June 2008
The Pitch Before the Pitch
Here are seven ways creative distributors are marketing their businesses and services – and how they hook clients way before they ask for the sale.
hink selling is all that matters as a distributor? Think again. Too often distributors hit the streets or phones for cold calls and sales pitches without investing time in solid marketing efforts beforehand. But, as our research shows, it pays to prime the prospects first.
What follows: examples of recent marketing tactics that generated huge income and results for distributors nationwide. Learn some tactics that can work for you.
1. Create a corporate network
Cindy Gibbs used to sell apparel to a number of widely scattered boat dealers by way of their corporate offices. All seemed well until dealers balked at the poor apparel choices their corporate overseers offered. What’s more, dealers tended to pay for shirts a few at a time, as the need arose – to fill staff apparel needs as well as to restock the retail shelves in the boating store outlets in which they sold their branded shirts to consumers.
Then Gibbs, owner of Big Fish Branding Inc. (asi/466105), decided to shake things up. She created marketing-driven order forms and an accompanying catalog with a limited number of products (from 10 to 15 shirts, sweatshirts and jackets), and pitched this idea to the company’s corporate headquarters: Dealers should buy their apparel several times a year during designated buying times, rather than in dribs and drabs whenever they wanted. Dealers could review the catalog Gibbs created, complete the pre-made order form and fax it back to Big Fish’s offices directly, eliminating the corporate office middleman. In turn, Gibbs could place orders in bulk and guarantee reduced pricing.
Recently, she launched the program and received $9,000 in orders from 100 dealers nationwide. A few months later, dealers ordered again, this time spending $23,000. “In the past, corporate picked stuff they thought the dealers would want,” Gibbs says. But corporate’s choices often nonplussed the dealers. The marketing piece that Gibbs put together herself, using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, allows her to change up the catalog seasonally, or whenever the dealers request it. What’s more, the catalog can either be printed out or sent by e-mail as a PDF, eliminating virtually any marketing cost to Gibbs. And, ultimately, she says, she can survey dealers and better gauge their interest about the products her catalog is showcasing, so she knows she’s offering them what they want to buy.
2. Make it memorable
Draughon Cranford will never forget the first time he shocked his UPS representative, who pulled up to the offices of Xpress Image (asi/364643), where Cranford’s the vice president, and saw 100 pizza boxes ready for shipment.
They were the latest marketing gimmick cooked up by Cranford – one of many unusual mailers he sends out to regular customers to keep them interested in what Xpress has to offer.
“He picks up the pizza boxes and says, ‘What in the world?’” Cranford says. The customers who received the pizza boxes probably said the same thing. Each box said “hot and fresh” on the outside. Inside was an Xpress Image catalog, a T-shirt and a bag of microwaveable popcorn. The promo, which cost less than $6 to purchase, assemble and ship, created a buzz when the items were sent out in November.
How to Woo
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3. Use the Web for marketing
When Cranford isn’t sending out pizza boxes, he’s often building leads through the online networking site Biznik.com. “I found it by accident,” Cranford says, while he was conducting an online search for a friend one day. That small “mis-search” has paid off in spades.
With just 12 people in his network, Cranford is starting small, but says already he’s received referrals for business through the site, and says other distributors would be smart to leverage any online social or business networking sites to get more orders. What’s more, he says, being involved in sites like that increases his “Googleability,” as he calls it, driving up page rankings for his own company by attaching its name to other well-known sites. Biznik, he says, is particularly helpful for small businesses, because the focus of it is to build “small, local communities online and continue them as business ventures offline.” Cranford, who is located in NC, says he’s gotten business from clients as far away as Seattle.
4. Give to their sweet spot
The best marketing tools target end-users’ biggest concerns, and show them how promotional products can help with those concerns. Trae Taylor, president of Peak Incentives (asi/292462), knows that. One of his biggest clientele groups is meeting planners – a professional contingent whose jobs are enormously high-stressed, as they’re forever on duty before, during and after an event is planned. They’re also inundated with promotional product offers and ideas. So, to get their attention, a distributor has to break through that clutter. To do that, Taylor and his company created custom convention badges “for the first annual meeting of overworked meeting planners,” he says, a fictitious event he created. Each badge was personalized for a different meeting planner. In addition, a lanyard was attached to each badge, bearing the message, “Lack of planning on your part doesn’t justify an emergency on ours.”
The badges, which were mailed out in early March, and were first field-tested with a few planners to make sure they would “get a chuckle,” were sent to 200 of the company’s core clientele of event planners, along with a postcard touting Peak Incentives’ ability to help lower the stress of planners who need to order apparel and other promotional products. One side of the postcard has a picture of a woman at a desk pulling her hair out. The other side of the postcard has a picture of a girl holding a beach towel that says, “Stress-free promotions are just a call away.” The personalized pieces cost less than $3 to make, and while it’s too early to gauge results, Taylor has high hopes. “It’s cute. It’s different,” he says.
5. Optimize online
With Google’s AdWords, the model for click-per-view is almost archaic these days as a marketing method online, distributors are finding more and more innovative ways to reach customers. At FiberLok (asi/54075), Brown Abrams, the company’s CEO, says that means creating an online video – even if it means spending $30,000 to do so, which FiberLok recently did.
Six months ago, the company started exploring new ways to connect with customers through the Web and its Web site. The first video was so successful that Brown and his team are creating a second one. The video covers 30 years of the most often asked questions about the company’s signature product – a textile mouse pad. “It stops people and engages them,” Abrams says, and ultimately increases their visit time on the site. And that kind of marketing piece, Abrams believes, “instantly legitimizes us” in visitors’ minds.
His company, he says, also shows the video on a continuous loop at trade shows. The continuity of seeing the video in multiple places also creates a marketing message and impression with audiences that’s seamless.
6. Direct to the trade show
In a world where most companies are trying to attract customers through the most innovative medium and methods possible, direct mail often gets overlooked. But it still has a place in the promotional products industry, says David Bebon, executive vice president of Capital Mercury Apparel (asi/43778). And so do trade shows. Capital Mercury, Bebon says, has paired the two methods to gain marketing heft in the industry for more than 10 years.
The main point of the mailings, he says, is to attract new customers while building upon the company’s existing client base. To do that, Bebon and his team use trade shows as the fulcrum of their direct-mail efforts. The company’s efforts, Bebon says, started with the first trade show Capital Mercury ever attended in 1996. Since then, the company has compiled a list of 20,000 names. The secret? The postcards the team sends out before each show offers a free product (often a T-shirt) to any visitor who swings by Capital Mercury’s booth during the show.
The first mailing and show blew Bebon’s mind. “Fifty people were lined up at quarter to nine with their little crinkled postcards waiting for a shirt,” he says. “We realized we had an effective tool.”
But to make that tool effective, Capital Mercury didn’t just hand out T-shirts to those patient enough to wait in line. Booth staff asked them to first sit down for a 10-minute seminar on the company’s products. That weeds out the “sweepers,” Bebon says – those who troll trade show floors in search of swag. The company typically gives out 1,000 to 1,200 shirts a show, and gives out order forms on the floor to those who are interested.
7. Give to get
When your signature product is a private-label cap, customized for clients, marketing becomes as customized as the products you’re selling, says David Brown, president of Carolina Cap Co. (asi/43974). As a supplier, Carolina Cap wants to help distributors market to end-users. To do that, the company has developed a program (the idea for which came from a similar promotion proposed by a distributor Carolina Cap worked with in 2004) for distributors, particularly those who sell products to charity organizations or companies that sponsor charity events through golf tournaments.
Through the program, golfers are offered the opportunity to buy caps, embroidered with the event logo on the front, the event’s Web site over the arch on the back, and a sequential number embroidered on the side. Golfers are then offered “prize money” (as much as $900) in a drawing that used the numbers embroidered on the hats. The prize money is then donated to the tournament’s charity. The idea works like this: Caps sold for $5, for example, to distributors are then sold to tournament organizers for $8, and to golfers for $20. A tournament with 150 players can bring in as much as $3,000 and net distributors an extra $450, Brown says. And, for charities that want to repeat the event, it builds customer loyalty with distributors and, in turn, with Brown’s company.
Promo Products at Home
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BETSY CUMMINGS is a senior writer for Wearables.
