Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

Direct marketing provides enormous opportunities and potential for profitability, but there are challenges and considerations to take into account. We recently discussed ways to successfully implement direct marketing services for your customers, emphasizing the importance of data and the need to understand the way your customer’s end-users think.

Another critical aspect of venturing into direct marketing is having a sales team in place capable of selling these services.

During our Direct Marketing Thought Leadership Workshop, Katie Dunn, President and Founder of Digital Innovations Group, emphasized that becoming a strategic partner for your clients means more than just adding services and offerings. According to Katie, successfully selling direct marketing services is dependent upon 7 steps.

1. Understand the Market
Consumers of today receive information through many channels, including print, mail, email, social media, the web and mobile. Consumers are always on. It comes down to identifying which channel and how to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Easy stuff, right?

2. Understand what Prospects Need
It’s clear that targeted communications can help your customers of tomorrow better reach their end-users and drive revenue. So what do these prospects need in order to be swayed to your services? Like any organization, they need results! They need to know what your company can do for them. Results come in many forms, including increased market share, enhanced profitability, and capitalizing on new opportunities and markets.

In their book What Sticks, Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart note that “19% of marketing fails outright and 67% could achieve significant improvement that would require no additional spending.” So what needs to change? This is where your team can jump in. Significant results can be driven through messaging, the marketing mix and existence of supporting qualification processes.

3. Build a Plan
A clear business plan should help lead your sales staff by include goals, metrics, measurement criteria and processes. It should bring to life the services your company has to offer. These expectations and organization will help drive the sales team.

4. Use the Right Sales Process
Today’s purchasing decisions are more complicated than ever before. In the past 5 years, the average sales cycle has grown 22% longer and involves a greater number of decision makers than ever before. Today’s customers put significant value on a salesperson who makes them think outside the box, brings new ideas to the table, and finds creative and innovative ways to help their business.

5. Call the Right People
Your sales team should be reaching out to senior decision makers. These are the big idea people – not the folks actually executing the ideas. These individuals lead organizations, have demanding schedules and want results. Knowing what gets their attention is critical to the success of your sales team.

Senior decision makers crave information that they can’t get anywhere else such as trends, statistics and best practices. Having a deep understanding of their company, their competitors and the marketplace is critical to capturing their attention. Bringing innovative ideas and proposals to the table that can help their company become more competitive will surely have them listening with anticipation.

6. Say the Right things
A sales team trained to say the right things can really bring everything together. Relevancy is paramount. Quantitative results of a real-life example in a comparable industry can speak volumes (even if the success was a result of work done by a company other than your own). A good template to follow when reaching out to a potential prospect is to acknowledge an industry-specific pain-point (for example – gaining donor participation for non-profits), showcasing how a direct marketing campaign drove results (quantitative is always better), and inviting the prospect to learn more about how your company can help this prospect through your services.

7. Provide the Right Support
Finally, equipping your sales team with the necessary support will dictate their level of success. You can help by offering information on vertical markets and horizontal offerings, defining value propositions, as well as the availability of presentations with talking points. Regular best practice sharing and coaching sessions can also help improve the effectiveness of your sales team.

Do you have a better understanding of where the opportunities lay with respect to direct marketing services and your sales team? Did this create some thought-starters for you to start implementing today?

Check out these other related posts:

• Direct Marketing: Get Relevant, Get Results – Part I
• 10 Ways to Improve your Sales Efficiency
• Define Your Target Market as Tightly as Possible
• How do I Market Better and Offer Marketing Services?

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Katie Dunn is a Business Development and Sales Coach for Digital Innovations Group. For inquiries on how to start selling direct marketing services today, she can be contacted: Katie.dunn@digcreative.com, Twitter: @digkatedunn, or via LinkedIn

Written by Howard Fenton
Senior Technology Consultant, NAPL

As I’ve written about before, talking to a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant reminds me of talking to a voodoo witch doctor.  Each has their own unique way to position their strange juju to get your page ranking higher on the Google search list. Ironically when you start to research the subject you learn that it’s not as magical as some would make you believe.

What is SEO and why is it important? The goal of SEO is to get your company or product, higher on the Google search page page rankings when customers are researching products. The two main strategies to get higher on the list are paid search, which means you’re paying for listings much like buying ads, and organic search which means the search engines list you higher based on your content, backlinks and webpage design.

As the name would suggest, internal page design refers to the coding behind your webpage such as your metatags, keywords, internal linking, and formatting. Backlinking refers to links from other sites and the popularity of those other sites. The link from a  more popular page will carry more weight than the link from an obscure page. Content marketing includes writing blogs and pushing people to those blogs using Twitter and LinkedIn.

One way to increase effectiveness of content marketing is to push people to that content using sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.  Expanding upon the voodoo witch doctor theme, to take advantage of your own juju, you want to create the illusion that you are a thought leader. That perception is created by blogging and recommending articles from other thought leaders.

How much should you write and how much should you recommend? I shoot for ratio of 3 or 4 to 1. In other words, for every blog I create, I recommend 3 or 4 articles written by others. Some experts recommend writing 5 blogs a week, but that is a huge time commitment and I have not seen significantly better results from 3 blogs a week.  Other ways to increase interest is to include pictures or graphics, and some believe that video blogs are more interesting than the written blogs.

The goal here is to push people down a sales funnel. It might start with a mention and a link in Twitter or LinkedIn which pushes people to a blog, then an article and ultimately to a website where an offer is made. The whole time you’re engaging your audience by talking to them about a subject that interests them and increasing your SEO.

The bottom line is write about subjects that will help your customers in their business, push them to your blogs from other sources, encourage feedback and you will enhance your reputation as a thought leader, become easier to find on the web and create a lead generation tool to sell more products.

How are you going to increase your SEO and generate new sales leads?

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Howie Fenton is a consultant and business advisor at NAPL. Howie advises commercial printers and in-plants on benchmarking performance against industry leaders, increasing productivity through workflow management, adding and integrating new digital services, and adding value through customer research. He is a paid contributor to this blog.

Written by Susan Weiss
Manager, Xerox Worldwide Customer Business Development

One of the best ways to gain an edge in today’s hyper-competitive graphic communications industry is by defining, pursuing and become experts in target markets.

That’s how Barb Pellow, group director, Infotrends, set the stage for our recent Business Development Series webinar on “Targeting the Right Markets,” which featured her and Robert Blakely, vice president, Business Development, Echo Communicate, a Baltimore, Md.-based graphic communications company.

In telling his company’s story, Blakely didn’t so much echo Pellow’s comments as amplify them. When targeting markets, he said, “Start with the tightest vertical focus possible. Find the company most like your initial win, and expand from there.”

That’s what Echo Communicate did after building a successful membership recruitment and retention business with US Lacrosse, that sport’s national governing body. Blakely initiated the business with a cold call about printing the Baltimore-based organization’s membership cards. The conversation quickly escalated to broader membership issues, leading US Lacrosse to give Echo access to its membership data. “We did something with their data that they hadn’t done yet,” Blakely said. “We quantified their pain.”

That helped give Echo the credibility to develop a highly automated, XMPie-software-based membership retention solution for US Lacrosse. In the first year, it boosted retention by 26 percent.

With that success, Echo began pursuing like organizations for its solution, focusing exclusively on national governing bodies of other sports. The tight definition optimized the expertise Echo was developing, and made collecting target information easy. “We had a list of national governing bodies in just a few minutes,” Blakely said.

Echo introduced the solution by using a multi-channel invitation with personalized sports imagery to invite prospects to a webinar featuring a US Lacrosse executive. Of 80 invitees, 40 attended. They heard a compelling message. “Nothing is more powerful than having our client tell their peers how wonderful it is to work with us,” Blakely said.

Several attendees are new customers. Because the solution is so automated and specialized, sales cycles and rollouts have been progressively easier and faster. And because the Echo team is now immersed in the vertical, its expertise has grown exponentially. In addition, margins are higher than in the traditional print business. In short, Blakely said, “It’s a winner.”

To hear a replay of the “Targeting the Right Markets” webinar, click here. And be sure to sign up for our upcoming 2013 Business Development Webinars, including “Targeting: Small and Medium-Sized Businesses…the Volume Aggregation Opportunity” on April 17 and “Targeting: Vertical Markets…The Enterprise Opportunity on June 12,” click here.

Have you experienced success by tightly defining a vertical and offering customized solutions? What drives your successes in targeting markets?

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

• XMPie Cross-Media Campaign Boosts College Admissions for Maryland Institution
• Do you Encourage your Customers to Interact?
• Personalized Renewal Notices Boost Membership Rates for Football Club
• You Don’t Have to Become a Marketing Services Provider to Offer Marketing Services

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Susan Weiss, manager, Xerox Worldwide Customer Business Development, is Xerox’s host for the 2013 Business Development Webinar Series

Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

Your digital printing capabilities allow you to provide your customers with benefits such as quicker turnaround times, shorter-runs at lower costs, and value-added services such as variable data printing and personalization. In the process, you reap benefits such as elimination of warehousing costs and reduced waste. Your customers appreciate the low prices you offer to print their latest company collateral run of 200. They find it extremely useful that the hard proofs you send them are accurate and representative of their final product. And they’ve surely come to rely on your two-day (…and even as it makes you cringe, the sometimes same-day) turnaround that you’ve become known for. But how can you be sure that your customers of today and tomorrow know about your many other services and offerings? What better way to demonstrate these to your customers and prospects, first hand, than through a self-promotional direct marketing campaign!

In a prior blog post we discussed the importance of self-promo campaigns, but let’s take a look at how a 2011 Xerox Best-of-the-Best Winner, CopyCat AS of Norway, put their plan into action. Their direct marketing campaign promoted an upcoming open house event, showcasing their capabilities – trusted, true and new – and resulted in 20 orders from brand new customers.

When CopyCat purchased their new Xerox Color 1000 Press with clear dry ink capabilities, they wanted to not only spread the great news to customers and prospects, but also show them what this new technology could offer. Clear dry ink provided an almost limitless range of creative possibilities, allowing their customers’ printed images to pop off the page with selective spot or flood effects, creative patterns, and gloss marks. CopyCat wanted to invite customers and prospects to attend an upcoming open house event, giving them a chance to see their new technology and to meet their friendly staff.

CopyCat decided to show off their direct marketing capabilities by producing a cross-media invitation, complete with clear dry ink effects and a QR code taking recipients to their own personalized response webpage. By teaming up with local photographers, they were able to capture recipient attention by featuring provoking imagery. Photographers made up a portion of CopyCat’s customer base and prospect list, so the print quality and use of clear dry ink within the campaign really resonated with that audience. Personalization was integrated into each piece using XMPie uDirect, opening the minds of the many recipients to CopyCat’s direct marketing services that they were previously unaware of.

1,800 invitations were produced and sent, generating a response rate of over 10 percent and a conversion rate of 50% – filling CopyCat’s open house event. An additional 130 respondents that couldn’t attend the event requested more information on CopyCat’s business and services. Best of all, as a result of the convergence of this creative campaign with a tangible call to action and an appealing offer, CopyCat received 20 orders from brand new customers in the weeks following the event. The potential lifetime value of these new customers and the lasting impact it could have for CopyCat is something I’m sure they are very excited about.

Interested in more topics similar to direct marketing campaigns or success stories? You may want to check out:

• When it comes to Direct Marketing Campaigns: Practice what you Preach
• Cross-Media Marketing Campaign Generates 10% Response, Draws Crowd and Nets New Business
• 3 Application Ideas for your Shop
• Stunning Digital Printing Showcase Helps Fuel 30% Growth for Printer

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Have a success story you’d like to share for international recognition? Are you a member of the Xerox Premier Partner Global Network? Enter into the Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest today – entries close April 3, 2013!

Written by Dharminder Biharie
Business Development Manager
Xerox Graphic Communication, The Netherlands

Would you like to be helped by a surgeon who flunked out of med school? Or a dentist with extremely bad teeth? Or how about a social media guru with only 10 connections? I can’t imagine that prospective customers would be lining up to be helped by an amateur surgeon, an inept dentist or a clumsy self-made social media guru.

The same applies to direct marketing. Having the skills, knowledge, and expertise to implement a successful direct marketing campaign is great – but there comes a point where talk must turn into execution. How do you show prospects and customers that your business is capable of transferring that knowledge and delivering a campaign with tangible results?

Time to execute.
I see many companies struggle to propose and sell cross-media campaigns to their customers. When I ask them how many times they have executed a proper cross media campaign…too often I get the response ‘none’. That’s a shame. If you sell direct marketing campaigns, I strongly advise you to use your own sales skills, eat your own dog food, and impress your customers with your own brilliant direct marketing campaign. The reasoning behind a self-promotion direct marketing strategy is quite simple … because nobody wants to be helped by… yes, you guessed it, the infamous amateur.

Simply put, a client is much more willing to place their trust with a successful, proven business model. If your company’s self-promotion campaign is delivering results beyond expectations, tout it. Your own results are a great starting point to promote yourself and your business. This will also help you catch the attention of your prospective customers.

But proceed with risk. You must realize that every minuscule hiccup has the potential to drive prospective customers away from your offerings. A QR code leading to a page not optimized for mobile may not be forgiven, as well as a faulty PURL or pages that are ultimately illegible on mobile devices. Every click and any negative distraction will not help your cause. It is therefore imperative to extensively test your campaign with a target sample group, capturing and measuring the responses and optimizing as appropriate.

Success is the Foundation of Persuasion.
Cross-media campaigns, or campaigns with multiple touch points carry a certain ‘cool’ factor. They resonate with customers, stay in the forefront of their minds, and leave a lasting impression. A successful campaign generates more buzz (think free advertising) – especially in the world of social media we live in today. If you find a lot of positive tweets and your campaign has yielded a substantial number of likes, then consider your efforts well done. This, in turn, offers you the opportunity to further market your company’s services and capabilities by creating a web promotion, success case or sales presentation complete with metrics, images, and examples of your campaign’s success. Your self-promotion campaign has now provided a first-hand illustration of your capabilities, knowledge and expertise…a persuasive power boost for sure!

And be sure to realize that the power of your campaign (and the future campaigns you implement for your customers) extends beyond the screen. Results can’t always be measured purely by analytic software. The most significant metric is the impression your messaging has left in the mind of your customer, inspiring him or her to act. When done successfully, you will be known by your customers as, yes, the trusted provided of direct marketing services, rather than the amateur.

Interested in similar topics? You may want to check out:

• To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Are You Old or New School?
• Newspapers: Sustainable Business Model or Yesterday’s News?
• Four Ways Brands Can Avoid Losing Followers
• Are Online Ads Less Effective Than TV and Print Ads?

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Dharminder Biharie is a Business Development Manager with Xerox Graphic Communication in The Netherlands. To get in touch with Dharminder, please contact Dharminder.biharie@xerox.com, + 31 (0) 6 2020 499 42.

Written by Dharminder Biharie
Business Development Manager
Xerox Graphic Communication, The Netherlands

In elementary school, we were always taught the golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. I now find myself observing the golden rule of social media more than ever: stop, look and listen…largely due to being part of the Business Development Group at Xerox Netherlands and responsible for helping our customers take their successful businesses to the next level,

I talk with many individuals within print operations every day – from marketers to the directors of the company. Let me know if this scenario resonates with you: A client you have been working with is highly interested in your solution, as long as you are able solve his problem. Sounds familiar, right? Resolving your customer’s pain points, however, cannot be done through an act of silence.

In an organization, complaints always go from bottom to top. Whether the subject is training, product offerings, market penetration, or bad coffee. Conversely, any pain felt by the company, such as low turnover, goes from top to bottom. Action must be taken to turn the tide.

The higher your customer is within the organization, the faster they will want a solution. You must come quickly with a solution.

Knowing the basics about your customer’s organization is only part of the battle. Figuring out the pain points and how you can resolve them plays a much larger role in solving the puzzle. Thankfully, tools such as social media make it easy to listen to the voice and pain points of your customer and their clients.

Here are some easy social listening tips that you can employ today:

• Twitter: Looking for a simple yet powerful method to monitoring relevant, customizable feeds? Start by creating a stream using ‘#’ and relevant keywords to your industry. For example, #oilpricing, #pharmamarketing or #carbrand. Now you can easily listen to what end users are saying.

• LinkedIn: Find relevant groups where your customers are active and join in on the discussions. Providing valuable insight can help you quickly gain credibility with your peers and help you earn valuable networking opportunities. Just never forget to investigate the network of your connections, as LinkedIn gives you a great start on this.

• Facebook: Follow a company and listen to the tone of their voice. See how they deploy marketing activities, and what their followers have to say.

• HootSuite is a great tool that provides streams and analytics for a variety of social media channels, allowing you to monitor the pulse of your followers based on key words you have defined…plus its fully automated.

• Industry websites: Trends and developments are often mentioned, further strengthening the information you’ve been accumulating.

• News through Google Alerts: There is a lot more posted than you think – but it’s all dependent upon how you set-up your alerts through key words.

• Annual report: This is not always present, but if it is, make sure you at least know the vision and direction of the customer.

The first step of Account Management is listening to your customer. We once did this at a desk during a meeting, but now we can practice this through the Internet via social media.

And never forget: we have two ears, two eyes and one mouth. Look and listen first and foremost, and you will always understand your customers better.

What have your experiences been with leveraging social media to actively listen to your clients and their needs? Do you find it to be an effective tool? What challenges have you come across?

Comment below for a chance to receive a free copy of the book ‘Social Media Field Guide: A Resource for Graphic Communications’ by Julie Shaffer and Mary Garnett. This book details best practices for many of today’s social media tools, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and more. Learn how to successfully implement these into your business today!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

• To Tweet or not to Tweet? Are You Old or New School?
• Four Ways Brands Can Avoid Losing Followers
• When it comes to Direct Marketing Campaigns: Practice what you Preach
• Are Online Ads Less Effective Than TV and Print Ads?

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Dharminder Biharie is a Business Development Manager with Xerox Graphic Communication in The Netherlands. To get in touch with Dharminder, please contact Dharminder.biharie@xerox.com, + 31 (0) 6 2020 499 42

Written by Larry Zusman
GM, XMPie Video Personalization Business Team
XMPie, A Xerox Company

With the holiday season freshly behind us, you may have seen “them”. In fact, we featured one of “them” just last week in a very special holiday blog post. What is this mysterious subject we speak of?

Whether it’s a movie showing a Santa Claus “Naughty and Nice” list with your name on it (you know which one you were on), targeted auto marketing videos displaying your exact car preference (Bond aficionados can enjoy Aston Martin DB5 footage), or maybe even something as inventive as a MTV-like college recruitment movie with images and audio targeted right to your 17 year-old (think Thriller for Pre-Meds), the world of video marketing is becoming a lot more — personal. The reason is because in the past year the marketing nirvana of easily and affordably changing text, images, graphics and even movie clips for each customer inside of cinematic quality videos destined for any device has finally arrived.

Lots of marketers are interested in developing personalized videos. They increase attention, response and most importantly sales. How do we know? Because we have data showing that static videos are markedly more effective over other media (Web Video Marketing Council and Flimp Media study, 2012) and we also have numerous studies demonstrating that variable media generates higher response versus static (www.podi.org). So video will surely follow suit. In fact, many marketing service providers, video production houses and creative agencies are exploring adding this specialized service offering to their portfolio. The reasons for this in addition to their effectiveness is the ability to extend 1:1 cross-media campaigns to 1:1 videos using the same database and content; use of affordable templates; and opportunities for new revenue and profit.

Videos directed to each person —individually— are created in different ways. However, in today’s rich media landscape the challenge is to generate high quality (HD), cinematic movies with a wide variety of variable content that can be displayed on everything from desktops to tablets and smartphones. A solution from XMPie meeting these requirements uses the Adobe® After Effects™ platform, which is commonly used for cinematic visual effects and motion graphics, and a plug-in from XMPie that links a database of text, images, graphics, and movie clips to the After Effects movie template. The end result is highly targeted MP4 movies containing specific content directed to segments or individuals.

For those of you who still have little idea of what I am blogging about, check out this link and you will experience this new media for yourself. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a fad. Video is here to stay as a powerful marketing tool perfect for the new tablets and smartphones. And personalized videos will exponentially increase in usage with improved demographic, geographic and psychographic targeting. By jumping into it now, either through a software investment or partnering with a professional service provider, you will have a leg up on your competitors and take full advantage of a new market with unlimited revenue potential.

For more information on how you can use XMPie video personalization for exciting, new business opportunities, contact your XMPie sales representative or Larry Zusman, GM, XMPie Video Personalization Business Team, larry.zusman@us.xmpie.com.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

• ‘Twas the Night Before…
• Are Online Ads Less Effective Than TV and Print Ads?
• Four Ways Brands Can Avoid Losing Followers
• To Tweet or not to Tweet? Are You Old or New School?
• Connecting Print to the Digital World One Scan at a Time