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.

Get more marketing punch with a full-service promotional provider:

We all know the value of a fully realized and well implemented marketing program and the value it can bring to your organization. But does your organization have the know-how and resources to implement a large scale

Licensed Promotional Goods

promotional branding campaign? How about the infrastructure to supply the promotional products to the locations you need? With a large scale promotional campaign comes many different logistics issue that may be expensive and time-consuming to solve.

That is where a promotional licensing relationship can be beneficial. By bringing in a full-scale promotional partner, you can save considerable time and money by utilizing the pre-existing infrastructure that a high-end partner brings. In addition, you can take advantage of the wealth of promotional experience that a specialized promotional company has already accumulated.

In a licensing arrangement, the promotional marketing company becomes a member of your organization and assumes a major part of the responsibility of making your branding initiatives successful. This ensures a close working relationship, and is the closest thing you can have to an extension of your own marketing department.

Experience counts. When you have a promotional partner, you automatically gain access to the full experience derived from dealing with countless other clients in countless other situations. Get invaluable advice on what works, and how to build your program. Stop throwing money around on “best guess” scenarios, and focus on proven tactics and tested models. This will not only help your organization to build its brand, but save considerable money by investing in more effective programs.

When building a promotional program, you not only need to consider what the message is, but how the program will be implemented into your pre-existing business model, and how it will be fulfilled and maintained. Implementation and proper maintenance is where a vast majority of promotions fail, as they are often the most overlooked and under-planned aspects. A proper promotional partner will have an infrastructure in place that will make it cost-effective and simple to maintain and fulfill the program.

Another thing that your promotional partner will bring to the table is a flexible range of assets and abilities to help you successfully launch your projects. From art and design, to full promotional line creation, to online technologies, to warehousing and comprehensive distribution capabilities, the extra capabilities that your partner offers

Putting it Together with Promotional Programs

will give you the proper support in areas that you need to ensure a successful program. This adds strength to your organization by giving you the proper supplement in areas where you may not be as strong or as experienced. This can add much value in that it saves you the very costly measure of having to build a separate department or add employees to compensate for your new marketing programs.

With a promotional licensing program, not only do you gain a new promotional partner, but you can gain valuable marketing experience, save time/money, and hone your marketing focus. In the branding world, the possibilities are almost endless, and it can definitely be helpful to have an experienced promotional partner in reaching your full branding potential. To learn more about the benefits of a licensing deal or gain a new partner in your promotional marketing endeavors, give us a call today at (800) 588-7111. Email us at customerservice@powertexgroup.com or visit us at: http://www.powertexgroup.com.