Images_Digital_Edition_January_2019

www.images-magazine.com JANUARY 2019 images 115 KB MARKET INTELLIGENCE Take advantage of these benefits by contacting existing customers. Simply by showing some care during your downtime, you can prime the pump for purchasing and referrals by confirming how important their business is to you. This confirmation should go beyond the standard email contact if you’d like to stand out from the rest: call personally, send a handwritten card or perhaps even take time to personally deliver a bonus decorated product. Surprising customers with thoughtful contacts or a small gift, even self- promotional products, can create a positive impression. Make sure to ask questions that show interest in your customer‘s business or club and ask about any upcoming plans. Listen carefully and you’ll not only show how engaged you are with them, but also identify potential opportunities to serve their needs and form preliminary proposals for a future contact. Even if a customer is clear about not wanting to plan ahead, asking satisfied customers to help out in the coming year with referrals and reviews is still worthwhile. It may be that this is a quiet time for your customer too, in which case they may be more likely to spend some time reviewing and referring while they aren’t bogged down in their own projects. Cultivate content To be found online you not only need to be where the people are, you also need to have the information that they are looking to find. If you want to make a name for your company, creating content that is useful and entertaining to your potential client while answering critical questions is sure to have an effect. To pull inbound traffic, you want to have your content local to your site and shared via social channels; this content helps you establish yourself as an expert in the field as well as catching those searches. You need to create a regular content stream, something that can be hard to manage when volume is high on the production floor. There’s no better time than now to start farming ‘evergreen’ content to fill out your stream. Though you will sprinkle in timely, reactive content throughout the year, you can answer the concerns that consistently come up with customers, profile products that are staples in your stitching or offer technique information to help customers select the decoration that suits them best, and create a calendar of content that’s ready to roll out on a regular basis between the reactive posts. Start a list of these evergreen topics and use this slower period to write and capture images for as many of them as you can to build up a content catalogue. Make sure that you always focus on providing value to the customer first. Make topic and content generation a habit: always take notes and capture images and video when you see something interesting in and around your shop. The foundation of content you create when production is slow will buoy your efforts to be consistent and allow you to tackle publishing in the available time without scrambling for topics and resources. Anticipate advertising Ideation is the largest initial cost of almost any project; coming up with concepts for advertising can be difficult when deadlines are looming so looking to seasonal trends and local events before the year is underway can help you be prepared to promote the right products at the right times. Page through your calendar and fill in seasonal changes as well as prominent local events, making sure to mark promotional projects for each a month in advance of both. Brainstorm the kinds of products that would suit each event and make notes for your eventual advertisement or promotion and how you would showcase embroidery on each. With time for customer contacts and promotion in media built in, you’ll be able to use the awareness of events or seasonal needs to boost your own promotions. Evaluate and estimate Any attempt at growth, whether it‘s a matter of making simple efforts like those above or opting for more far-reaching reorganisation, requires tracking progress and making sure that your activities are aligned with your goals. If you haven‘t been keeping an eye on costs and profits as you should, this is the time to start, but this analysis Festivals and events aren‘t all about the official contract for vending; this design is one of hundreds for the individual balloon teams that will attend Albuquerque‘s International Balloon Fiesta. All the local teams want their own customised gear aside from the official offerings, leaving plenty of opportunity for sales if you market correctly With an inexpensive headset and screen capture software, you can record videos of your digital work and informational presentations in which you can educate your customers about your business practices. Imagine when you need to discuss a digitising fee if you were able to email a link showing your customer the work required to digitise a design, narrated by staffers they know. Add that to the fact that these videos translate well to social media content and blog entries, and even those among us who don‘t feel comfortable writing blog posts can create valuable content with minimal effort. If you can put together just 12 short videos and 12 blog posts, you have a bi-weekly content stream as the backbone for your marketing year