Make your marketing matter - self-promotion

Is your networking working? Is your advertising enticing? Is your Web presence present? We are in a marketing business. You as a promotional products distributor get involved with your clients' marketing objectives every day, but what are you doing to market your own business?

There is an infinite amount of ways to promote your business, directly and indirectly. Doing a great job for one customer can lead to word-of-mouth referrals. Being involved in local civic groups and clubs is a networking stalwart. Targeted advertising is a proven way to get your name in front of potential customers. Are your competitors' Yellow Pages ads more compelling than yours?

Having existing customers sign up to receive e-mail alerts for occasional specials you run can generate extra sales while keeping your name in front of them.

Something as subtle as a questionnaire asking clients what they like and don't like about your company can help you fix your biggest problems first while solidifying current relationships. It can also give you ideas on how to attract more customers like the ones you already have.

Sending out press releases to the local media is a good way to get your name out in the community. Any time you hire some one new, move to a new location, win an award, donate product to a charity event, or are involved in a newsworthy project, let your tie know about it. Just make sure it isn't just fluff to newspaper promote yourself or it'll never be printed.

Simply having a Website is not enough if you intend for it to help grow your business. You need to drive traffic to the site. A good way of doing this is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is the process of fine-tuning your Website so it shows up in the top 20 results of a search on Yahoo! or other search engines when somebody types in key words relevant to your site, Many Internet business consultants specialize in SEO, which can make a huge difference. Moorpark, Calif., SEO pro Bruce Clay says for every 100 hits a first-page search result site receives, a second-page site gets only about 50.

Perhaps you've been too busy concentrating on selling to worry about promoting yourself. But we all know good marketing makes selling much easier. If your marketing efforts could use a little push, check out what the following promotional products distributors are doing along those lines.

Queen of Networking

Barbara Dail is the owner of The Creative Solution in Anaheim Hills, Calif., a large promotional products distributor Earlier this year her company purchased Vermont-based Purple Elephant Promotions and absorbed it into the operation.

"Marketing -- it's really hard for us. We really work on, referral. We really work on networking. I'm the queen of networking."

Dail attends community events, is a member of many volunteer groups, and she and her partner get involved in the Chamber of Commerce and other such groups.

"The Visitors and Convention Bureau is a good source," she says. "The other members there are all my markets -- hotels, restaurants -- all types of service industries. We deal with all kinds of businesses."

Dail says the only advertising she does is in the Creative Source Book, a kind of very elegant Yellow Pages for the, entertainment industry in Southern California.

She has also formed a second companion company called The Event Solution, which organizes, from top to bottom, all kinds of events for clients, "It rose out of necessity," she says. 'My customers would ask me to help when they were going to hold an event. and I just ended up handling it."

Dail says that the key to her marketing efforts is focusing on customer service, taking care of her existing customers so well that they talk to their friends and business associates.

"I even knit socks for my customers," she says. "We tend to really take care of our people. I have a friend who bakes apple pies."

Dail says that having a Website is also key to keeping a PPD on the forefront of the business, and she boasts that her firm was one of the first PPDs in the country to have one, having launched www.TCsolutions in 1995. Using a professional Web building and hosting company, the Creative Solution Website utilizes all the modern search engine devices, but Dail says that having a Website is "more of a presence.

"My customers pay me to research for them," she says.

However, she uses her Website to introduce new and creative ideas. One 6f these is a mini-company store concept she has trademarked called 'The Corporate Closet" where she features apparel and other accessories that businesses and business people would want and need. But, she adds, it's relationships that keep on selling.

"We're not here just to do one shirt," she says. "We want to create an identity for your brand."

Dail, whose D-4-sized company does about 60 percent of its business in wearables, says that, bottom line, the most important thing to boost business is hard work.

"I love it (the business)," says Dail, "and I can out-work anybody."

Trade show secret

Monte Rifkin is president of M.J. Rifkin, [he., Advertising Specialties, Marketing Services, of Skokie, Ill., a now D-2 firm he founded in 1989 in Virginia and moved to the Chicago area in 1996.

While wearables are a small portion of ibis firm's business -- 15 to 20 percent, he stiys -- Rifkin says he has a long history with them particularly as it relates to golf as his father was a buyer for the golf retailer Nevada Bob's. Also, Rifkin himself got into the wearables business in the late 1970s while working as a "promotions grunt" for Chicago's WLS radio. "We gave away a lot of T-shirts. I was known in many Chicago neighborhoods as the T-Shirt guy."

For marketing his promotional products business, Rifkin says he does a bit of advertising in some targeted magazines and newspapers. things like Crain's Chicago Business -- "1 don't go in the dailies," he says -- and he also does a fair amount of Internet advertising, concentrating on sites he thinks his clients, or target businesses, would visit on a regular basis.

He also utilizes a lot of direct mail, focusing his efforts on members of local chambers of commerce. In addition, he networks frequently with chamber organizations, committees and events, but he says that "it's kind of a Catch-22 -- the clients there tend lobe small."

The big thing for Rifkin, however, is an innovative form of cold calling that he and his staff have perfected. He says he contacts trade show operators and obtains -- months in advance -- the list of their exhibitors. "It's all in the presentation," Rifkin says about obtaining these lists. "We tell them we are providing a service specifically for your members." Then he contacts the exhibiting companies on the list -- by phone and by direct mail - "and we suggest things that they can give away to visitors to their booths during the trade shows." These potential customers come from throughout the United States, he says adding "we deliver all over the country.

The kinds of trade shows he hits include hardware, health care, consumer electronics, and he says last year there were "a lot of technology shows." As for promotional products that fit their needs, Rifkin says it kind of depends on the hall. "Water bottles or bottled water are big," he says, but a lot of places won't allow you to give away water because they are selling bottled water in the hall."

"Hats are always popular," he says, "and shirts are a no-brainer. But the problem is that if it's a 10,000-person show, you probably can't give away shirts."

Rifkin is also big on using the Internet through his own site, www.sales-tips.com, because it adds credibility to a cold call or direct mail contact.

Concentrating on customers

Many smaller distributorships have all the business they can handle and don't see a need to do much in the way of marketing their own business.

One such example is Phil Follen, owner of Follen Specialties in Neillsville, Wis., a town of about 2,700 in the central part of the state, a couple of hours east of Minneapolis.

"I don't do a whole lot of marketing and I'm not very pushy. I haven't had to knock on doors' Follen says. "I'm really not a salesman. I'm a service provider. That's the way we market here."

Follen says some salespeople who are focused solely on their commission try to push a product down a client's throat rather than thinking about whether it is something that will actually help the client.

"I think it's about providing what they need, not just what I want to sell," Follen says.

"We do work at it. We just go out and take care of our people. Some of them I've had (as clients) for 20 years."

While he does give out promotional items with his business information around town, he says he hasn't had to do much else and is still growing his business.