The hidden opportunity in your PDF downloads

If your company is like most these days, you have numerous PDFs on your Web site available for download. With this cost effective and user friendly tactic, many companies are missing the opportunity to let the PDF help close the sale.

PDF Newsletter (Toyota Material Handling)

Too often, the downloadable PDF is not professionally designed because you’re not investing in offset printing. Such treatment can lead to missed opportunities. When uploading documents in PDF format to your Web site, ask yourself, “What does my audience do with those documents, and are my PDFs doing their job?”

From investor relations to sales collateral, your PDF downloads provide a convenient means for potential buyers and investors to collect the information they seek.  But do those documents rise to the level of your corporate identity? Do they enhance your brand? Do they build your image? Do they sell?

When researching a vendor, product or service, buyers commonly collect downloaded PDFs and spit them out of the office printer for later analysis. Product information, whitepapers, spec sheets, company fact sheets, annual reports – they’re all being downloaded and printed as we speak. While offset printing volumes are being reduced, the office printer is alive and well.

So treat the office printer like another media channel. When your company’s material comes out looking superior to the others in the prospect’s collection, you’ve just jumped to the top of the stack.

Is your marketing plan ready for the upturn?

The industrial blogosphere was teeming with very cautious optimism about an economic turnaround somewhere on the distant horizon. An unexpected uptick in durable goods orders in February prompted some such blog entries, like this one posted by Jorina Fontelera, managing editor of ThomasNet, on TN’s Industrial Market Trends blog. The writer rightly cites far more negative indications, noting it’s way too early to get excited.

Whether or not we’ve hit bottom yet, good marketers are asking themselves two questions:

1. Has the recession changed your market and/or your competitors?

2. Will your company or brand be in a good marketing position prior to the rebound? (Is your marketing plan poised?)

If you can’t answer the first question in a half-second, chances are the answer to the second one is “no.”

Great brands strengthen their overall brand position by marketing specifically to the special needs created by the recession.  If your company keeps that mantra, your brand–even your corporate identity–stays present among its audience and fosters good will.

When it comes time for your audience to make buying decisions in the next economy, they will remember the brand who stuck with them when the times were tough.

Email will be an essential tactic in your marketing mix for 2009

If you haven’t gotten serious about email marketing yet, 2009 is the year you will. It has become the cog in the engine of corporate marketing from first response to ongoing customer relationship management.

Whether consumer or business-to-business, email is one of the most critical touch points between a brand and its public. Good email marketing is not a “blast.” Rather, it is relevant and valuable to the recipient. In today’s economy, it’s not enough to push various sales messages out to your public. When done right, email is an effective, rapid way to build brand image and create loyal customers.

Email marketing is most effective when used in tandem with direct mail, Web landing pages, and a CRM system. And in 2009, a challenging economic year, smart marketers will be doing it. Why?

• It’s the primary communication between company and customer
• It’s the bridge between advertising and selling
• It’s proven to be a cost-effective way to increase and retain business among the existing customer base

So with everyone trying their hand at email marketing, how can you avoid being lost in the noise? Careful attention to branding and message is the short answer. The following article has appeared on several blogs lately and offers timely tips:

How Can You Make Your Emails Stand Out?

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An old brand can be the ticket to new market share

Looking for a shortcut to increased market share? If you have opportunity, buy an old brand. Building a dominant brand in any market segment can take decades. In today’s market, some savvy companies are looking for fire-sale prices on old school brands.

The following article shared from Forbes.com tells the story of an entreprenurial company who purchased, of all things, the Gold Bond brand of medicated foot powder. Instead of updating the brand, the company smartly milked the old-school look of the brand and extended it to a myriad of personal care products.

read more | digg story

Corporate branding should improve the bottom line, not dent it

(By Michael Ervin, published in Orange County Business Journal)

Throughout the past decade, the focus on corporate branding has led to a heightened awareness of the critical role a branding campaign plays in the communications mix. We know that effective promotion of a brand helps customers, employees and shareholders better understand a company and its offerings. It enhances the confidence that stakeholders have in that business and its activities. It differentiates the company from its competition. And, we now see that all of these attributes can have a positive effect on a company’s fiscal health.

Unfortunately, the last decade also found those who believed that companies could “out brand” their competition simply by outspending them. Often, corporate branding campaigns offered high hopes at a hefty price. There were those who thought that the more money spent to “invent” a company’s brand, the more powerful it would become. But now, more than ever, we know that smart—not necessarily costly—branding is effective and essential. And smart branding is based on a company’s current, definable practices, activities, philosophies and personality.

A truly effective marketing communications program will uncover the strongest brand identity for a company when it is based on reality. By showcasing a company’s greatest strengths—hopefully those that also differentiate it in the marketplace—a company can build valuable credibility that resonates with its customers, employees and shareholders. Since a corporate brand is a reflection of what is true about a company, no amount of money thrown at “inventing” a brand will be successful—the company must walk the talk of the brand image it promotes. A well-researched, efficiently crafted, reality-based branding communications effort, therefore, need not be a multi-million-dollar proposition.

Not only is branding based on facts essential for enhancing a company’s goodwill, it has also become a necessary business practice to fortify balance sheets. Recent studies show that a brand’s power accounts for a whopping five percent of those things that contribute to whether the stock price will go up or down. When you consider the fact that a company’s “financial strength” factored in at only six percent—a mere percentage point difference—you can see how much power a brand wields.

Of course, stock price or shareholder confidence is one thing. A strong brand can also impact a company’s bottom line by affecting its ability to retain employees, attract customers and, ultimately, reduce costs by building momentum on its marketing dollars.

Gone are the days when branding efforts were optional. In today’s competitive marketplace, building corporate brand identity is critical to gaining ground on competitors. And while it shouldn’t place a heavy financial burden on a company, branding is simply something we can’t afford not to do.