Making your Marketing Memorable by Making it Practical

One of the challenges of marketing in the 21st Century is making it memorable. I’ve talked about this challenge in many of my other marketing articles. Put simply, people have less time to pay attention in general, and only notice marketing that will solve their immediate problem. The big companies solve this by running advertising constantly using a ‘shotgun’ approach knowing sooner or later that one of their many ads will reach everyone. If you aren’t a big company and don’t have that sort of money to spend, how do make sure that people notice your marketing when they need it? The answer is pretty simple.

The simple solution to making sure that your marketing is going to be there when they are receptive to it, and you do that by giving people a good reason to hold on to it. We have talked about it before, using such things as rewards incentives for holding to advertising flyers. I would like to present another low cost method that will help keep your marketing in front of your existing and future customers: by giving it a practical use. This is a different to the idea of using branded ‘feelies’ like pens or post-it-notes. You want to give customers items that they use on a regular basis so your business and what it does pops up in front of their eyes.

These can be as small as todo list pad you can put on your fridge to the big A1 wall planners. As simple a business card with a reference guide on the back to a calendar that talks about different products and services each month. The trick is to make it something that people can use that also ties in to your normal marketing process. Let me illustrate with a few of examples:

• One client sells liquid concentrates. They modified their business cards to a folded version with a dilution chart on the inside. Customers will keep it to hand to make the job easy and remind them where the concentrates came from.
• Needing to have a low cost gift to give to clients, we created for another client a DL sized 1 year fridge calendar. We were able to not only mark all the important dates on it but it still had room for a full size business card at the top.
• Selling equipment, how convenient would be to have a service chart attached to an out of the way part of it allow customers to keep a log of how much uses it has had and when it needs its next service.
• If you have products that come in a range of sizes, why not supply a sizing chart with your details all over it. The customer will hold on to it to make their lives easier and think positively about you for doing that.

Of course these are just a few simple ideas. What you give out depends on your business, your budget, and how you want to connect with your customers. Don’t be afraid to try out oddball ideas because here at Copy Express we can produce them in small, low cost runs that won’t hurt the budget and lets you refine your ideas.