Welcome back! I’m hoping the reason you’re here is that you tuned in yesterday for our discussion on direct mail marketing and catching your neighbors’ eye. If you missed out on yesterday’s post, make sure you stop by there after you’re finished here. In the meantime, here are the highlights:

1) No one really has time to get to know every business owner in town personally the way they used to.

2) Businesses are all looking for that personal connection when they’re looking for someone to do business with.

3) Direct mail marketing offers the best of both worlds; an easy, hands-off way to reach local businesses and a venue with which to express your willingness to build a personal relationship with your clients from the very beginning.

So How Do You Turn Your Average Direct Mail Postcard into a Paragon of Modern Marketing?

It’s the million dollar question-literally. Direct mail materials can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in business, but only if you know what you’re doing. With that in mind, here are a few simple tips to turn your direct mail marketing materials into million(ish) dollar money makers:

• Choose an image that your target audience is going to relate to. Using your company image on the cover might sound like a good idea, but it’s not going to inspire the same irresistible urge to flip the postcard over and sneak a peek at the back as a postcard bearing an image from their industry.

• Talk to your customers, not at them. Yes, granted, it’s not like you’re going to get a whole lot of immediate feedback from a direct mail marketing piece, but that doesn’t mean your customers need to feel like they’re trapped in a used car lot with a rabid car salesman and nowhere to run!

• Be personable while remaining professional. There seems to be a mistaken belief out there that when you create a direct mail marketing piece you have to be a cut-and-dried professional. There’s plenty of room out there for warm, friendly sales teams, so don’t let the opportunity pass you by!

• Be true to your brand. The whole point of personal service and building a relationship with your clients is to convince them that you’ve got what they want. There’s no possible way you’re going to be able to do that if your direct mail marketing pieces don’t reflect who you and your company really are!

Tags: digital printing, direct mail marketing, marketing materials, marketing to local businesses, printing

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Thanks to the power of the Internet, global commerce has become the name of the game. Local market targeting is slipping through the cracks in many small business marketing campaigns, partly because the Internet creates the option for something so much more than local commerce and partly because many businesses simply can’t get a handle on how to advertise to their community.

Welcome, my friend, to the land of direct mail marketing.

Let me ask you something (and feel free to add your thoughts and comments in the comment boxes below). In your opinion, what is it that local businesses are looking for? Are they looking for someone who’s going to give them a good price? Someone who’ll create a great product? Someone who knows what they’re talking about? The answer is…yes, yes and yes! More than any of that, however, is their genuine, undeniable desire to connect, network and build a lasting relationship with a business that’s going to treat them right.

Are you passing out the right marketing materials to reach your local business?

Look at it this way. If a business just wants a good deal on their products, they could go out on the web and get it. There are companies out there that operate in a strictly digital environment, which means their overhead is…well, next to nothing. How are you going to compete with that? You don’t. You build your business platform on something a lot more solid: Direct mailing materials that offer your clients the personal touch.

Back before the advent of the Internet, how do you think businesses introduced themselves to their neighbors? They went door to door. They spoke to the owners. They took them (and their families) out to dinner. By the time it was all said and done, all of the small businesses operating in a single community knew each other personally and not only did business together, but also willingly referred their customers back and forth to provide the highest quality of services and variety of products possible in their small town.

At the end of the day, everyone went home happy.

Now, unless you live in a town with a population of less than 200, you probably don’t have time to personally introduce yourself to every business owner in a ten mile radius. But you want them to know that you’re willing and able to bring that personal touch to each and every one of your B2B transactions. How do you do that? By creating direct mail marketing materials that say exactly what you want to say, exactly when you want to say it.

Tune in tomorrow to find out how to create B2B direct mail marketing materials designed to bring your clients the personal touch they’ve been waiting for.

Tags: direct mail marketing, local marketing, marketing, marketing to local businesses, postcard marketing

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