Post office lowers rates for direct mailings

Every business will benefit by a constant presence before current and prospective customers. Recognizing that out of sight is out of mind, you need a drip, drip, drip of communications to provide arguments why folks should buy from you.

This rule applies whether you’re a retailer or a service provider. From banks to window washers to craft stores, the key to increasing sales is increasing your marketing.

Many businesses like the convenience of electronic newsletters. Others prefer direct mail. Which brings us to your question.

Depending on what you’re mailing, postage can be a significant portion of your campaign’s budget. Here are a few thoughts:

• Mail fewer pieces, bringing down postage, printing and handling.

• Cut the number of pieces in your package. That brochure you’re including might be pushing your weight up an ounce.

• Print on thinner paper, lowering weight without needing to redesign your brochure, sales letter, etc.

• Use postcards. A 4” x 6” card effectively sends a quick message while lowering 1-ounce mailing rates from 44 cents to 29 cents.

Now today’s news: With the impending hike in first class rates and the ballyhoo about the potential failure of the Postal Service, the USPS has created a program that delivers mail for just 14 cents each.

Whoa!

Called “Every Door Direct Mail,” the post office lets you hit every mailbox on any block in the country without a specific mailing list.

Which means if you’re looking to get fliers or samples into every home within a radius of two miles…or 200…it’s easier than ever to do.

EDDM lets you send up to 5,000 large mailers per post office per day. They have guidelines you need to follow, of course, but you’d expect that. It’s the post office, for heaven’s sake!

But given the odds that you’ll want to send out a package like the Publisher’s Clearinghouse uses (slim), the flexibility this setup gives you (lots), and the ability to reach huge numbers of sales prospects in your immediate neighborhood, it certainly seems to be worth a look.

More info is available at uspseverydoor.com.

With that said, I wish you a week of profitable marketing.

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Avitus Digital Dialog

 

11 useful tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn

With over 135 million users, 59% of which are located outside of the United States and with 75 of the Fortune 100 companies using the network for marketing and recruiting purposes, LinkedIn has become a critical platform for building, connecting with, and growing your personal and professional networks.

As the leading business social network, LinkedIn offers the chance to connect with professionals all around the world and from all industry backgrounds. But how do you convert networks into customers, and ‘likes’ into sales?

1. Learn from your peers

Successful marketing is all about listening to what your market needs. The LinkedIn Groups feature provides a space where you can discuss issues with others in your industry and learn from their advice. You can bounce ideas off industry experts and stay informed on new developments. You also have an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in a certain industry/area allowing you to build relationships with current and prospective customers in a more organic and credible fashion.

2. Build on your niche

It doesn’t matter how specific your company’s product or service, LinkedIn allows you to connect with companies or individuals by industry, company size, geographic location, and more. By targeting your network-building, you are able to focus your time on building relationships that count.

3. Use Company Status Updates

You can post the latest news, product updates, videos and promotions on yourCompany Profile and instantly learn how it is being received with likes, comments and shares. Just like with any community, make sure your content strategy is relevant, adds value and promotes discussion. Use feedback to adjust your posting frequency or alter your content based on what is popular or what is missing.

4. Ask your audience

LinkedIn provides a channel to your audience, but communication doesn’t have to be one-way. You can use your Company Profile to ask customers what they think, and engage with issues they might face. Asking for feedback can provide a wealth of market information from your core audience. If your Company Profile is too limiting, consider setting up a group or groups that meet a particular need among your audience.

You can also use LinkedIn’s polling feature. LinkedIn Polls is just like any other polling service: everyone can ask any query, include possible answers (as much as five) as well as select how much time it’s going to run. There is an ability to share content out via your social networks or upload it on your website to acquire the highest possible voting power. Analytics data is what’s valuable here: you can break down voters by age, gender and even seniority.

5. Use LinkedIn Ads

If used correctly, LinkedIn Ads can offer a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising. Because of the number of LinkedIn accounts (135 million worldwide), each with detailed profile information, LinkedIn Ads can specifically target your demographic by industry, geographic location, seniority, age, or by LinkedIn Group in a way few other channels can.

6. LinkedIn Recommendations: Give Generously

Your LinkedIn profile might look great, and you may have hundreds of connections, but in a crowded market what is going to make your company stand out? How will potential clients and customers know to choose you above your competition? The answer goes back to one of the basics of marketing: a positive recommendation by others is worth a hundred times what you will ever say about yourself. The secret to attracting great LinkedIn recommendations is to offer them yourself. Businesses, whether suppliers, clients or partners, are far more likely to give you a positive recommendation if you offer one first.

7. LinkedIn SEO

When people search for your industry or product, how are you going to come out on top? Just following the basics, such as making sure your profile is complete and accurate can help, but spending a bit of time over the keywords in the Specialties section is also important for driving traffic. You can also customize your URL to give your company’s name rather than a sequence of numbers, which can help search engines to find you.

8. Enrich your profile with LinkedIn applications

You’ve driven traffic to your LinkedIn page with targeted ads, great networking, and an informative profile, but what now? You’ve got so much more great information that will benefit your customers, but how are you going to tell them about it?LinkedIn apps can help, giving you the ability to add your blog to your profile, upload presentations, add polls and your Amazon reading list, collaborate with document sharing, and many other ways of enriching your profile to help it stand out and offer new ways to engage.

9. Meet like-minded people at industry events

The LinkedIn events tool is a great way to easily search for relevant events (physical events, webinars, workshops, roundtables, etc) where you can meet your peers. LinkedIn search will display events related to your network connections as well as industry and geographic location, both past and present. Utilize this feature to extend your network face-to-face.

10. Integrate your LinkedIn presence into your other properties

Prominently display “Follow Us on LinkedIn” button on your other social properties to help grow your network.

You can also add “LinkedIn Share” button to your other properties to make it easy for people to share your content and help it travel father.

The “Recommend” button can be prominently displayed on your website to give visitors to website a little bit of a nudge to recommend you on LinkedIn. The recommend comes in two formats: one for the company page itself and also one for the products and services page.

11. Measure your success

Make sure to track your performance as you go and make changes to your strategy based on that data.
On your Company Page’s Analytics tab, you can now see how many LinkedIn members are visiting your Company Page and how many of them are following your company. You can also see what industries, functions and companies these professionals come from as well as track how they are interacting with your Careers Tab or Products and Services Tab, how many are clicking on your promotional banners, and how many choose to contact employees at your company. And for every one of these data slices, you can compare yourself against similar companies to benchmark your performance.

Just recently LinkedIn also launched a brand new Group Statistics dashboard that delivers unique insights into groups: demographics, growth, and activity.

LinkedIn can seem daunting at first. If you think of your social media marketing as an extension of your traditional marketing, you can start to think of ways to integrate your standard practices into your LinkedIn networking. You don’t have to start from scratch; much of your marketing media, from videos to presentations and documents, can be shared through your profile and used to reach new, targeted audiences, especially those you may have trouble reaching through traditional marketing methods.

The 8 Best Types of Video Promotion for Small Business

Video marketing strategies

There are countless ways to use video for business, varying from sophisticated, high-priced ad campaign commercials to complex landing page productions devised to pull someone into a purchase. What are the greatest types of video for Small Business owners that can be produced cost-effectively and published rapidly and create leads? Here are the Elite Eight.

Intro Advert

Well-known and regularly underused, the video Intro to the Business is a short, 5 minute or less (2-3 works well) homepage introduction that tells who you are, what you do and why customers should care. This can be done using a description in a commercial replete with lots of movement shots of the shop floor, the office, and merchandise; a talking head of the CEO to a blank camera; or use the 3rd party opinion of a genuine Video interview (see below) Business FAQ.

Production fees can vary from FREE (CEO talking into a webcam) through a few hundred bucks to thousands for a videographer shot commercial. Google doesn’t care; either will index well given the suitable keyword tags. The question you have to answer is, what is going to be instantly informational, entertaining, and referable (as in Re-tweeted).

Product Description

Specific to demonstrable merchandise, especially ones that move, like machines, toys, electronic devices, and, considering the medium, software. These again shouldn’t go on too long but can be longer than an introductory commercial. A software-based demo may take up to 8 minutes, but you should be able to say it in less time than that. When it comes to demos, in some cases less is more. Most often either a narrative led demo showing strictly merchandise or a spokesperson paced demo (think QVC or Home Shopping Channel) works the best. Just make sure to show the greatest features of your product and lay out consistently (3x) how this addresses an issue for your customers.

Professional Abilities

This is very similar to a product demo and works best for suppliers, especially those in developed countries, trying to demonstrate their remarkable technology will actually cost less money or provide better quality merchandise for a customer engaging them with an arrangement for recurring services. Machine shops and laser houses prefer this stuff, showing programmed machinery cutting steel while a guy with a hardhat and safety goggles oversees the process. This can run 5-10 minutes max. The key here is, make sure that your ability really is something memorable and that your video captures its uniqueness.

Company Spotlights

This is more of a tug on the heartstrings video that features either what your company has achieved that is significant or what your staff members have done for your company. If it’s about the company, it MUST be validated by 3rd party reference, as in an award won from a prestigious registrar (Best in Class, Malcolm Baldridge quality), a status acquired (ISO 9001 certification, etc.) or a cat saved from a tree on the news.

When discussing employees, the old Employee of the Month style headline adds a nice human element and speaks to what your company values in its people, and that can make a big difference to prospects with the same value system. For these kinds of videos, keep them short (2-4 minutes) and keep them current, especially for the employee notoriety videos. An Employee of the Month surmises that next month, we’ll see another.

Video Landing Page Combo

I could write pages on this one and frankly, I’m not a professional at it, but I am sure you’ve experienced pages that have these videos. These are designed to be hands-free on the part of the seller of a product or service, meaning, don’t call me, take the steps explained on the video. That means enter your email address to get something for FREE for agreement to advertise to you, or register for the thing (whatever it is) right now!

Just like text-only sales landing pages, these are long-form videos, with Squeeze Pages (get the email address) videos stretching from 3-7 minutes, and Sales Pages running all the way up to 30 minutes (that is too long in my opinion, with 10-12 being sufficient). The crucial stuff here: limit options to only this with no other on-page interruptions and make multiple calls to action to the prospect.

Vlogs

All about providing information this one is. It comes in the form of an instruction video, which is conveniently done for things like software applications using screen capture software, or talking head telling something she knows, and typically is the Expert Interview (I’ve done a ton of these in my blog, see sample). The goal is expert placement for your company while providing real value for the view. These videos can run from 5-30 minutes or longer (think of a book author interview), but I like to keep them between 7 and 15 minutes (YouTube has a 15 minute max until you are a recurring video poster). Tickets to success are to limit the subject matter to avoid rambling, don’t provide fluff with a sales pitch to get more, and add some written text fore and aft of the video to set it up and recap.

Testimonies and Personal Examples

Very self-explanatory here, this is 3rd party Reliability Building 101. Take the same things that marketers value about written examples and reviews and put them on steroids. This positively MUST be a person outside the company outlining what the company did for him or her, and it can NOT be anonymous (just like those outrageous made up references you see, “JL from Tampa says …”). Use foresight if the person doing the talking is not good on camera. It shouldn’t matter but it does. He doesn’t need to be Ben Affleck, but he can’t be a stiff either. These run no more than 3 minutes in length and follow my rules for great reviews.

Quality can’t be weak, but a webcam with acceptable quality can be used effectively, as the content of the person’s reference is the crucial piece.

Interviews

Video interviews work well for any business that wants to put a human face on its product, so take into account if that is you. They work exceptionally well when your business has these three qualities:

1. No physical merchandise– That’s right consultants, lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, IT people and anyone else offering professional services, I’m looking at you. You sell intellectual property and that is difficult to show by showing a video shot of your report (although you can show results charts, but the people who can use this tactic the most, financial advisors, usually have rules preventing it).
2. Trust is the key to business– Same group, right? If you’re an attorney, how can you start to break the trust hurdle down without ever getting to know someone? Show some face time with the 3rd party legitimacy that comes from being interviewed.
3. Sameness in Brand– If you look at your rivals’ websites and they look like yours does– competent yet non-distinguishable– you’re a good candidate for a video interview to set yourself apart. Again, this is why professional service companies fall so perfectly into video interview prospects.

For advertising purposes the longest video interview should run about 12 minutes. That’s pretty in-depth. The shortest you can reasonably do with any bona fide dialog is about 2-3 minutes.

The vital success factors here are that the interviewer is good and that the framework of the content is planned beforehand. A faltering interviewer will lead to an unpersuasive interview and fragile video. A sound interviewer with planned content will lead to genuine questions that represent you in the very best light.