Designing Your Business Communication
Quick! It’s time to order your Christmas or holiday cards! Sending out Christmas or holiday cards to your business partners, clients, or customers should be a priority in the month of December. Don’t wait til the last minute and get stuck picking up flimsy cards from your local dollar store. Why Cards? Holiday cards are a tradition in business. They…
Designing Your Business Communication
The holidays are the perfect time to express gratitude to customers, peers, vendors and anyone else who’s helped you reach your business goals throughout the year. Whether you have a list of 5 or 5,000, Christmas cards are an easy, inexpensive way to say “thanks” and to stay top-of-mind in the coming year. While it seems that everyone sends holiday…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Remember how excited you were last time you received a handwritten card in the mail? Bring that same joy to your customers and partners this Christmas. To your Customers: If your small business is growing in leaps and bounds, and you simply have too many customers in your database to address that many envelopes, wow them with a special customer…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
When you do something well, you want to do it again and again and again. This holiday season, draw on your most successful past holiday promotions for inspiration. Sometimes the wackiest ideas — like hosting a silly photo contest online or having an open house at the business with a carnival theme — are worth repeating. Bring it Back Start…
Designing Your Business Communication
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you’re a small business. Look to what both you and your competitors did last holiday season to drive sales when planning this year’s holiday promotion. Ask yourself: What worked well for your company? What worked well for the competition? What mistakes were made? Take time to analyze the successes or failures from…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Big or small, every business should get in on the holiday spirit. Has your company thought of a holiday promotion yet? These seasonal offers and contests are great ways to entice new customers to try your product or service, and to bring past customers back to your front door. Not sure what type of promotion to host? Here’s a few…
Designing Your Business Communication
You probably already know how important your logo is in regards to identifying your business. However, you might not realize the importance of the colors you choose to use on your logo. In fact, according to recent surveys, around 85 percent of consumers claim color–of logo or box– is a factored reason they purchase a product, and 80 percent of…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Given the chance, most employees would jump at the opportunity to work from the comfort of home. More flexibility? No rush hour traffic? Trading in heels for yoga pants? Heaven! In addition, many studies show that home-based employees are happier and more productive. However, some companies are understandably still hesitant to offer this benefit because the arrangement isn’t without challenges….
Marketing is invaluable in reaching a target audience and generating positive word of mouth. In addition to traditional offline paper marketing materials like business cards and flyers, businesses should be covered in the virtual world as well. Here are eight key things every business should know about online marketing: 1. Websites are wonderful Foundational to your online marketing campaign is your website….
Autumn is just around the corner and with it comes crisp days, falling leaves and of course, Halloween! As a pumpkin patch owner, your marketing window is short. Start advertising too soon and customers might forget by the time they’re ready to buy. Advertise too late and they may visit a competitor. Plus, like most small business owners, your hands…
Designing Your Business Communication
Taglines and slogans can be essential to creating buzz around your business. Everyone knows Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan. And of course, even after decades, most people can name the brand associated with “Where’s the Beef?” But coming up with even the most simple tagline can be a lot of work. Luckily, there are automated online tagline/slogan generators that can…
In the past, when large businesses competed head-to-head with smaller ones, the winner was the larger businesses. However, today, thanks to many small businesses online presence, they are no longer being left in the dust by big corporations. Read below to learn how small businesses can compete online today: Be Entertaining: Consumers are more frequently surfing the web for no…
Designing Your Business Communication
LinkedIn has become a valuable tool in the business world. In fact, according to LinkedIn data, the platform is especially helpful when landing higher-paying jobs. Unfortunately, if you commit certain faux pas on your LinkedIn profile, you can come across as unprofessional and in turn miss out of potential career opportunities. Therefore, to help you avoid these pitfalls, PaperDirect, which…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Starting a new job can be overwhelming. Empower your female work force from day one by making it easy for new hires to assimilate into your company. A few techniques that are especially helpful for women who are new on the job: Make It Easy to Get to Know Everyone When your new employee first arrives, give her a tour…
Whether you are just starting out on your career path, or you have been climbing the ladder for years, it’s never too late to refresh yourself on the best business etiquette techniques. When you follow the proper protocol, you will be noticed by your employers as an exemplary employee and your fellow co-workers will admire your professionalism in the workplace….
The cliche about not giving up your day job often turns out to be solid advice for business ventures that net little or no profit. Unfortunately, juggling a traditional 9-to-5 gig with a side business can be incredibly difficult, particularly if your schedule is also swamped with school, family and social obligations. There’s no need to give up your dream…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Your company may have the potential to help a lot of other businesses, but you’re not likely to effectively reach them unless you zero in on your target market. You can do this with some helpful tips that make it easy to reach the companies you can benefit most. Figure Out Who They Are You can’t very well target if…
Designing Your Business Communication
When you are launching a new business or creating a fresh identity for a current organization, you will want to take the time to create a branding strategy that will work for your company. Once you have created your new brand, you will want to present it to the world — but you have to feel completely confident in the…
While performing market research has gotten pretty “high tech” in recent times, with algorithms and analytics bringing business intelligence over mobile devices, there’s something to be said for getting back to basics. Some of the best ideas to perform market research are those tried-and-true classic methods that get you down “in the trenches” with customers; they can also be implemented…
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
Christmas, Halloween and Easter can all be promotional gold mines, but when the standard holidays are far away, it never hurts to come up with a few new and unusual holiday marketing prospects. Instead of sticking with your tired holiday celebrations, why not take a more original approach and incorporate a few unusual holidays into your marketing effort? Take a…