Multi-Channel Marketing

Larson & Associates Multi-Channel Marketing Program gives you the opportunity to get your message out and reach consumers through one of three media:        

·         Teleprospecting / Telemarketing
·         Social Media
·         Web Site SEO
·         Direct Mail
·         Email Marketing

Fact is the more marketing channels your company is using the easier for prospects to find and become customers.  You probably have a brick and mortar location as well as a website and company brochure and (seeing that your reading this online) perhaps some social media marketing.  Each channel provides a different view and gives you a different kind of marketing avenue and prospect “eyes”.  This is what multi-channel marketing is all about.  Each channel provides a different opportunity for prospects to find you, interact with you and to buy from you.

Whether you choose Teleprospecting, Social Media, Web-SEO, Direct Mail or Email Marketing we can help you get your message out.  Starting by knowing, understanding and isolating the demographics of the targeted group of people or companies you are targeting and the message you are sending can help decide not which channels to use but which ones to devote the most effort into.

If you are not sure who your best customers are we can analyze your current customer list, find out the kinds of clients you work best with and basically find you more of them in any number of ways.

If you really need more prospects call us. It is not a problem.  We simply take the target we have created and make connections for you.  It’s almost that simple.



Call Me, Howard Larson, now, at 847-991-1294, for a free consultation,

If results are what you need and expect contact us today. We do what others only promise.

Larson & Associates / We Make Good Businesses Great & Great Businesses Even Better.
www.larsonassociates.ws
847-991-1294

All associates located in the United States

Remember, you can ONLY get the Larson advantage at Larson & Associates

Ways Lead Generation Works

If you can’t keep your sales pipeline full of fresh new leads you will fail. NO matter what out of any list of 100 names there are only a certain number of new customers. So every time you take 1 out of the list be it a yes or a no, you don’t lose 1 real lead, you lose that 1 and maybe 20 more that were never going to buy but are still in your data base.

1) Using The Wrong People – For every lead generation program, you need to be sure that the employees be it inside telemarketer or outside rep making the sales calls have the appropriate background and knowledge. I would say you want to be finding a mature adult who knows how to think on their feet. A college education back ground doesn’t hurt and any kind of selling experience. If you can get any familiarity with the client, product or service is you got a real winner.

2) Defining The Lead – How will sales reps or telemarketer know when they have a lead or suspect if they have no clue what a good lead looks like in the first place? What does a customer look like? If you can’t define it don’t expect anyone else to be able to do it for you. A business can qualify a lead by industry, company size, revenue, location, and be taking the prospect to a closed sale faster by confirming the more advanced information like budget, authority and timeline.

3) Poor Messaging – A message that does not resonate with prospects or that is difficult to understand, or one that is difficult for sales reps or telemarketers to say and deliver is going to slow down any kind of lead generation campaign. Your company must have a clear, pointed, directed message that speaks to the needs, the pains or the joys for your product or service from your company for the prospect to generate results.

4) Wrong target – If you have the wrong list the message does not make any difference. This happens when you do not properly build or acquiring a list of prospects based on your company’s perfect customer or if you focus too much on the influencer and not the ones making the buying decisions. Remember the perfect demographics when making or getting your list, industry, company size, revenue, and location.

5) Poor Lead Handoff – This sometimes means a lead was not properly qualified, or it took too long for a good lead to the sales people too late, well after the prospect has forgotten about the conversation or bought from another vendor. It done right and seamlessly a proper lead handoff can help businesses avoid both of these situations.

Larson Notes & Satire:  I have always said the better the Lead List the better the Lead Generation process. If you are hitting on the right people and the right companies they well need what you are selling day in and day out.

There are ways to do this. Secrets if you want to call them that to make the process better. I call it experience.

So how will your company grow in 2013? Share with us your thoughts. What has worked in your organization in lead generation and what are mistakes you have learned from in the past?

And if you want your business to be more and have more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

The Mindset of a Communication Services Provider

Get your head out of the sand. If you can start thinking of more than just a shift in technology or product line, becoming a Communication Services Provider is at least to start with, a shift of mindset. As a CSP, you’ll still be a Printer or a Print

Services Provider (PSP) but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real change is in your head, it is one of your overall perspectives of your business and your company.

Here are four ways to adopt and implement yourself as a Communication Services Provider

1^st Start by talking to your customers. Really when was the last time you talked to your key accounts on what they need, not just in the way of printing but about their entire communication needs and process.

2^nd Selling a product or service is only one step of what you need to be doing. Selling printing makes you a commodity. Selling a communication service makes you a total service filling out a full need, not a part. If you do it right, this interacting with customers should of course be a constant back and forth process for the entire life cycle of the customer. As a Communication Services Provider you need to learn about the reason behind the products and services they buy. With each service and transaction you make, you need to know and ask “What is that client’s ultimate goal and reason for doing this.”

As there Communication Services Provider your mind needs to be project based, not product based. You are solving a problem not a requirement of that problem. You’re starting a communication partnership, instead of just being a print vendor. If you understand your customer’s print marketing goals and how those align with their overall marketing goals you start to become valued partner. If all you do is pick up the phone, take the order and then hang up and do the job, become noting more than a commodity.

3^rd Start Selling Solutions. Shifting from PSP to CSP means you’ll have to sell yourself in terms of total solutions instead of just products. The print part of a project is just that, only part of the solution. Now you need to communicate the benefits of print in the context of the total communication and marketing system.

The brochure you print, the flier you produced, your direct mail offering you have going out isn’t important because it’s just a piece of paper or a nicely typeset invitation to purchase your client’s product. All of those things mean nothing really. You can go out and buy them anywhere. The direct mail pieces, the flier, the brochure, are nothing without knowledge of the entire process. You need to be selling the solution not the product.

4^th the all important Follow Up. If you have listened to and understand your client’s business goals and communication and marketing objectives, you’re finally in a position to follow up with them and offer them true value. Your printing company is already part of the communication and marketing process. Now, take those isolated printed pieces and make it a communication campaign with all the other parts of the channels of marketing and communication.

As a Communication Services Provider, you can sell clients on creating complete projects both on and off line, which allow you to track campaign result and engagement. You can further automate the process to report to your clients on exactly how the mail performed–who went to the personalized webpage, how long they stayed and whether they acted truly interested. In other words, you can become a total marketing partner, actively delivering leads, reporting marketing effectiveness and using measurement tools to make future campaigns more effective for them

Just remember becoming a Communication Services Provider means changing your perspective, then match that with your product and service offerings. You aren’t just selling a new product: you’re partnering with a client to help them find total communication solutions not just print solutions that solve their problems.

Larson Notes & Satire:  So how will your company grow in 2013? Only in one way? Print if you’re a printer? Signs if you’re a sign shop? Yet you could be more, so much more. If there was a way for you to become a complete communication company for your key accounts at no cost to you, would you?

If you want your business to be more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Growth Synergies for the Printer

I know it goes against every bone in your ink stained body but to grow in 2013 might require a new way of thinking. Are the old strategies still working for you? I’m guessing no. I’m guessing you are getting hammered from the right and from the left from online, to do it on my copy machine to paperless.

So what do you do? If you play ostrich and put your head in the sand you’re done for. The only word that comes to mind is Synergy. You need to find people in related fields that can add to your company’s service base. Surround yourself with a team of experts to engage in a successful hands off partnership.

If the railroads had see how airline companies were going to come in and dominate passenger traffic they might have gotten into the business of flying or bought them out when they were small and buyable.

If you’re a commercial printer, this is especially a wise strategy to consider. You can buy your way in. But that takes money which is in short supply.

We all know that in a flat economy, sales are hard to come by. And I call 2% growth pretty flat. That’s why you can’t just think of adding more sales people, or cutting your costs. After the last few years or cost cutting are there any more places to cut costs? Probably not. And as for qualified salespeople the good ones are not moving and the bad ones, well you don’t want them.

To do what I am suggesting you may have to reconsider the basic structure of your business. Parts of your business that are drags on your business. What would happen if you stopped or outsourced those parts?

Then there is expansion of services. Could you achieve synergies to make your “printing” company a communication company by teaming with someone else? This is a case where you could work with a competitor or parallel company to achieve a win-win situation.

There are risks, there always are risks.  But the greatest risk a printing owner can make is to be stuck in his or her definition of what the definition of their company and business is and to formulate a growth strategy.

Larson Notes & Satire:  If you want to bust out of the trap of being a printer to one of being a marketing communication company. We have ideas. They might work for your company, they might not. As for why, what we know about web, social media marketing, telemarketing will take you time to catch up to what we know and guess what? By then we will know even more. My point is to form a synergy with an organization like ours who does not want to steal the printing side of your business but work behind the scenes as a partner letting you keep in total control of the customer base might be just what you need to get your company to 2014.

If you want your business to be more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

White Hat / Black Hat Better Know The Difference

I might know every wrong way to make a website go up on the search engines. You know the ones that get your site booted out of Google and then you need to go on bended knee and beg them to take your web site back and list it.  You might think oh that’s bad. But let me tell you it’s very very good.

When it comes to social media marketing, there is a long list of best practices and worst practices that you the marketing manager or business owner needs to be aware of.

Sometimes this line of good and bad get all messy, and even though you might be innocently just trying to improve your hits and followers or metrics, BAM! The web marshal goes and puts your site in web jail. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 new followers! Yes you could be crossing the line and being accused of using “black hat tactics”.

Black hat tactics go against both the written and unwritten rules of social media. Yes we are at war, but these kinds of tactics bait the system in order to achieve better results. Now some black hat tactics are clearly underhanded and I mean sneaky bad, and easy to identify, others are not so bad and are leveraged by thousands of marketers and companies on a daily basis, sometimes on purpose and many times totally unintentionally. Below I have given you 5 black hat strategies, along with ways to clean up your act.

Black Hat 1: Buying your Audience
This is such an obvious black hat practice, and it really makes no sense to do. While there are many services that make it simple for someone to purchase fans or followers, this tactic has little-to-no value. The popularity is nice and we all wanted to be Homecoming King or Queen in High School, but you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Not only can you totally damage your company’s reputation with your real 3F’s friends, family and followers, but chances are that these mysterious new audience fans don’t care much about what your company has to say. Then again, purchased fans and followers could hide spammers and hackers, which have the potential to really cause a whole lot of problems for you.

White Hat 1: Growing your Audience
The best way to grow your audience is with engaging content. This includes great posts, insightful content, images, videos, promotions, polls and any other type of interactive ideas and update that grabs you attention. Once you start posting content on a regular basis and promote it on your SM page even more people can see, find and comment on it. This should be done on both Facebook and Twitter. As you do this you (nicely) get the word about your company’s social profiles, which helps increase real fan and follower.

Black Hat 2: Running Facebook Promotions Directly on a Page
This is an example of where the lines between black hat and white hat get blurry. Although many companies run promotions on Facebook on a regular basis, only companies who are running these promotions within Apps on Facebook.com are actually complying with the Facebook Pages Terms.

White Hat 2: Running Legit Promotions
The Facebook Pages Terms make it totally clear that promotions must be administered within Apps, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App. However, social marketing managers should also note some of the network’s other promotion rules, like acknowledging that promotions are not endorsed or sponsored by Facebook, disclosing who is collecting participants’ information, as well as not using Facebook functions (such as likes, comments or check-ins) as valid actions for entries into a contest or promotion.

Black Hat 3: Spamming for Traffic
Another obvious black hat tactic is spamming for traffic. Most of us have seen the social spammers, who tend to comment on popular posts and tweets with a random message in addition to some strange link. While most of you reading this article know better than to click on these suspect links, others don’t, which is why this shady tactic continues.

White Hat 3: Posting for Traffic
The best way to fight against spammers is to report them, but this doesn’t solve the problem of how you can obtain more web traffic via the social media. Aside from posting good engaging content, another way companies can boost their visibility (and therefore web site traffic) is by participating in conversations on topics, which is most easily done on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Black Hat 4: Corrupt Cover Photos
Facebook cover photos are meant to be a representation of your company, but some companies leverage this area to promote sales. The Facebook Page Terms, however, clearly labels these tactics as prohibited. In fact, covers images cannot be made up of more than 20 percent text, include price or purchase information, contain website, email or mailing addresses, have references to Facebook actions or other call-to-actions.

White Hat 5: Innovative Cover Photos
If you are determined to use your cover photo to promote a new service or product, try to use some imagination in order to not breach the Facebook Pages Terms. While a cover photo car get to the point or a new product or service you need it to also comply with cover photo guidelines by not including too much text, a call-to-action or pricing information.

Black Hat 5: Sneaky Automation
Using automated services for social media campaigns is another place where the lines between black and white hats get blurry. While these services can make life much easier for you, they can also be major annoyances when done the wrong way. An example of a bad use of automation is when company’s send out generic messages to new followers and fans thanking them for becoming a follower. While you might not think this is “bad”, some companies take the thank you message a step further by asking their new fans to take an immediate action in engaging with them by adding a link to their website, a product or additional social profile within the message. While this might not bother some people, it can turn others away.

White Hat 5: Automation to Help Save Time
Automation tools should be used to help you make the posting process done in less time. A service like IFTTT can make some social media management tasks easier, you should remember that interactions with fans and followers should come off as authentic, and not from a robot. Use it but be careful. It is social and sooner or later you need to interact.

Larson Notes & Satire:  So are you I hot water? Are you a Black Hat, White Hat, Gray Hat or a Hat Of Many Colors, or do you just not know?

Take it from a guy who knows all the Black Hat ways to do web promotion. The dirty little truth is these 5 Hats are just the tip of the iceberg as to what you should be working through. And, what you don’t know can hurt you.

So you might want to think about your next step. We put it all together with a powerful knowledge and experience base.

If you want your business to be more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Should You Be Mobile?

Was doing some reading this morning at the kitchen table.
>Expect 63% more people to be shopping on mobile devices during the next couple years
>Already 51% of people feel very comfortable making purchases from their mobile devices
>To people with mobile devices say the most important app features are:
>36% access coupons
>35% comparison shopping
>31% customer reviews
>28% make purchases
>26% track shipping

This leads me into asking should your company be doing mobile? B2B has been wondering about this I know but let’s take a closer look.

Mobile site and email traffic continues to skyrocket. In May alone, GigaOm reported that there are 5.5 devices per household, and they see that increasing to as many as 8 by 2016.

A recent study by Foolproof reported nearly half of consumers would not engage with a company if they had a poor mobile Web experience! And nearly 60% said they viewed a company as "being in touch" with them after having a positive mobile experience. Think about yourself. Look at your own thoughts and behavior, how likely are you to revisit a site after having a frustrating mobile experience with them, like “how dare they waste my time!”

You are facing a huge challenge. Your customers are becoming more savvy about marketing then you are. Their lives are a blur of offline and online interactions with friends, fans, family and favorite brands. Now we are going to increase the challenge with people on their smart phones and tablets and they expect to do the exact same things on those devices that they are doing on their desktop, but with very different constraints. When you don't make it easy for consumers to complete an action guess what? They won't. Marketers are leaving impressions, clicks, conversions, sales on the table, lost somewhere in cyber space when they don't create a seamless mobile experience for them.

By planning and designing the mobile experience, you can improve all your versions of your content including your desktop version. To do so, you the marketer need to understand the constraints smart phones and tablets put in place and really align your marketing strategies to their behavior.

Let’s be honest here, every, yes EVERY channel has constraints. In email, you have rules for each mail client. In direct mail, you need to work in a more traditional structure to print what you want or do you, think variable data.

Mobile, which is what we are talking about, makes viewing your web site and content to conform to a new set of limitations, rules and opportunities. By embracing these constraints, you can find explosive ways to talk to customers. In a network there are a substantial number of phones that are able to get on the 4G LTE network and amazing as it might seem, a mobile network is even faster at loading Web pages than some desktop computers. Most phones, however, are still on a 3G network, so they have slower loading times. And then (death warmed over) there are certain places (like that dead spot in the corner of house) where they just don't get service.

Larson Notes & Satire:  Ok so you have a printing company. Maybe you have a small copy shop. Think of all those Brides out there shopping for Save-the-Date and Wedding announcements.

You have a large web shop printing 100 page catalogs. That worried buyer, you know the person who graduated from college 3 years ago, is worried about getting them on time and tracks his shipment.

Should I go on? That CFO who gets lost on his way to the press check?

So you might want to think about your next step. We put it all together with a powerful knowledge and experience base.

If you want your business to be more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
|http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Did you know that you can economize on your print marketing and increase your marketing effectiveness simultaneously?

You might equate saving money with choosing less expensive paper or printing less, but it is about targeting and optimization. Here are ways you can save marketing dollars while actually improving your results.

1) Clean your database. Yes, get rid of all those dead end names, out of business companies, people who have lost or left their jobs. Throw them out. Then try to make sure all the addresses are correct both email and physical addresses. There is no sense spending the time emailing something to someone that has no chance of getting there. Even an email blast has a cost. As for mail? Mail, even if you print it yourself has a cost to print and mail it out but the name is not quite as important because it might go to the new person who took your old prospects place. When your mail gets to the place you want it to go, your response rates go up!

What percentage of a direct mailing you do actually gets delivered? Do you have any idea? According to the United States Postal Service, 30% of all bulk mail never gets to its location because the addresses are undeliverable.

So work hard to keep your mailing list up to date if you are going to use it, it is money you don’t waist. The USPS can and wants to help you. They don’t like all that junk mail they can’t deliver either. So they have a service called the United States Postal Service CASS certification to confirm that addresses in your list are deliverable. Run your list through the NCOA (National Change of Address) every six months and keep that list scrubbed.

Next best thing you can do with your list is to break it down into segments. Not all prospects are created equal or should get the same message. Break down your database to pin point accuracy by targeting your message to different demographic groups within your larger target audience. This will not just decrease your print runs and postage but because your message is more relevant you will increase your response rates.

2) Divide in to target markets. By dividing your audience in to groups, you can speak to each more specifically. You might tailor your message by sic code. You might offer different products to businesses falling in to different levels of number of employees or sales. You might send different offers and incentives to current customers versus your past customers.

If you don't have demographics that you can pull out of in your database, and they do really help, demographic direction is very cost-effective. Talk to us about adding different variables into your market segment that will help to increase the pointed direction you want your marketing to attack or be directed to. The tighter your direction and offer the better your return on investment (ROI) will be.

Then think about your overall push. Be it direct mail, email blast or a telemarketing campaign, if you are still printing and mailing bulk if your email mail is not pointed if your telemarketing secret is one size fits all just to economize, it might be time to rethink. Get off the merry-go-round of marketing nonsense. Today's channels no matter what you are working in from Social Media Marketing to Direct Mail can be tailor made to fit your target. Offset and digital technologies let you print on demand (POD) and/or in time (JIT) so why not use that mentality in the rest of your marketing. As you do, your marketing gets stronger, your return goes up, you get more leads and you make more money.

3) Print on demand. A recent article, Target Marketing suggested evaluating the cost-effectiveness of POD models in the following categories:

Generic documents with annual usage of less than 5,000 pieces
More complex documents with annual usage of less than 1,000 pieces
New pieces for which no shelf life or usage history has been established
Items that change often
Materials about to enter back-order status

These are simple steps, but they can have profound results. Even in case you are in the rare minority of those not looking to economize on print marketing, keeping your database up to date, segmenting and targeting your marketing messages, and moving to a real-time stock and print management model ought to be part of the best practices of every company's marketing program.

Larson Notes & Satire:  Clean database, dividing up your list to its proper demographics, then use it. Yes use it, run it hard and run it fast.

That, if nothing else is what we do best. We use what you got and do it day in day out consistently.

Now if there was a number 4 to that list that would be to be consistent. Outsource your marketing lead generation work to a company like ours and that is what you get. Day in day out consistency. We don’t get too busy. We don't  to run out on an appointment or any of the distractions that get in the way of self marketing or self prospecting so we don’t have time to do the work. We don’t get to busy to mail sort your direct mail piece and get it out. We get it done.

Then 5. We know how to use the tools and the systems that make them work. We don’t have to learn on your time and your dollar. That college kid who works for an hour? You think he knows how to work social media and SEO for business? We already know what they only dream of knowing.

So you might want to think about your next step. We put it all together with a powerful knowledge and experience base.

If you want your business to be more, call us for an appointment.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.