I just returned from attending Gaspedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago and my head is swimming with creative ideas for improving our viral marketing. The conference providing some simple, hand-on tips for developing and implementing a Word of Mouth marketing strategy in any organization. In the opening session, WOM marketing guru Andy Sernovitz broke it down into five easy steps – he called it the 5 T’s of Word of Mouth Marketing:

1)      Talkers – find people who will talk about you (ex: fans, volunteers, customers, bloggers, influencers). Hint: these aren’t always your best customers.

2)      Topics – give people a reason to talk (ex: special offer, great service, cool product, silliness, neat ad, new feature). Make sure to create something that is portable, repeatable, and emotional.

3)      Tools – help the message spread faster and farther (ex: tell-a-friend form, viral email, blogs, handouts, samples, message boards, online communities).

4)      Taking Part – join the conversation by letting your staff surf and reply to comments, post on blogs, join discussions, answer emails, and offer personal service.

5)      Tracking – measure and understand what people are saying by searching blogs, reading message boards, listening to feedback, and using advanced measurement tools.

WOM marketing really is about wowing your prospects and customers with something totally fresh and unexpected, something so remarkable that they just can’t help but tell others.

One of the most famous viral marketing campaigns ever is the BlendTec ‘Will it Blend’ marketing campaign where they created a series of videos showcasing the company blending a variety of unusual things – rakes, golf balls, phones, iPods, laser pointers, and really anything else you could think of. The campaign highlighted the power and durability of their blenders, while simultaneously entertaining its viewers. Talk about remarkable.  

So, what is unique about your company? How can you create something worth spreading, and what tools will you use to help it spread. Remember, you don’t have to nail it on your first try. Nobody knows what will work. Andy Sernovitz recommends planting 1,000 seeds – he says one of them is bound to bloom. Learn more

Nobody needs a drill. What they need is a hole. The drill is merely the means to the end.

In our business, nobody needs brochures or postcards. What they need is to grow their business by communicating more effectively with their customers and prospects.

Nobody needs what you sell. What they need is what your product or service will do for them. So if you want to sell more of your product, find out what your customers and prospects want your product or service to accomplish for them, and tailor your solution to their actual needs.

Don’t sell drills. Help your customers get the holes they want.

One of the best ways to grow your business without breaking the bank is to get free exposure for your company in the news media. Sounds great, but how do you actually get someone to publish the fawning puff piece you always wanted?

Cameron Herold, COO of a cool Canadian company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK gave a presentation on how they have been successful at getting alot of media attention, which in turn drives new customers and inquiries from potential franchisees. And they have done this without hiring an expensive agency.

He boiled the whole thing down to three points:

Know your angle.  The Sloan Brothers from Startup Nation emphasize the importance of having a well-honed “elevator pitch.”

Similarly, when trying to get a reporter interested in writing about your company, you need to have a few good “angles” that clearly explain why your company is interesting and newsworthy.

Know your targets. Find reporters (not editors) who cover your area, industry, or customers. Read a number of their previous stories to get a feel for what interests them. Reach out to them with a brief (there’s that word again) explanation of why they might be interested in your company.

Pick up the phone! A lot of people chicken-out at this stage. It is scarier than a cold call. So just do it! And do it some more. It gets easier over time.

One last tip: listen carefully when you are talking to a reporter for any signs of what they find interesting about your company. When they seem to perk up about something, expand on it, even if it is not what you think is the best thing about your company.

The reporters I have spoken with are generally bright, with a variety of interests. They are unlikely to write a glowing profile of your company the way you would. But remember, any media mention that spells your name right and does not allege criminality is a good thing.

It slays me when a presenter in a meeting or at a conference throws up PowerPoint slides full of words, then proceeds to read them to the audience. I mean, if words alone are enough to communicate your ideas, send an email.

If you use PowerPoint for sales presentations or internal communications, you’ve got to watch this brief video:  The Truth About PowerPoint

If you don’t have 3 minutes to watch the video, please remember just this one tip: don’t read your slides out loud.

At PrintingForLess.com we serve a variety of small business customers ranging from a one-person shop to companies with hundreds of employees.  Some print only a few jobs a year while some larger organizations may place many orders and may reprint the same type of pieces repeatedly with only slight changes to their art. We have found it to be more efficient for some of these larger companies to use our web-to-print solution to save them time and money. I would like to share one company’s story with you.

 One of our customers, Frank Guerrieri is the President and CEO of Preferred Care at home, a growing senior home care franchise company with 38 locations across the country. Since 1984, the company has built a reputation offering quality service at affordable prices, providing the extra care needed to maintain independence and dignity in the comfort and security of home.

 As Frank’s business grew he found was spending more and more time acting as a print coordinator rather than managing his business. Each franchisee would go through him to order marketing materials like brochures and business cards. It just wasn’t efficient to have Frank stuck in the middle of this administrative nightmare, yet he wanted to make sure he had consistency of trademarks and messaging in Preferred Care At Home’s materials.

 Our web-to print solution, or Private Print Shop, turned out to be the right solution for Frank. Frank manages the development of the content and art for his materials. Then the design templates are placed online on a Preferred Care At Home custom website where franchisees can easily choose, customize and order exactly what they need.  According to Frank, PFL “freed us up to do what we need to do; run our business and build a franchise organization.”

 We have built custom web-to-print solutions for a wide range of business from franchises to manufacturing to chains of clinics.  Their needs may be slightly different but in all cases they share the need to easily accesses, customize, and order printed material on a frequent basis in the most efficient way possible.  Besides Preferred Care At Home, we have profiled five other companies that are reaping the benefits of custom-web-to-print solutions. To read their brief success stories click here.

Okay, I’m coming clean. I have a problem – I am a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator.  While I’m not yet ready to join Procrastinators Anonymous, I am publicly attesting to the extra stress, late fees, embarrassment and remorse it has caused me over the years.  Fortunately, though, there are some areas of my life where this insidious habit has been easier to control. Personal procrastination is indeed painful, but I’ve learned that putting things off in marketing your business is a sure-fire way to go out of business.

Years back, I was at a weekend exhibition that a friend had organized in the health and wellness arena. He was so confident about the event that he borrowed more than $30,000 from credit cards and friends to put it on.  He did manage to recruit a decent amount of exhibitors and arrange a packed schedule of speakers and workshops.  What he didn’t get were attendees. About 200 hundred people showed up all weekend, for a type of event that normally draws thousands. What went wrong? He waited way too long to get his print and media advertising out.  I remember seeing his printed brochures show up the day before first day of the show. Ouch!!

He’s not alone. Nearly every day we squeeze in super-rush print jobs to help our customers out in a time pinch. Yes, I know there are a lot of factors involved in putting a printed piece together, from going back and forth with designers to getting all the content and details worked out. But more often than not, that pesky procrastination game is to blame.

Is it just poor time management or something deeper that underlies our procrastinator’s dilemma? Most of the pundits and researchers will point to psychological causes such as anxiety or fear of making mistakes, or the physiological roots of low activation in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

In defense, not all procrastination is counterproductive, like when you put off the small stuff to work on the important stuff – such an innovation, building relationships and planning for the future. That’s one of my defenses, along with my attention-deficit tendencies. The problem is, a successful life and business demand timely execution on the small stuff.

What are you putting off? Can that next print project really wait?

Working for a print company, I get to see a ton of different postcards come through our presses.  And from a direct marketer’s perspective, many of these make me cringe.  There are some critical ‘postcard marketing elements’ that need to be included to optimize your results and get a better return on your printing and postage investment.

Our service reps frequently ask for feedback on their customers’ creative – to see if I might be able to provide any suggestions to improve performance. Most of my feedback centered on three core elements that should be incorporated in most any postcard.  They are:

1. Offer
2. Call to Action
3. Response/contact information

I recently collected a random sample of 50 different postcards from our production floor.  I went through them to see how many cards had the different elements listed above.  I was shocked to find out that 74% did NOT have an Offer. Additionally, 64% did NOT have a Call to Action.  These are incredible numbers – I was amazed to see the majority of our customers are missing such critical elements to their success. 

With the next postcard your or your designer create, give a sample to an unbiased friend and have them look at it for 5 seconds (and only 5 seconds), then put it down and ask them these two questions:

1. What is the product or service being offered?
2. What is the recipient supposed to do after receiving this postcard?

Postcards are like billboards on the freeway, you have a very short window of time to communicate your message. Keep your postcards simple and uncluttered. Use the headline to effectively answer the two questions above. Be sure to include a compelling offer – and call it out graphically so it grabs attention. And tell your customers or prospects exactly what to do (call us, go online, come to our open house, etc…). And don’t hide your contact information!

If you incorporate some of these ideas in your next postcard marketing campaign, I’m confident you’ll see better results and achieve a better ROI on your marketing dollars.

Lately, this phrase has been getting tossed around more and more. A quick search gave me this definition, minus the word remarkable: “Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship …”
Hmmm. While I think this is pretty close to right, it misses one point: loyalty. Meaning, if your “sum” is pretty good, or even really good as a company, then as a customer, you are totally loyal to that company, right? Probably not.
I go to a lot of places for more or less the same thing, but there are a few select stores or sites that I go to exclusively. No where else. Ever. Why? Take the test.
The best test for all of us to really answer the question of what is a remarkable  customer experience is to look at our own day-to-day experiences.
Right now, jot down your absolute best experience at a restaurant, visit with your accountant, picking up groceries, buying new skis or a pair of shoes–anything. What was it that made it so damn remarkable? Were there any similarities between the experiences? Probably. What are they? Keep these points top of mind.
So, what is the point of this exercise? First, it is so we don’t forget that we are all customers. Secondly, is that when we experience something remarkable, when our day is made, and we leave a store or website or phone call with a sigh of relief and something really of value, that we owe it to try every chance we get in our own businesses to do the same thing.
Why? Because it is one of the few things every one of us can control. It is something we can choose to do. It is never the easiest, but it is something that can give us the most gains.
So who knows, you might just show up on someone’s “Most Remarkable Experience” list someday soon. Try to get there.

We just rolled out a major software infrastructure change here at PFL. It’s been months in the making and it allows for more competitive pricing, smoother price breaks, and easier concept-to-market implementation of new products. Aside from all the cool opportunities this initiative will provide for our frontline employees and our customers, I think the coolest thing is that the structures, programming, testing and roll-out were all done in-house!

As employees we take a lot for granted. We expect things to work and when they don’t we come down on IT and programmers like a ton of bricks without knowing one iota about how these systems work. As for the interfaces, the people who design what it should look like and how it should work are called Business Analysts her at PFL and they catch their share of grief from us as well. “What if we do this?” Why didn’t you think of that?” blah, blah, blah! Again, without one inkling of what it takes to create the systems we work with in the first place!

I’m the training manager, but when I don’t have a training class running I sit with the BAs in our Strategy Execution department and see first hand the work that goes into something like this. At times it’s creative and inspiring. More often than not, it’s tedious and frustrating work with a finish line that, at the same time, looms ever closer and never seems to come into view.

Programmers, well, they’re puzzle masters, aren’t they? These modern-day witch doctors take the storyboards, images, and concepts of BAs and turn them into number, letter, and character combinations that, like some kind of evil-ly good magic, boggle this blogger’s mind as if discovering fire for the first time. I do not question it, I just believe.

So, I’m declaring this “Thank an IT Specialist, Programmer, and Business Analyst Day.” They deserve their own holiday given the amount of grief we give them. And, I’m not sure about BAs and IT folk, but I know programmers REALLY love hugs so throw some of those in as well.

Last Friday PrintingForLess.com completed our annual highway clean-up.  As is the custom, we diligently trudged down the highway in front of our building picking up every piece of garbage that passers by chose to toss from their car windows and every plastic bag that the wind blows our way. 

Among the usual debris however, we found a few interesting items.  Some are out of the ordinary and others are just plain lucky.  Below is a list of the top 10  things found at this year’s cleanup.  Enjoy!

Top 10 Things Found at the 2009 PFL Highway Cleanup

1.  A Fedora

2. A Web Cam

3. A Pull Tab Can (That is at least 30 years old)

4. A Nest of Snakes (They were harmless)

5. 8 Golf Balls ( Someone’s been practicing their drive)

6. 4 Baby Mice

7. Boxer Shorts

8. A One Dollar Bill ( Lucky!)

9. A Five Dollar Bill ( Luckier!)

10. A Ten Dollar Bill ( Luckiest!)