possible. If you want to guarantee that you're getting maximum mileage out of your marketing content, there are a few, key tips that you're definitely going to want to keep in mind.

Repurpose Whatever You Can

Creating a piece of high-quality, original content from scratch is not only expensive but time-consuming. This isn't exactly a secret, but it is a problem that marketers are creating for themselves more often than not by insisting that every last piece of information going out into the world has to be wholly original from the top down.

The fact of the matter is that it doesn't - sometimes repurposing a piece of older content is a great way to not only get maximum mileage out of those materials, but it can also help fill gaps in your editorial strategy and more.

For example, say you hosted a webinar that went off without a hitch. Those ideas don't have to die the minute the last viewer logs off. Take all the notes from the webinar and turn them into a slideshow for your website or use them as the basis for a direct-mail flyer to go out in the near future. You get the benefit of building FROM something instead of creating from scratch and also get to stretch the ROI of that original content as far as it can go at the same time.

Redistribution: Using Changes to Your Advantage

Another one of the most important ways to get maximum mileage out of your marketing content involves careful redistribution. Consider how things may have changed since that original piece of content went out into the world. Maybe you designed a post for Facebook that was hugely successful but now a new social media network has entered the marketplace. A few key adjustments could make that old piece ready for a brand new audience.

The same can be said of taking something from the print world and bringing it into the digital realm, and vice versa. Take that informative print flyer you sent out a few weeks ago and use it as the framework for a blog post. You get the benefit of increasing the longevity (and again, the ROI) of that original content and you get it in front of a whole new crop of people at the same time.

While many people think of content marketing as "disposable," it absolutely does not have to be that way. A good piece of content is a good piece of content - period. By carefully practicing techniques like redistribution and repurposing, you can stretch the value of that content as far as it will go, and get as many miles out of it as you can.

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


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Turning Failure Into Success - Stories of Famous Achievers and Their Failures

Every entrepreneur, and I do mean every, has had a taste of failure at one time or another. The slam-dunk business idea that landed flat.  The star product that fizzled out.  It happens more often than you really hear about, but to those individuals that it's happening to, the "failures" can be seriously disheartening. If you're feeling a bit down about a business venture that didn't go as you planned, don't lose hope. Countless well-known and successful individuals have achieved their dreams despite multiple setbacks.  Their stories are sure to inspire you.

Henry Ford

Best known for the most ubiquitous automobile on the road today, Ford founder, Henry Ford had a rocky start. Early on in his life, Ford worked as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. It was during this time that he built the first gasoline-powered horseless carriage in a shed behind his home. Due to a number of factors, including controversial views on politics and battles with the United Automobile Workers, Ford reportedly went broke three different times. Despite numerous setbacks, Ford went on to develop new methods for mass production that put the automobile within the reach of ordinary citizens.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a French Chemist and Microbiologist most well-known for his invention of pasteurization, a process that kills bacteria in food through extreme heat.  Beyond making food safer for people for years to come, this below-average chemistry student is also responsible for creating vaccines for anthrax and rabies.  Not bad for a student ranked 15 out of 22 chemistry students!

George Lucas

George Lucas...the man that brought us Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and the Force, fueled every kids' dream of being a fighter pilot in outer space.  It's hard to imagine that a franchise worth over $30 billion began with rejections from every studio in Hollywood before 20th Century Fox finally took a chance on it.  We shudder to think what would have happened had he just given up and went home.

He's what George Lucas says about failure:  "If you're creating things, you're doing things that have a high potential for failure, especially if you're doing things that haven't been done before. And you learn from those things. No matter how you cut it, you say, 'Well, that didn't work,' or, 'Well, this didn't work,' or 'That was not the best idea.' And you use that information that you've gotten, which is experience... Failure is another word for experience."

Walt Disney

Known for his fanciful theme parks and animated children's tales, Walt Disney wasn't always living in the lap of luxury.  Countless instances of adversity rained down on Disney in his early years as an animator.  After having to dissolve his company in 1921, he was unable to pay his rent and was living on dog food to survive.  Later, after gaining some success with a cartoon character named Oswald the Rabbit, Universal obtained ownership of the character and hired all of Disney's artists when Disney tried to negotiate with Universal Studios to increase his pay. Not surprisingly, Disney reportedly suffered from depression during his long career.  The suffering and perseverance paid off, as assets of the Walt Disney Company are currently in excess of $89 billion in 2015.

Dr. Seuss

Who would have thought that one of the most well-known and revered children's book authors had trouble getting his writing career off of the ground?  It's true, though. The crafty "Cat in the Hat" creator was reportedly rejected by 27 publishers for his first book "And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street." The 28th publisher, Vanguard Press, took a chance on the young author, ultimately selling over 6 million copies of that first book. Since then, Dr. Suess has published over 40 books and sold over 600 million copies.  The best part is how he made a positive impact on the lives of millions of kids around the world.

Remember, you write your own stories, so you are in control of writing your ending. Will those "failures" become opportunities or excuses to quit?


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


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Creating an Editorial Calendar: The Foundation of Your Content Marketing Strategy

According to a recent survey conducted by Gleanster Research, managing the overall content creation process was the single biggest challenge that most medium- and large-sized companies faced on a daily basis. To make matters worse, 36 percent of respondents indicated that they were missing deadlines on a regular basis, significantly derailing their efforts as a result.

Luckily, the exact cause of these types of issues also happens to be one that is easily avoided. By creating an editorial calendar, you essentially create the backbone of your entire content marketing strategy. Your entire team can reap the benefits in a number of important ways.

Why You Need an Editorial Calendar

On the surface, an editorial calendar is a calendar that outlines the specific due dates for all important content launches well into the future. It's a wonderful, visual way to see where you stand and what you need to do in terms of your short-term and long-term goals.

Underneath, however, it's an invaluable resource to start putting better content out into the world immediately. Think of it like a daily planner - each day you know what type of content is going to be launching, who is going to be writing it, what important details are going to be included, and more. It's an opportunity to take this resource and bend it to your existing workflow. Instead of laying down guidelines for your team and forcing them to adjust the way they like to work to meet this new tool, the tool itself is inherently malleable by design.

An editorial calendar is also a great way to plan for the entire process of content creation from start to finish. Everything from idea conception to publishing is all handled through one centralized point of access, not only giving you all of the benefits of firm project management but also helping with communication. Everybody can be on the same page at the same time (no pun intended) because all they have to do is check the calendar to see where they've been, where they are, and where they're supposed to be going next. It doesn't get much easier than that.

Forming the Backbone of Your Future Content Planning

Once you've had the chance to get your editorial calendar up and running, you'll have access to a wide range of different benefits that would be difficult to get in any other way. For starters, a calendar allows you to custom build your content marketing strategy for specific audiences in a much easier way than ever before. Based on user preferences and behaviors you can clearly outline what types of content are making their way to which channels and, more importantly, when.

An editorial calendar also gives you the ability to plan keywords well in advance, letting you design the content around the keywords your users are paying attention to, rather than trying to cram those keywords into a piece once it is already finished.

These are among the many reasons why taking the effort to create an editorial calendar is well worth your time. The great thing about it is that it is a resource you only have to build once. As soon as your editorial calendar is up and running, everything from creating content to distribution becomes significantly less challenging and the results that you're after are well within your reach.

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


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Lowered Postal Rates Mean Now is the Best Time to Give Direct Mail a Try

To say that most businesses have something of a love/hate relationship with the United States Postal Service is an understatement. USPS is one of those necessary things to get a wide range of direct and print mail marketing materials out into the world. With a decade of increasing prices chipping away at return on investment little by little, it's no wonder many organizations started to skimp on direct mail spending in favor of other "cheaper" solutions in the interim. Now, however, the tides may be truly changing as postal rates are on the decline with no clear end in sight. If you've been waiting to jump back into the direct mail world, now might be the PERFECT time to give it a try for a number of reasons.

Postal Rates: What is Going On?

On April 10, 2016, the cost to ship a first-class letter in the United States fell to just $0.47 - a rare phenomenon in recent memory. Additionally, the price of sending a postcard dropped a penny, international letters fell $0.05, and even coveted "Forever Stamps" saw a decrease in cost at the same time. These are the most direct mail and small business-friendly prices to come along since the beginning of the 2008 recession.

Direct Mail Doesn't Just Work - It Works Gangbusters

Despite all this, some people still refuse to give direct mail the chance it deserves because they naturally assume that digital marketing is more efficient in the tech-driven world in which we now live. After all, with people glued to their cell phones day in and day out, how much of an impact can direct mail really have?

The answer is "a great big one."

According to a study conducted by Compu-Mail.com, direct mail is still used heavily in an iPhone and Droid-centric world: approximately 43% of all local retail advertising still falls into this category. Not only that, but young adults are actually the largest group to respond to direct mail the most, particularly among the millennial crowd. According to a recent International Communications Research survey, approximately 73% of consumers actually prefer direct mail over alternative advertising methods. This is largely due to the fact that an equal number of respondents said that direct mail marketing was a much more personable experience than internet-based materials. Keep in mind that millennials think junk mail happens in their inbox, not their mailbox.

So, if the reasons why you had overlooked direct mail in the past were because "it was too expensive" and "you didn't think it worked," congratulations: those two reasons just evaporated in an instant.

No two businesses are created in quite the same way, and what works for one might not work for another - especially in terms of an overall marketing strategy. However, with the recent decline of USPS postal rates, now would be the absolute perfect time to give direct mail a try if it's something that you've flirted with in the past, but ultimately overlooked for whatever reason. Now, is a terrific chance to really dip your proverbial toe in the water and to see just how direct mail can benefit your organization, especially if you're doing so for the first time. These declining rates most likely aren't going to stick around forever, so go for it, and create your direct mail campaign today.

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

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Succeed in Business Without Undue Stress: Lessons From a Sailor

Sailors are known for their exciting tales of far-off worlds and adventure beyond a landlubber's imagination. The trusted captain and crew have a few pointers to share for a successful voyage. Let's see how your business can benefit from the lessons learned in the daily life of a salty sailor.

Know your vessel.

Is she seaworthy? Is she built and maintained by people who take pride in their work? What are her quirks? Not all vessels are the same by any means. Know what makes her unique and tend to those details. What is the greatest strength of your enterprise? What is your core competency, or what is the distinguishing feature of your product? Having a well-defined product or service and a good understanding of how it compares to similar items in the marketplace is crucial.

Choose a good crew.

Your crew will make or break the voyage, and as the captain, all the responsibility is resting on you. Is the "crew" of your "vessel" the best in the business, or did you hire your brother's high school best friend out of some misplaced sense of obligation? You have to constantly assess the skill and knowledge of your crew. Do you have the right people stationed at the right post? Just as you wouldn't put a deckhand in charge of navigation, you must insist on having all of your staff working in the areas of their expertise.

Know where you're going.

As a sailor, you must always be aware of your latitude and longitude. You have to know where you are in order to chart a course to where you want to go. The tools available today are changing rapidly and technology is great, but do not lose sight of the basics: quality, consistency, value, and customer service. Knowing where you are in these key areas and how you stack up to the competition will allow you to get where you want to go, be it increased market share, growth, innovation, or profitability.

Sharpen your senses.

The wind will change direction and velocity and make your life terrible if you aren't in tune with Mother Nature. The same goes for rain, thunderstorms, and squalls. Know what conditions are in the forecast, but always keep watch to discern subtle changes and patterns. Business journals and analysts are out there making predictions and it can be hard to figure out who has the best information. Sharpen your senses and your gut will guide you in the direction of success. Look at the forecast, but know that your gut is rarely wrong.

Know how to adjust your sails.

When the wind changes direction or a storm system builds, sailors understand that they'll make no progress fighting the forces of nature. They know that by simply adjusting their sails, they can harness those forces, adjust their course, and continue on. They may even adjust their destination to make the most of the situation. Similarly, a leader of any enterprise must know how to adjust his plans to accommodate changes in the market. Market forces can be infinitely stronger than your iron will and can crush your business if you fight. If you accept the change and adjust your course, you may find yourself in a different place from where you intended to go, and it may be far better than you expected.

Whether you are a captain on the high seas or a captain of industry, you old salts have a lot in common. Next time you are in a pub near the marina, strike up a conversation with the weather-worn sailor in the corner. You just might learn something.

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


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