The Promo Coach

Finally the day arrives when you open the doors of your neighborhood fitness center. You’re ready for the customers to pour in and mount those treadmills and stationary bikes, and to start using those workout machines. However, soon reality will hit; there are bills to pay like rent, electricity, insurance, maintenance, accounting fees and employee salaries. Fitness is no different then any other business. You need to maintain membership, grow the numbers and prosper. Marketing can play an important role in this goal. Most neighborhood gyms have a few hundred paid members so retention of memberships is quite crucial.

One strategy to seriously consider is offering a gift for members to renew. The most common enticement is a discount upon renewal, and people love to save money, especially with the renewed trend towards frugality. However, this represents a fixed amount of lost revenue where the value is non-negotiable. Using personal business gifts allows you to control the amount of revenue expended without necessarily revealing the amount.

You can e-mail members whose contracts are soon to be up and offer a free gift if they renew now. Videos are a sound choice for business gifts. There are fitness, aerobics, diet, and dance videos ranging in price but fairly inexpensive. Make up a little gift bag and put in a video of speed jump rope and some nice athletic socks, which altogether won’t cost too much. Portable fat analyzers are now available as well at an affordable price. This might be a touchy subject so you want to be careful with this item. Try and have your gym logo and phone number imprinted on these gifts.

Even though you may be a small local gym, think like a big business and show your members you appreciate their business and you’re not afraid to give a little back. A good promotion will have you muscling your way to bigger profits!

Using the services of promotional gift suppliers to stretch your advertising budget can be a smart choice! One of the most important tasks facing Marketing and Advertising departments in companies today is getting their brand, company name, and logo out there in the market place - and targeting the correct market for their product. Company advertising budgets can be wasted if the wrong target market is reached, or if their brand is advertised at the wrong time or in the wrong place.

Consider taking advantage of the expertise and experience offered by promotional gift suppliers who specialize in this particular type of marketing. A good supplier will sit down with you and brainstorm, in order to ascertain which of their products will meet your specific needs most effectively. Promotional gift suppliers know how important this phase of your advertising campaign is. Proper planning helps ensure appropriate gifts are used to the maximum benefit of your organization.

Your plan for promotional items may have more than one goal. Some items may be aimed at prospective clients while others may be aimed at current users or regular buyers of your product. You may need a specific item for an event - a sponsored golf day, for instance, will call for golf umbrellas, peak caps, or a selection of the myriad of golfing accessories - all branded with your name. If the gift suppliers know the market, these items will be tastefully printed with your company name or logo, to gain maximum exposure for your brand. Remember, sometimes a promotional item that looks too ‘busy’ will lose the efficacy of the message you are trying to get across.

It is also essential to select useful items to give to your current or potential customers. Making the item something that they will have a consistent use for is the perfect way to ensure that your name is out there in front of them at all times. At the end of the day, remember that selecting your promotional gift suppliers is just as important as selecting the products that they are promoting, which will in turn promote your company!

Trade shows are one of the most powerful marketing tools available. Every category of manufactured goods have trade shows, also most professional organizations from medicine, pharmaceuticals and engineering employ this venue to publicize new products and services. This is a venue where it pays to get everything right.

Book hour shows well in advance and work close with the event organizer. Make sure your booth will be ready and reliable shipping has been arranged. Have travel arrangements booked along with accommodations for your people. Plan a press release and high tech marketing aids, typically videos on large flat screens with surround-sound will get extra attendance.

Offer some attractions such as meeting the CEO, having a drawing for a door prize, or if budget allows offering a hospitality suite where you can get some one-on-one personal face to face time for a select group of important targeted customers.

Everyone attending will expect some promotional gifts; this is worth some extra attention. Find an item that won’t end up in the trash. Find something that will stay with a customer and keep your logo in front of them. Baseball caps with your logo have proven longevity after the show. Umbrellas are also a lasting giveaway. In the novelty area, light liquid activated shot and drinking glasses are an attention grabber. As soon as liquid is poured into the glass a blinking fading multicolor display appears.

Everyone uses computers so let your booth give away USB flash drives or at a lower price point, give out some screen dusters; these will probably be kept and used. There are custom imprinted mouse pads and USB flexi-lights that can light up your keyboard when you are flying at night. They are powered through the USB port and contain several LED lights that can illuminate a laptop keyboard. Whatever gifts you choose, remember to plan early, organize and promote, promote, promote.

When it comes to hiring new talent for your team, there are several ways to go. You can hire someone and hope that they fit in well, you can make them feel welcome with personal attention and possibly even a small gift to welcome them to the team, or you can leave the orienting to them and hope for the best.

When these options are presented, you can bet that most new hires are looking for a warm welcome and hoping for an environment in which they feel comfortable, and while an expensive gift for every new hire is out of the question, something thoughtful as a ‘welcome aboard’ might be just the thing to build a reputation for your company as an attractive place to work, allowing you to find the right new hires and the best talent in the future.

If you are leaning toward the warm welcome by now, then you should consider gathering a cache of small corporate gifts for your new hires. Handing out a gift when they have finished their hire paperwork is a great way to say “welcome to the team” and to truly make them feel like they are already valued members of your company.

Corporate gifts are not just a great inspiration for your new hires, they are also relatively inexpensive, and a great way to generate that kind of instant loyalty to your team without spending a fortune. The gifts can be as simple as a watch or a picture frame, and can be bought in bulk from promotional product companies for a great bargain. They also tend to look nice, making them valued as a gift.

Your new hires will be glad of your generosity and glad to get down to business with your nicely presented welcome gift in hand as soon as they are ready to settle in to the office. Show them to their new desk, thank them for joining your team, invite them to talk with you about any problems, and hand them a gift to welcome them to the office. It is a perfect combination.

As your business grows and the quality of your marketing becomes increasingly important to your continued expansion, you will inevitably ask yourself how best to organize your marketing functions. Given that marketing spend is often the second largest variable expense after suppliers, the importance of this question cannot be overestimated. When buying a promotional gift, the first thing to consider is what your business’s major challenge is. Are you distinguishing yourself from the competition? Extending your brand into other markets? Increasing customers’ lifetime value? Lowering the cost of customer acquisition?

What should you look for when choosing a company to supply your corporate gifts? There are many of the same considerations as when we choose any company to supply an organization with goods and services. But here are a few tips to help you make the right decision!

Contact them before your order. New business is the lifeblood of any company, and if the speed of response is poor, imagine what it will be like once you’ve placed your order. Check out the client list and testimonials – check the website for testimonials; if there aren’t any it doesn’t mean you won’t get good service, but if they are there it should give you a degree of confidence. Find out their track record. How much experience in supplying promotional products and business gifts do they have?

Is stock held on site? If not it could mean problems down the line. What about branding – is it done on site or subcontracted? Again sub-contracting such an integral part of the service means the company is not in total control. Look into accreditation and determine if they have received any prominent awards. Remember, when you use gifts to communicate with your customers your brand reputation is on the line. So choose the right vendor to make sure your promotion runs smoothly, on time, and within budget.

The best managed companies and organizations keep staff morale high during economic downturns by capturing hearts and minds. There are several core measures that can be taken or implemented to assist companies in achieving a motivational nirvana and uplifting spirits. Communicating direction is so important and is always a good starting point. Provide clarity of strategy – use good communication to make sure your staff know where they’re going and give them the confidence that the leadership in the company are in place. Feedback on progress, efforts, and successes regarding goals and direction are also a crucial piece of the puzzle, otherwise you’re only working out half the equation.

Businesses need to instill trust and confidence in their most committed and best focused employees since these are the ones who will also provide and promote confidence for other employees. Address key concerns; communicate to each individual what’s expected of them, how they should behave, and what they need to achieve. Be sure to put staff in positions suited to their particular skills and ambitions. You will want to give them time and support to succeed for better results and higher productivity.

Act quickly, because inactivity creates a vacuum that can leave your staff worried and unfortunately free to draw their own (and often incorrect) conclusions. Keep investing in research and development if possible. Innovation is even more important in a major credit crunch than during other tough situations. Reward positive behavior – it’s important that when staff perform and are adding value to the organization, that this is recognized and communicated throughout the company. This will reinforce good practice and motivate other staff. Introduce a reward or motivation scheme, or recognize staff with individual awards. Online vendors supply single engraved items, awards and plaques for recognition or general promotional gifts for schemes or programs.

Even as brick and mortar retailing is being challenged by online vendors, an old retail concept is making a strong comeback. Consumers are turning to vending machines for low cost convenience items in a big way. Think about those video vending machines. You can rent a new release for just a buck. They even allow you to go online and reserve your video. This is done by giving your email address when you make a purchase at the machine. The vendor then collects an entire valuable list of email addresses for all its customers. Talk about a hot mailing list! The vending interface instantly creates a list of qualified customers to target.

Using the high tech vending machines opens up additional marketing opportunities. For example, let’s say your machine sells tooth paste, tooth brushes, and other drug store type merchandise. After you capture the person’s email address, send them a promotion via email. If you were vending best seller novels, you could offer a discount for books or merchandise from bookstores or individual Amazon book sellers. Promotional products don’t only have to be offered through email. Some vendors are actually packing coupons right with the merchandise so when your item drops out through the machine’s opening, there is an immediate reward. Vending manufacturers who sell children’s items are designing an area of the machine that kicks out an inexpensive trinket whenever a purchase is made. This really delights the children who get an immediate free gift.

Make sure you display your web address prominently and clearly on the machines so customers can go online and find where you have other machines located and get more information and details. When you add new locations or lines of merchandise, email your distribution list and update your customers on what’s new. Remember - vending machines can be a wonderful venue for selling and promoting products.

While advertising can bring customers to a store, it can also work from within your store. Today many retailers realize how important in-store advertising can be to their bottom lines. Television advertising is a huge billion dollar industry and in-store advertising accounts for a big portion of advertising dollars as well. However much less is spent on in-store advertising. This doesn’t mean that retailers prefer advertising on television, but it does mean that you can spend a lot less money advertising in your store. Moreover, you’ll find that it can be highly effective!

A common strategy among retailers is to first implement sufficient (though not high-budget) marketing and advertising in order to draw people to their place of business and then to advertise and promote heavily inside of their business. People typically come into a retail establishment with one or a few key items in mind; the goal is to entice these shoppers to buy more with well-planned advertising and marketing within the store.

In-store advertising can trigger recall. The human memory is far more likely to recall an item upon seeing it again and in-store advertising can help trigger such recall. You can also introduce new products; unfamiliar products may not draw people to a store, but within the store such products can attract attention through their look, feel, or smell.
Promote sale items - while a “one day only” newspaper ad can draw people to your store, in-store sales place those lower prices in front of your customer and encourage additional (and even impulse) purchases.

Provide more information; whether you use a plasma screen or simple signs to highlight your featured merchandise, you should communicate the information to your customers that will convince them to make smart purchases. Of course, in-store advertising is most effective with a strategy. So determine first where to place racks, cubes, platforms, mannequins, and especially your well-designed signs in order to best display your merchandise. High-traffic areas, like doorways, cash registers, and fitting rooms, should be your priority placement locations.

Hand out promotional products in your store that are useful and will remind people of the good deals and positive shopping experience. Keep your customers coming back for more and keep your brand in their minds!

Product placements in film and television are a way to put your product in front of a large audience. In fact, the rare high impact placement, such as Reese’s Pieces in the movie E.T., can catapult sales. Even more mundane placements, that are not at all integral to the storyline, can help promote your product or your brand.

Such placements used to be reserved for large national companies, but as numerous cable channels and independent film companies emerge, small businesses can also benefit from placement deals. This is just another method and venue to use promotional products to your advantage.

There are several ways to go about placement. For example, you can try a placement agency. Before signing with such an agency, however, make sure research and find out about the agency’s reputation and track record. Try to learn more about how many other products they are trying to place, particularly competitive brands.

Alternatively, you can try placing your product yourself. Very often, barter deals are struck where you provide the cast and crew with your product to eat, wear, carry, or use in some manner; and they provide a product placement. In other cases, it’s a cash deal, not unlike advertising, but somewhat less expensive. While advertising tends to mean running a commercial frequently, placing a product is usually a one-shot deal that airs repeatedly at no extra cost to you. However, you do run the risk that your product ends up in a movie that bombs!

You can always look for films shooting in your area and offer a barter deal. Independent film companies are easier to reach and may be less besieged with products. Also watch television programs and focus on the set design. Look for places where your product could fit in. Send your product periodically to set designers and look for online film and television resources. Try to make barter deals with local production companies for their next project. Network and get to know directors, producers, and local talent. There are quite a few approaches you can go with so get out there and start promoting!

A corporation purchases corporate gifts for many reasons. The kind of gift that’s bought broadly depends on the occasion. The gift may be a simple keepsake or a special present that indicates an honest deal of gratitude and appreciation. These gifts range from small keepsakes, such as business pens with the company logo, personalized calendar book, shirts, jackets, and tote bags to fancy elegant items like gold or diamond watches with engraved initials. The more elaborate the occasion, the more elaborate the gifts are as well.

One of the most popular events where gifts are given is when someone in the company is retiring. For many companies, this means the giving of a gold or diamond watch with the retiree’s initials engraved on the back. The company may also give presents to reward employees for long years of service. In these instances, gifts that are typically given include personalized watches, desk set accessories, plaques, or trophies. Such gifts are also often combined when someone retires with a great deal of service time or if he or she is part of upper level management.

A company may also present a service award at any time throughout an employee’s career within the company. Many times, such employees are given a brochure or a list of gifts from which he or she can choose from, depending on the service time that was rendered. Apart from usual gifts, companies may also give a certificate with the gift, or a gift card may be given instead. This card will allow the employee to choose from a variety of gifts or other merchandise that the company has chosen. For other companies, the first few years of service of an employee provide little more than a personalized business pen or tote bag with the company’s logo on it. But when he or she remains longer in the company and proves loyal to the organization, the more upscale the gifts become.

Corporate gifts are easily found on the Internet with many varieties of items to choose from. A lot of companies are rewarding their retiring employees with personalized business items. A corporate retirement gift or recognition gift can really mean so much and is a perfect way to say goodbye and thank you!