Chapter 11

Making a Positive Impression in Low-Cost Ways

In This Chapter

arrow Using viral marketing to generate buzz

arrow Thinking like a journalist to score positive publicity from traditional media and bloggers

arrow Knowing how to choose quality premiums with high impact

If you can work your way into the environment of prospective customers in positive ways that don’t have the costs and stridency of advertising, you can make a positive impact in an effective, low-cost manner. In this chapter, I present three complementary ways of winning the right to be visible and liked. If managed well, each tactic can make a positive impression for surprisingly low cost.

  • Word of mouth is what people say about you to others. If you give good service and make a friendly, positive impression on people, they’ll be motivated to share their enthusiasm with others. Viral marketing is a current word-of-mouth trend that I cover here.
  • Publicity works you into the editorial part of the media, where exposure to or mention of your company, service, or product can become a part of the news.
  • Premiums are products identified with your brand (and often with your company’s contact information). If people like the premiums, they hold, use, and share them, generating considerable positive exposures for you, again without you having to pay for each exposure.

remember.eps All three tactics have one very powerful commonality: They get people talking about your product or brand. Many marketers ignore or give only minor attention to them, but all three belong in the front lines of your marketing program because of their ease of use, simplicity, low cost, and potential.

Making the Most of Word of Mouth

If you survey customers to find out why they decided to buy a product, you generally find that answers like “my friend told me about it” outnumber answers like “I saw an ad” by ten to one. When customers talk, other customers listen.

remember.eps Word of mouth gives a consumer the most credible source of information about products, aside from actual personal experience with those products. What consumers tell each other about your products has a huge impact on your efforts to recruit new customers. Word of mouth also has a secondary, but still significant, impact on your efforts to retain old customers.

Most marketers spend somewhere from 5 to 25 percent of revenues on their marketing activities. Every now and then, I meet people who say they don’t have a marketing budget. They don’t even have a brochure. They just get referral after referral, and they rarely if ever lose a customer. Must be nice to send that normal marketing expense straight down to the profit margin! What’s their silver bullet? How can they avoid marketing costs? It’s simple: They’ve been doing a consistently impressive job in their industry for a long time, and they have a really strong following and great word of mouth. They’ve probably spent more on quality (great product, great people, and good pay) to maintain their superior reputation. Usually, they market locally or regionally to a relatively tightly defined customer base, which helps build that strong reputation.

tip.eps The bottom line is, quality and reputation are the best marketing tools ever, and if you’re the best, you may not need to do much marketing. Offer the best service, develop loyal customers, and grow from their referrals. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it can be written on a single scrap of paper. Now, that’s a powerful — and low-cost — marketing plan!

The following sections give you the lowdown on word of mouth and explain what you can do to keep some control over it. I also cover viral marketing, which is akin to word of mouth but tends to live online.

Engaging with customers and followers on social media

Go to your Facebook home page, and look at the Trending box to see whose pages are particularly popular at the moment on Facebook. All too often, it’s a celebrity with a scandal, but sometimes it’s a business identity or brand. Right now as I write, Coca-Cola has the top spot, trending up, because of the chatter about its 2014 Super Bowl commercial, celebrating the diversity of the nation. Some people were deeply moved and loved it; others were offended by American citizens singing in languages other than English. I doubt the marketers at Coca-Cola thought that would get anyone’s dander up, but it’s hard to overestimate the vigor of extreme politics. From a marketing perspective, this is a kind of a social media gold mine. Coca-Cola corporate at the top of the charts on Facebook and Twitter? Hey, who could ask for anything more! Even if some of the hits are from haters, it’s still an opportunity to present the brand with dignity, compassion, and class.

remember.eps Almost any coverage is good coverage in social media. The trick is to contribute — in meaningful and well-intentioned ways — to the national conversation. What do you and your brand have to contribute to the week’s conversations? Has something happened that you can speak to in some way? Do you want to step forward and share information, sponsor someone, or take a stand? Don’t wade in with a negative position; try to take the high ground with constructive comments. A positive, constructive tone is always appropriate for a professional identity, regardless of whether you get peppered on occasion by people who hate your ads.

How much is enough when it comes to Twitter and Facebook comments and contributions? Remember that social media is all about dialogue. If you’re not generating retweets on Twitter, comments on Facebook, pins on Pinterest, and so forth, then you’re not in the conversation. The alternative to conversation is a monologue, and people soon get tired of that. So let the reactions be your guide, telling you what’s of interest and showing you where the conversation should go.

tip.eps Marketers aren’t generally going to be the leaders of social media conversations. They are (they hope) well-mannered guests, chiming in when the social cues suggest it’s appropriate but stepping back when it gets more personal and less corporate or professional in nature. But that doesn’t mean marketers go unheard. Take a look at the leader board on Twitter to see which brands or professionals are getting a lot of retweets, and then track them back to see what content got picked up as a way to train yourself to be more savvy about how to plant the root of a good viral conversation.

remember.eps When consumers interact with you on your social media properties, make it a priority to respond to any questions or feedback within one business day — even shorter if possible. For more on how to use social media, see Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond (Wiley).

Managing word of mouth

Many marketers automatically assume that there’s no way to effectively encourage customers to say nice things about a product or prevent them from slamming it. However, you actually can influence word of mouth to a considerable degree.

tip.eps Here are some ideas for how to manage word-of-mouth communications about your product:

  • Make your product special. A product that surprises people because of its unexpectedly good quality or service is special enough to talk about. A good product or a well-delivered service wins fans and turns your customers into your sales force.
  • Do something noteworthy in the name of your product or company. If no aspect of your product is incredibly wonderful and surprising, do some cool activity and associate that activity with your product. Get creative and think of some way of helping improve your world that surprises people and makes them take notice of the good you’re doing in the name of your product. Support a neat nonprofit organization in your neighborhood. Stage a fun event for kids. Let your employees take short sabbaticals to volunteer in community services. All of these strategies have worked well in the past to generate positive publicity and word of mouth. And don’t forget to post a couple minutes of video footage of the event on YouTube and your website (just be sure to get permission if there are any close-ups of individuals).
  • Use exciting sales promotions and premiums, not boring ones. A 24-cent coupon isn’t worth talking about. But a sweepstakes contest in which the winners get to spend a day with the celebrity of their choice can get consumers excited. A premium like that generates positive PR and a lot of word of mouth. As an added bonus, if you can think of something really unusual to give winners, that item becomes a talking point, especially if folks can wear or prominently display the premium in their home or office. Why? Because people are guaranteed to ask them about it!
  • Sponsor an online sweepstakes that’s publicized with hashtags on Twitter. Putting a hashtag (pound sign) before a word or phrase points back to earlier Tweets or postings on the topic, which is helpful for following the thread of a conversation. You can also sponsor a contest on Twitter, giving it a hashtag such as #yourfreegiftfromourbrandforbestetphoto. People wanting to submit their pet photo (or their cheer for their favorite sports team in a big game, or whatever you want to make the topic of your contest) simply Tweet, using your hashtag. If the contest attracts interest, a lot of people will retweet it, and it may go viral. (Services such as www.offerpop.com can help you run such contests.)

Capturing the power of viral marketing

Viral marketing aims to build word of mouth by giving people something (either in the real world or on the web) that they’ll pass on to multiple other people because they like it. The object is to get your message to spread naturally, like a cold virus, except with many more positive benefits for society — and your business, of course!

remember.eps Good viral-marketing campaigns target decision influencers, also known as alphas. These are the folks whose opinions matter the most. In business-to-business marketing, the decision influencers are often obvious. A handful of prominent executives, the top bloggers in your industry (also check for top microbloggers), a few editors working for trade magazines, and some of the staff at trade associations probably exert a strong influence over everybody else’s opinions. Often, you can tap into the Facebook pages of leading thinkers. And you can find plenty of identifiable decision influencers in consumer markets. For example, in the soccer-equipment market, youth coaches, league managers, and the owners of independent sporting goods stores are important decision influencers, and loads of bloggers, YouTube posters, or Instagram personalities also address topics to do with the sport. Some of those bloggers will have huge follower lists, making them your best starting point.

tip.eps To take advantage of decision influencers, develop a list of the people who fall into that category for your product or service and then make a plan for cultivating them. Match them with appropriate managers or salespeople who can take them out to lunch or to events. The goal is to get people associated with your business into the decision influencers’ personal networks.

Alternatively, why not consider developing a series of giveaways and informational mailings to send to these folks? For example, if you want to sell a new soccer cleat to youth players, send free samples to youth coaches. You may even hold a contest (with daily updates on Twitter and video coverage on YouTube) for which team striker can score the most goals in the new cleat in one season. When you know who’s talking and who’s listening, you can easily focus your efforts on influencing the talkers.

You can reach the decision influencers of your viral content through any medium, from the web and giveaways to local newspapers and sales of products containing or displaying your viral content. The trick to viral marketing is to come up with something that people will think is cool or useful enough to share with others. A giveaway in exchange for their signing up with e-mail address (which then links you into their social media) is a good way to feed your CRM database.

Here are some examples of viral marketing:

  • A great design incorporating your logo and additional art or text that people think is fashionable enough to wear or use in public (think T-shirts, temporary forehead tattoos, shoulder bags, or caps). If the design “gets legs” and starts to become fashionable, everyone will want one, and soon you’ll see your logo on the chests of teenagers everywhere.
  • An amusing, fascinating, or beautiful digital video of one to three minutes in length that attracts a large number of viewers and copycats.
  • A fun or clever hashtag that links your product or brand to a situation or occurrence everyone can identify with, perhaps using a fun or startling photo to maximize pickup.

These examples of viral-marketing content illustrate the simplicity of viral marketing and its range of possibilities. Remember: Something simple and appealing can always spread, especially if you take care to launch it in ways that make it easy for the right decision influencers to find and share.

Using Publicity to Your Advantage

Publicity is coverage of your product or business in the editorial portion of any news medium. If, for example, Consumer Reports runs an article praising your product as best in a category, that’s publicity. Good publicity. If, in contrast, the evening television news programs run a story saying that experts suspect your product caused numerous accidents, that’s also publicity — the bad kind.

These examples illustrate two common reasons for journalists to cover a product as a story — because the product is better or worse than expected. In both cases, product quality is the key to the publicity. If you have a unique product or service and can make any interesting performance or quality claims, they may be newsworthy, so share them with local, industry, or national media and bloggers.

Public relations (PR) is the active pursuit of publicity for marketing purposes. You use PR to generate good publicity and minimize bad publicity. For example, you may send editors a press release, which is a letter summarizing a suggested news story. Or you may write a short, informational e-mail summarizing your newsworthy claim to fame and send it to your favorite bloggers for a more modern spin on releasing your content to the news media.

tip.eps Many businesses hire publicists or PR firms — experts who do PR on a freelance or consulting basis. A regional or smaller PR firm can often do a decent job for you on a retainer of $1,000 to $3,000 a month. If your marketing budget is at least ten times this much, then you can probably afford PR representation. If not, then you need to write your press releases and communicate your stories to the media yourself. (But first, however, you have to come up with something newsworthy to send.)

The following sections help you identify which stories are worth promoting and how to go about putting together a press release that will get you results.

Sniffing out good stories

To a journalist, a good story is anything that has enough public interest to attract readers, viewers, or listeners and hold their attention. A good story for a journalist covering the plastics industry must hold the attention of people in that industry. I’m sorry to say that most of what you want to communicate to your market (the great features of your product, why your service is better than your competitor’s, and so on) doesn’t fall into the category of a good story.

tip.eps To get good publicity, you have to give reporters what they want. Sniff out a good story, put together sufficient information to back it up, and script a version of the story that reporters in your target media can run, almost without doing any work.

remember.eps Although the specifics of what the journalists you’re targeting want vary depending on the beat they cover, here are a few standard characteristics of a good story:

  • Timeliness: Pay attention to trends and current events and weave your product or service into them. You don’t want to be the marketer pitching the benefits of high-quality parkas in July (unless of course you live in Alaska).
  • Solid information: The story you pitch needs to have the right facts and quotes within a clear, well-written narrative.
  • Novelty: Your story should be something that hasn’t already been talked about. If it is, try to give it a fresh twist. Old news isn’t news.

Reporters and editors do not want stories about

  • Your new product or service and how it differs from previous models or your competitors’ product or service (unless that’s their coverage specialty)
  • Why you or your company’s senior executive think your products are really great
  • Your version of an old story — one that they’ve covered in the same way before
  • Anything that seems boring or self-serving to anyone who doesn’t work for your firm

Finding the hook: Think like a journalist

Journalism is all about finding the hook that makes your story appealing. Basically the hook is a fresh, interesting piece of information that catches and holds attention. When you start sniffing out good stories, you have to look for something interesting, new, and news- or gossip-worthy because without a hook, you don’t have a real news story, and the press more than likely won’t pick up your story. Journalists don’t want to help you communicate with your target market, but they happily use any good stories that you’re willing to write for them. And often your product gets mentioned or you get quoted as a result of the good story you pitched.

remember.eps So what’s the secret, the key, the essence of good publicity? Develop stories with effective hooks and give those stories away to journalists and bloggers, both of whom eagerly accept a little help from time to time.

tip.eps Looking at the situation logically, you need to design hooks to convert your marketing message into stories that appeal to journalists. Your hooks need to be just like the ones that attract your attention to interesting news stories, with one exception: You need to somehow tie them to your marketing information. You have to make sure that at least a thin line exists, connecting the hook to your brand identity, the news that you’ve just introduced a new product, or whatever else you want the public to know. That way, when journalists use your hook in their own work, they end up including some of your marketing info in their stories.

Try this simple exercise to help you get an idea for your story’s hook. Scan today’s newspaper (whichever one you like to read) and rank the top five stories based on your interest in them. Now analyze each one in turn to identify the one thing that made that story interesting enough to hold your attention. The hooks will differ, but each story will have one. And I guarantee that all five hooks you find will have certain elements in common:

  • Hooks often give you new information (information you didn’t know or weren’t sure of).
  • Hooks make that new information relevant to your activities or interests.
  • Hooks catch your attention, often by surprising you with something you hadn’t expected.
  • Hooks promise some benefit to you — although the benefit may be indirect — by helping you understand your world better, avoid something undesirable, or simply enjoy yourself as you read the paper.

tip.eps If coming up with newsworthy hooks proves challenging for you (and you don’t have the budget to hire an expensive PR expert), consider hiring a journalist who has written dozens of stories for one or more media outlets in the past. Writers don’t cost that much to hire, so run an ad saying you’re looking for a writer with journalism experience to develop press releases and see who responds. I bet you’ll find plenty of people are eager to help you come up with interesting content about your business or brand and turn it into usable stories that the media will pick up.

Communicating a story to the media

To effectively communicate your story to the media, you need to keep both format and content in mind. Put your story into an appropriate and professional format so reporters and editors can know the subject of the story and find that story easy to work with. The most important and basic format for communicating a story is the press release (also called a news release), a short, written document with a clear headline at the top, sufficient facts and quotes to support a short news story, brief supporting background on the company/product involved, a date, and contact information for journalists who want to follow up with a phone call or e-mail to get more info or to arrange an interview. If you include all of these elements — and you have a good hook to start with, as explained in the preceding section — you can write an effective press release.

remember.eps Reporters and editors throw away more than 90 percent of the releases they receive. Beat the odds with proper formatting and good content (as explained earlier in this chapter). Also, always do the following to help you secure pickup (coverage) in the media:

  • Include something helpful that the media can quote, such as a list of tips, rules, or principles. For example, a chiropractor’s practice may offer five ways to have a healthier back, or a home inspection firm may give ten tips to avoid costly surprises when buying a home.
  • Offer yourself as an expert commentator on industry-related matters in case the reporter needs a quote for another article. She may just include one sentence from you, but if she mentions your company name, you just got some good publicity.
  • Keep it brief. Journalists are quick on the uptake and work fast, so let them call or e-mail if they need more information.
  • Post your press releases on your website. Your press releases can do double duty on the web, providing information for both curious journalists and potential customers.
  • Send releases to every local editor in your area, no matter how small the publication or station. Local coverage is typically more attainable than regional or national coverage, and that local coverage can be surprisingly helpful.
  • Include a short introductory paragraph in your electronic release that includes a half dozen or more well-chosen (specific) key words so that web search engines like Google can find it. Someone looking for information with those keywords may go directly to your release, bypassing the need for media or a blogger pickup of the story.
  • Deliver your release electronically as an e-mail attachment unless you know that a particular reporter or editor prefers the old-fashioned printed release sent by mail. Most journalists like electronic releases because they can directly cut and paste text.
  • Collect examples of good coverage of your type of product or service and build a mailing list of journalists and media that cover your type of business. Sending your releases to these people makes sense because they’ve already proven they give similar stories coverage.
  • Check electronic databases of media contacts to see whether you can send your release to more names. You can expand your list by using services such as Cision MediaSource (us.cision.com/products_services) and BurrellesLuce (www.burrellesluce.com/Media_Contacts).

Whatever you do, be sure to avoid these common press release errors that journalists complain about:

  • Don’t send inappropriate or late releases. Target the right contacts. The food critic doesn’t need a release about a new robotic factory. And if the facility opened two months ago, the business correspondent doesn’t need the release either because it’s old news.

    tip.eps Take the time to build up an accurate database of media contacts. E-mailing your release can be sensible because journalists work on tight deadlines, so include a field for e-mail addresses in your database. Think about developing a list identifying authors of stories you like that may be similar to stories related to your business. Now you have a smaller list that’s a much tighter match with your content and target audience.

  • Don’t make any errors. Typos throw the facts into question. You want the journalist to trust you to do her research for her, which means she really has to trust you. Prove that you’re worthy.
  • Don’t give incomplete contact information. Always include up-to-date names, addresses, and phone numbers. Also, give journalists instructions for how to reach you directly by phone or e-mail. (Note: Your personal cellphone is easier than a company phone that rings to a directory.)
  • Don’t ignore reporters’ research needs. The more support you give them, the more easily they can cover your story. If you want to e-mail a photo, make it a TIFF format of 300-dpi resolution or higher. Also, consider offering plant tours, interview times, sample products, or whatever else may help journalists cover your story.
  • Don’t pester journalists. You won’t get your story picked up by being a salesperson for it. After your targeted reporters or editors have your pitch, let them do their job without frequent, interrupting phone calls from you.
  • Don’t bother reporters or bloggers who actually pick up your story. Journalists don’t want to send you clippings of the articles they write, so don’t bother asking. Nor do they care to discuss with you why they didn’t run a story or why they cut off part of a quote when they did run a story. They’re busy with the next story. You should focus on the next story, too.
  • Don’t forget that journalists work on a faster clock than you do. When a journalist calls about your release, return the call (or make sure that somebody returns it) in hours, not days, or she’ll have found another source by the time you get back to her.

Sending press releases to website editors and (especially) bloggers

Realistically, most publicity programs today are going to get ten or more online pickups for every off-line or print pickup. The web simply has so much more editorial content than print these days that you must plan to run a largely online publicity campaign. People are reading news online, so that’s where you want your story to appear. Major newspapers and many magazines run active and interesting websites, so make sure you submit a release electronically per the instructions for publicists on their website.

Online magazines are outpacing print magazines, to be sure. But the real winners of the race for audience are the bloggers, many of whom post their content (at least initially) for free, although if they build a following, they may enjoy selling ad space, just like newspapers and magazines. Blogs exist for just about every conceivable audience and topic.

To send a press release to a blogger, first build a list of blogs that address your topic and have enough audience and/or influence to have an impact. One way to cold-search for blogs is to go to directories, many of which are available online (just do a search for “blog directory”; add the country or a state or region if you want to refine the search geographically). Here are a couple of directories worth investigating:

  • Technorati (www.technorati.com) tracks more than 1 million top blogs by readership and shows their momentum by dividing them into risers and followers; it also cuts the blog deck by topic.
  • Top Blog Directory (www.top-blogs.org) also provides data on blog readership and topic.

tip.eps Don’t waste time (yours or the bloggers’) on blogs that are a mismatch with your topic. A business press release may go to some of the 41,000 business bloggers in the Technorati directory but not to anyone else.

After you build a list of blogs for your release, visit each blog to make sure it fits your release topic (or vice versa), and see whether the blogger accepts releases. If so, there will almost always be some instructions for how to submit a release. Occasionally, a blog may require you to pay a small fee in order to submit. If the fit is good and the blog has a lot of readers, it may be worth your while to pay to submit, at least the first few times — but if it never picks up your stories, cut it from your distribution list. You don’t need to become an unwitting, anonymous supporter of the blog.

Considering the hodgepodge of video releases and wire services

E-mailing or mailing a traditional press release to a reporter isn’t the only way to get your story out there. You can generate a video release with useful footage that a television producer may decide to run as part of a news story. Video works well for stories that have a strong visual component. Opt for video if you can provide the media with footage that viewers will find compellingly interesting. (Hint: It should involve plenty of action.) You can also put a written press release on PR Newswire, or any other such service that distributes hard copy or electronic releases to its media clients — for a fee, of course. You can even pitch your stories to the Associated Press and other newswires (but I recommend hiring a major PR firm before trying to contact a newswire).

remember.eps When it comes to online distribution of a news story, a photo or short video clip is helpful for attracting attention if (but only if) there’s clearly something worth illustrating. If the story doesn’t need an illustration, then leave out the photo or video clip for fear of annoying journalists with extra content they don’t want in their inboxes. PR Newswire offers the option of online photo or video distribution in which your headline and visual are displayed on the websites of major newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times), MarketWatch, and even the Reuters sign above Times Square in New York City.

Going directly to readers with a blog

If you are (or have on staff) a good writer with a flair for the fun and clever (or, for B2B, a flair for making the technical interesting and clear), consider sponsoring a blog on a topic of general interest. Note that “why our brand is the best” is not of general interest, but “what’s the best way to have fun when you go out on your own?” or “how are smart small businesses beating the pants off bigger rivals?” may be. Creating an interesting blog is akin to writing a good press release, except it has a higher standard of general interest. For example, a medical consultant I know spends 30 minutes each day blogging and tweeting, exchanging interesting thoughts about medical research and, incidentally, building her network of prospective clients.

remember.eps When you go the blogging route, think of yourself as an online journalist and/or entertainer first and a publicist only second, or else your blogs will be so marketing-plan serving that readers won’t become regular followers.

After you have at least a handful of good blog entries posted and are clear on your writing formula and ready to write a dozen more good ones, start publicizing your blog. WordPress (wordpress.com), an excellent platform for posting blogs, also has (under the Social Tools category) a Publicize option that does a decent job of finding potential readers (based on demonstrated interest in the topic) from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Path, and LinkedIn, which, added up, spans a huge swath of the online reading community.

Premiums: The Most Abused and Misused Medium of All!

A premium (referred to in some circles as a giveaway) is any product with a marketing message somewhere on it that you give away. (Actually, sometimes you may want to sell a valuable premium, but you need to at least make getting it easy so as to spread your message as widely as possible.) Classic premiums include T-shirts, coffee mugs, pens, wall calendars, and baseball caps with your company name or logo on them. But you don’t have to confine yourself to these choices by any means. In fact, businesses have used these classics for years, so offering something more innovative may be just the route you want to take. The next two sections focus on identifying the premiums that work best and how to make sure people notice whatever premiums you choose to use.

Creating an impact with your premiums

As with any other marketing initiative, you want a premium to change someone’s behavior. And you can’t do that very easily with a cheap pen or ugly mug. To make a premium really work, you must think through an impact scenario, which is a realistic story about the premium and its user in which the premium somehow affects that user’s purchase behavior.

remember.eps An impact scenario starts with your wish list of what the target customer should understand and do. It ends with you thinking of ways that premium items can accomplish your wish list goals. For instance, perhaps your goal is to stimulate and strengthen feelings of pride in a brand. If you’re doing marketing for a college or museum, simply putting the institution’s name and logo on a mug may accomplish this purpose. Some examples of impact premiums include coffee mugs, pens, T-shirts, calendars, notepads … the list is endless.

Say you’re marketing a new set of banking services for small businesses, and you want to spread the word about these services to business owners who currently have checking accounts with your bank. Specifically, you want to let these businesses know that you’ve made a variety of helpful new services available, and you want the business owners to call or visit their branch offices to find out more about these services.

Why not have the bank’s name and the slogan “Servicing small businesses better” printed on pens, which you can then distribute in the next mailing of checking account statements? Sounds like this premium item will give you an easy and cheap marketing tactic, but try to imagine the scenario before jumping the gun:

The small business owner opens her bank statement, and a pen falls out. She grabs the pen and eagerly reads the slogan. Then, curious about what the slogan means, she immediately dials her local branch and waits patiently on hold for a couple minutes. When she finally gets someone on the phone, she says, “Hey, I got your pen! Please tell me all about your services for small businesses!”

Somehow that scenario doesn’t seem too plausible. In fact, I think most people would just toss the pen into a drawer, or even into the trash can, without reading the message or thinking about what the slogan means. And if you really look at most premiums, you see that they’re a part of equally unlikely scenarios. Sure, they often cost little, so marketers often fall for them. But they usually don’t work too well, causing even that little bit of money to go to waste.

Don’t give up hope! You can find some way to use a premium so that people actually get the message about your business or product and, as a result, take some action. In the earlier bank example, a coffee mug may work better than a pen. A mug gives you room to print more information about the services you offer, such as a “Did You Know?” headline followed by short, bulleted facts about the problems the bank can solve for a small business owner (“Miser National Bank offers automatic bill paying” and so on). A customer, drinking coffee from that mug at the office, sees the information you print on it more often and may become curious enough about one of the services listed to ask for details the next time she goes to the bank. But why will she keep the mug at the office and use it? Because it’s attractive, and perhaps because it has something appealing (a nice picture, for example) on the opposite side of your marketing message.

Prizing premium quality over quantity

A premium is a gift from you to your customer — which means it tells your customers a great deal about you and what you think of them. A cheap, tacky gift may look good when you run the numbers, but it doesn’t look good to the customer who receives it. Yet most premiums are of low or medium quality. Few are as good as, or better than, what you’d buy for yourself. Make sure whatever premium item you choose is of good quality.

tip.eps You can make your premium stand out by simply selecting an item of higher-than-usual quality. One health spa, for example, orders the nicest terry-cloth robes money can buy, with an elegant embroidered version of its logo on the chest, and sells them at cost to customers, who view them as prized possessions. A customer remembers a better gift more easily, and that gift creates a stronger and more positive image of the marketer. And more customers keep and use higher-quality items for a lengthy period of time.

Of course, a better premium usually costs more. But you can justify this cost by selecting a premium that makes a greater impact — and reduce the cost by distributing it to a better-quality, more selective list. Consider the following example:

  • Premium A (Cheap premium with direct-mail solicitation)
    • Cost of Premium A = $5 each, or $5,000 for a distribution of 1,000.
    • Response Rate (customer orders within 1 month) = 1.5 percent, or 15 per thousand.
    • If profit from each order is $1,000, premium gross = $15,000.
    • Return = gross of $15,000 per thousand minus cost of $5,000 per thousand = $10,000 per thousand.
  • Premium B (Expensive premium with direct-mail solicitation)
    • Cost of Premium B = $25 each, or $25,000 for a distribution of 1,000.
    • Response Rate (customer orders within 1 month) = 12 percent, or 120 per thousand.
    • If profit from each order is $1,000, premium gross = $120,000.
    • Return = gross of $120,000 per thousand minus cost of $25,000 per thousand = $95,000 per thousand.

If the $25 premium is of significantly higher quality, you can expect a more positive impact on your customers — and higher response rates in any direct-response program. Thus, the return is often considerably higher on a high-quality premium — provided you target the premium to the right customers (those likely to respond according to your scenario) and don’t just blast it out to a poor-quality list.

For a quality take on some classic premiums, plus a broad assortment of high-quality clothing and luggage options, try Lands’ End Business Outfitters (visit www.landsend.com and click on the Business Outfitters tab or call 800-587-1541). It offers everything from aprons and sweaters to canvas bags and beach towels; it can even neatly embroider your logo and message. I recommend the company for screen-printed T-shirts, too. And although it’s known for clothing, it carries higher-end mugs, water bottles, and other good premium items as well. I keep hoping someone will send me a good reusable water bottle as a premium gift, so I don’t have to go buy one for myself!