Print Blog: Communicate, Motivate, Educate, Enhance, Celebrate, Animate, and Promote with Print and Promotional Products

With California's recent passage of a ban on plastic bags, the trends are pointing towards disposable plastic bags going away, quickly. More cities and counties are banning their usage. While California is the first full state to enact such a ban, it seems likely more will follow.

If you’re the marketing director for a company with multiple locations one of the biggest headaches you face is enforcing corporate identity and brand standards throughout your network of offices.

Invariably individual offices tend to do their own thing when it comes to marketing and collateral material. People in field offices often don’t know where to buy certain collateral, or the appropriate corporate identity standards for simple day to day items like business cards, envelopes, promotional products or product flyers. Everything is last minute in today’s fast paced world, when an office needs something they need it quick and end up going to the closest local source.

Thanks to the first-ever survey of advertising specialists directly concerning their use of promotional merchandise, the results are in – and they show that branded promotional merchandise is a highly effective marketing strategy in several ways!

Driving title insurance sales is a difficult business, because you so rarely deal directly with property buyers. While it can happen, most of your sales are ultimately "secondhand." You get title insurance sales when your partner realtors make property sales.

In business, image means more than we sometimes like to admit.   We all like to brag about our accomplishments, but those take time and energy to convey to a potential lead.  When buyers today are being assaulted by more marketing messages than ever before, they don't always stop to carefully consider your offers.

A lot of the time, buyers are making extremely quick judgments about your company based solely on external appearances.  They have to be impressed by your business's looks before they'll start to investigate its substance.

One of the best aspects of branded promotional products is how they can continue to drive sales long after the first sale. Unlike most advertising, which is transient, a good promotional item can live on in someone's desk for months, or even years, providing ongoing messaging and impressions.

Title insurance sales is a tricky industry because your "leads" are rarely the end users - they're the real estate companies in between you and property-buyers.   If you want to see insurance sales, you get them through your affiliated estate agents.

Luckily, promotional products can be one of your best tools for building bridges between yourself and your partners.  Largely, this is because good promotional items can accomplish multiple goals at once.  They can:

• Establish you as an authority in the field
• Solve a problem in the agent's life
• Increase brand impressions
• Get people talking about your services
• Convey useful -or vital- information the agent needs
• Bring a bit of fun into an agent's life

"Engagement" has been one of the big watchwords in marketing lately, and for good reason. Today, it's no longer enough to simply have a brand that's widely-seen and well-known. When people are being bombarded with hundreds of marketing impressions a day, it takes more than that to create sales.

How would you like a sales team that promoted your product, your service, your entire company at all hours of the day and night, targeting people who are most likely to become actual customers and extolling your company’s virtues – all without drawing a salary, medical benefits or other costly perks? Sound too good to be true? Not so – that’s what happens every time a customer tells someone else about what a great experience they had with your company and how much they love your product, and recommends they use it too.

When you give a promotional item to a client, you're tossing a metaphoric bottle into the oceans. You'll never know what happened to that item after it leaves your sight; you can only hope that it successfully leads them to one day call your firm for help.