Creating Effective Presentations

Making presentations is a part of business life. Whether it is a presentation to staff or a sales meeting with a significant client or prospect, there is nothing that helps bring the point home more than a well-produced and rehearsed professional quality presentation. An effective presentation allows the audience to experience the power of words and pictures simultaneously, which increases comprehension and retention of the material.

There are some tools and tips for enhancing the power of presentations. This issue provides some information on preparing slides or overheads, on speaking, and on providing supporting material to your audience.

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Content is King… Engage Your Customers

Amid the ongoing debate about whether direct mail or e-mail or social media is the best method to market to customers and prospects, very little is being said about the one thing that is crucial to the success of each – the message. Unless the message is relevant to the audience and persuasively presented, it doesn’t matter how it is delivered. So while the discussion about the delivery method continues, focus on developing good content and honing your writing skills.

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Proven Marketing Practices for Businesses and Organizations

Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create, and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer.  — Dr. Paul Christ

For long term success, every business or organization must attract and retain customers. Most of us understand the term marketing as the discipline associated with such activities.

Marketing encompasses a broad range of activities, from product development and pricing, to promotion and distribution. As your printer, we play a role in helping you to effectively promote your business’s or organization’s products and services.

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Salesmanship in Print… Communications that Sell

The term marketing communications describes messages used to communicate with a market. Marketing communications focus on the products or services of a business or organization, rather than on the company or organization itself, and are used to create demand or position a company’s product or service.

The task of generating marketing communications often is the responsibility of the business owner, sales manager, or development professional. Once written, this information can be used to create a variety of sales collateral material – flyers and brochures, direct mail marketing packages, newsletters, press releases – and can also be used on company web pages and emails.

Think of marketing communications as salesmanship in print. And just as you carefully prepare and plan for a sales call, prepare and plan for salesmanship in print.

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Editing Copy Written by Others

It can be a tricky situation – editing copy written by others.  Whether your task is to compile and edit the company newsletter, review the boss’s PowerPoint presentation, or prepare the company marketing material, the job of copy editor requires diplomacy and discipline. The diplomacy is necessary to avoid alienating the writer (and losing your editorship); the discipline is required to impose standards and create consistency.

To help with this delicate balancing act, it is useful to have an editor’s toolkit – measuring devices that transform your editing from subjective to objective. Here are our favorites.

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Targeted Marketing… Factors That Influence Success

Decades ago, when there were fewer products and fewer brands, mass marketing made sense. Often one company owned an entire category. When the only coffee sold in supermarkets was ground and in one-pound cans, marketing to all coffee drinkers as an undifferentiated group was easy. The choice was between brands, each making taste claims.

Think how this has changed! Not only has the number of companies selling coffee increased, there are now more brands offered by each company. And at the same time, coffee products have proliferated — regular, decaffeinated, blends, flavored, ground, whole bean, instant, cans, packages, pouches, even individual portions. Clearly mass marketing is not the most effective way to advertise all these choices.

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Alternative Ideas for Five Common Printing Projects

As you would expect, there are some products we typically print for many of our customers. Letterheads, note pads, thank you notes, newsletters, and brochures are common business printing projects for which we print multiple orders each week.

In this issue we’d like to suggest some options for refreshing the look of these printed materials… with a few simple changes.

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7 Ways to Maximize Your Marketing Budget

The resources your business or organization devotes to sales and marketing is its marketing budget. We purposely use the term resources, because a marketing budget may be time and materials as well as cash. It may be a specific amount based on a written plan, or it may be an informal recognition that some time and money is required to support a sales effort.

So how can you manage your marketing budget to maximize its effectiveness? In this issue we will offer some strategies, ideas, and activities to get the most out of your marketing budget.

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How to Write an Effective Newsletter

A newsletter is a popular and effective way to keep in touch with customers, members, and employees. It helps create top of mind awareness – having your company come to mind whenever a customer needs your product or service. It provides a way to talk about the benefits of new services, products, or equipment. It allows you to showcase your expertise and become a source of useful information or valuable advice. And it definitely can help you find new customers or members.

To be truly effective, a newsletter must be:

  • published regularly, whether monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly;
  • well designed, eye catching, content-rich; and
  • written to keep the audience’s interest.

Each of these elements – regular publication, good design, and good writing – contributes equally to the effectiveness of a newsletter.

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