Three steps that will help you to market and grow your licensed promotional marketing program.

Your sourcing, production, merchandising, warehousing, distribution, warehousing, and customer support are all set up and ready to go. You’ve completed your e-commerce online store and launched it. So now what? Well you should already have been working on building a marketing campaign to build your brand and grow your audience. It’s better to plan out your marketing plan from the very beginning stages of any project. However, if you haven’t started already, rest assured it’s never too late to start.

Successfully building a campaign starts with three key phases: 1. Take advantage of your existing strengths 2. Grow your audience and extend your reach 3. Nurture existing customers. These three rules can be applied to just about any situation or program model, and are pretty much universal. Unfortunately, many programs concentrate on one or even two of these phases while missing out on a major slice of the promotional pie.

Existing Newsletters are a great place to start advertising

1. Take advantage of your existing strengths:
This is almost always the best place to start marketing, as it is usually the path of least resistance. Do you have something that is already successful such as a newsletter or a high traffic home page? Don’t be afraid to piggy back your new program advertising onto existing publications or web pages. Look at existing partnerships and cross-promotion opportunities. If you have a partner brand or supporting organization, approach them with a cross-promotion marketing program. If you are a successful company, you must be doing something right already, so why not make it work for you in getting the word out about your new program?

However you choose to promote your program, always remember that your existing audience is your most valuable audience. It’s sometimes hard to keep sight of the fact that, in most industries, your existing customers are almost always your highest opportunity targets. You know they are interested in what you have to offer, and you know they are interested in hearing what you have to say. Brand loyalty never comes from first-time customers, so don’t miss out on the opportunity you already have.

Promotional emails are one way to entice new customers

2. Grow your audience and extend your reach:
The next thing you need to do is to grow you audience. There are a plethora of marketing methods available to help you extend your reach, and how you go about it will really depend on your organization and what your product or service is. Whatever you do, be sure to take advantage of the most cost-effective marketing avenues. Email marketing, social media (such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook), industry press releases, blogs and RSS feeds, search engine optimization, cross branding and working with fan-sites are all very simple to implement, and can be invaluable to extending your reach. With social media sites like Facebook, you are exponentially expanding your reach with each person that signs on as a fan or follows you. Plus, RSS comment feeds from places like Twitter allow your content to be picked up and republished just about anywhere, thus expanding your reach.

When investing in marketing directed towards audience growth, one of the most important rules of thumb to live by is that you should always be able to track your return on investment. At the very least, you should be able to get a good idea of how much of a response you are getting. Marketing of this type can be a double edged sword in that it has potential to grow your audience rapidly, or it can possibly end up as a gigantic waste of marketing dollars. You need to know which avenues are most successful at generating qualified leads in order to wisely invest your marketing dollars. If you can’t track it, it usually best to skip it.

Use coupons and gift certificates as a great way to encourage repeat business

3. Nurture existing customers:
This is very much related to step number one, but it is slightly different in that it speaks more specifically towards developing program-specific marketing methods to increase conversion rates and encourage repeat sales. Your program will eventually need to step out on it’s own in this regard. You cannot grow a program simply by piggybacking it onto your existing assets forever, and initiatives aimed specifically at growing the program are important. Tools that can aid in growing this part of your programs are things such as: online store recommended product suggestions, customer product reviews, new or seasonal products, a program-specific promotional newsletter or email, proper product key-wording for easier online store searchability, social media, and custom coupons and customer discounts.

The point is that nurturing existing customers is more than just communicating regularly with them, it is also about using all available tools in order to provide them with a reason to make a purchase. Whether it be an informative article about a certain product, a 10% off coupon code, or a newly added product, these things are all reasons to make a purchase. As you grow your email subscriber database, social media networks, and overall program visibility, be sure not only to make it easy for your customers to keep updated on your brand, but that they have a reason to come back and make multiple purchases. Be creative, and put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would make you want to come back and make a second, third or fourth purchase?

Promotional licensing programs require a real commitment in all phases to function well, but one of the most critical phases is the marketing phase. You can create the best promotional licensed program, but if no one is purchasing your products, it is all for naught. That is why you want to be planning for how to market your program from the very beginning. To learn more about how to promote your promotional licensing program, give us a call today at (800) 588-7111. Email us at customerservice@powertexgroup.com or visit us at: http://www.powertexgroup.com.

Keep up on new technology trends or risk being left behind.

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Business and technology move quickly, which is why it is important to occasionally take a moment to gain perspective how far things have come, and where they are going. The last several years have seen a drastic shift in available mainstream technologies as well as applications for those technologies. We have seen advances in a variety of areas such as cell phones, social networking, miniaturization, and internet technology amongst other converging technologies. This has led us to a point where we are set to leap into a new generation of marketing techniques and delivery platforms.

Where we’ve been:

Youtube Powertex Page

In the mid-late 1990’s we saw websites and, more importantly, e-commerce websites emerge as a necessity for retail businesses. This caused innovations in search engine technologies, web marketing, web advertising, and affiliate programs that added an extra dimension to business promotion. From the year 2000 to around 2006, there were a few major innovations that changed the marketing game, such as more targeted advertising abilities, better visitor analysis, better e-commerce features, better usability and online merchandising. Blogs also rose to prominence during this period, along with content aggregators (such as Digg and Reddit), pod-casting, online pay-for Mp3 services (such as iTunes), RSS news feeds were popularized, Youtube pioneered user-submitted video, and more ample online news platforms evolved as well. Each of these innovations was game-changing in the sense that they each created massive opportunities for those that were willing and able to integrate those new platforms into their business and marketing model.

Recent developments:

It wasn’t until the last 2 years, however, that we saw the biggest and arguably most important technological innovations since the late 1990’s. There are 5 things that have recently converged to change how we look at not only marketing, but business in general:

1. Cell phones - One of the most immediately impacting developments, the cell phone has yet to reach its full potential. The ubiquity of the Smart phone has made it possible for not only the road warrior, but the average user to be connected 24/7 via email, text message, GPS, and internet browsing. Through recent (and continued) innovations in processors, batteries, motion-gesture technology, touch screens, 3G wireless access, and new interface technologies, the smart phone is set to possibly replace the computer as the primary source of internet access. The smaller screens and unique limitations as well as opportunities that smart phones provide will continue to drive a whole new marketing methodology in the near future.

2. Social Media - Probably the single most important development with regards to marketing, social media has changed how people interact with the web. No longer is the web a place where

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only tech-savvy people can participate,but it is something where everyone can share their thoughts. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter are critical new platforms to watch, as they are incredibly successful, and have not yet even matured as market delivery platforms. Do yourself a favor, if you haven’t already, get involved with these platforms, and at least be sure you understand how they work. People are getting networked and connected like never before, and you can’t afford to be left behind.

3. GPS - GPS has been around for a long time already, but has never really been a major market factor until the last couple years. GPS usage in driving and navigation has jumped in the last few years, and has become more of a factor in where people go for dinner, where they stop for gas, and which routes they take to get there. Not only that, but GPS mapping has become more and more tied into the internet, and social media in particular. In the near future we will begin to see the real capabilities of GPS from being able to geo-tag photos of people you know, to being able to provide a visitor coupon based on their geo-position in relation to their nearest restaurant.

4. Search Technology - We have yet to see the full impact of this convergent marketing technology, but there are new developments in the Search Engine world that will revolutionize t

Wolphram Alpha Search Engine

his area by finally realizing the dream of a more “semantic” web. These technologies will take human-style queries and return useable information. The recent release of a project code-named “Wolfram Alpha” has demonstrated just how far these technologies have advanced. For instance, in the Wolfram Engine, should you ask it for “Champaign, IL county retail sales” it won’t return a page with links to web pages, rather it will scour the web for raw data. It will then pull that data together, repackage it, and put it into a human-useable format. In this instance, it will tell you a dollar amount, generate a chart with last year’s retail sale in the county by month, show you the 1-year maximum sales for the county as well as the minimum, display various currency conversions for the amount provided, as well as provide the breakdown of those sales by wholesale, retail, service, and manufacturing. Never before have such capabilities been available, and it will be in the next few years that we will finally be able to realize the full potential of these new web search advances.

5. Computers and the Web as a Total Media Delivery Platform -

Hulu Media Delivery Platform

For the first time in its history, the web, through services like Netflix’s video-on-demand service, Hulu.com, Joost, and MTV.com, has become a total media delivery platform. More and more computers are making their way to the living room, and the line between a computer and an entertainment center is becoming more and more blurred. This is causing the death of traditional media such as cable and news media outlets. Look for more and more opportunities for aggressive marketing in these areas as these technologies mature.

What it means for you:

What this all means for you is that, for better or for worse, there is a marketing and technology revolution going on that, once finished, will see major changes in not only how your business approaches promotional marketing, but in how it operates. There will be big winners, and there will be big losers by the time this all shakes out, and it will be up to your organization how well it adapts to these new opportunities. No one knows exactly where each of the above technologies will end up as of yet, but one thing is for sure: the future is happing now.

As an industry leader in promotional marketing, Powertex Group is dedicated to ensuring that we are always on the cutting edge of developing technologies. We strive to make ourselves leaders in all aspects of marketing, which is why we have such value to our promotional partners. To learn more about how these upcoming technologies can impact your promotional marketing efforts, give us a call today at (800) 588-7111. Email us at customerservice@powertexgroup.com. Visit us at: http://www.powertexgroup.com.