What is the best way to market a new catalog?

There are several different ways to reach out and touch prospects and customers.  If you offer a variety of different products, you most likely have a printed catalog.  You many also offer a catalog flipper on your website.  But how do you let your customers and prospects know that your new catalog is available?

You could send postcards that are inexpensive, but unless you have a reliable, accurate database, that could be a waste of money.  An old fashioned letter via snail mail is another option.  Slim catalogs are an inexpensive way to get more information to a customer or prospect versus just a letter, but we’re back to the reliable, accurate database again.

Some marketers would deploy an email marketing campaign.  It’s significantly cheaper than print.  You can leverage your customer database with an email database you can purchase.  It has been my experience that purchasing email databases is unreliable.  How many different email addresses do you have and use?  People change email addresses all of the time.  In addition, not everyone likes or reads marketing or new catalog announcement emails, especially if they are getting bombarded by spam emails on a regular basis.

Pay-per-click, SEM/SEO and banner advertising are still viable options, but you need to be careful.  PPC can be great, but you can blow a ton of cash from your budget faster than you can say “Google Adwords”.  SEO/SEM works very well if your website is optimized.  The key is getting into the heads of your customers and prospects.  How are they searching for and finding your company on the internet?  If you know and understand that, you can build a very effective SEO/SEM strategy.

And what about using social media to get the word out?  Whether your company caters to B2B or B2C, social media is an excellent channel to tell the world about your new catalog.

Which channel is right for your business?

I have done a significant amount of work in the industrial supply market which was primarily B2B although we expanded more into the B2C space when we opened a store on Amazon.  Over the years, we have seen a migration to digital technology, but print isn’t dead by any means.  Email marketing has become an effective, inexpensive option.  Social media which was born in the B2C market is migrating to B2B.

One thing I have learned over my 20+ years of marketing is that you need to use multiple channels to touch the right prospects and customers.   Everyone has different preferences.  Some like to order online through a website, social media or an app, others use printed catalogs and 800-numbers, and others still use fax or email.  I recommend doing analysis on your customer and prospect ordering methods.  Give the customer the option to review and order your products however they want to.  With all of the digital browsing and ordering tools like smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, and the speed in which new product information is delivered, you need to be ready to receive orders whatever what way your customers want to order.  Do B2B companies, for example, have to have a mobile version of your website?  Ask your customers.  If that’s their preferred method of searching and ordering products, then you had better build it.  If customers prefer that method, your competitors may have already figured that out.

As a firm believer in synchronized marketing, if you have a new catalog that you want to present to the marketplace, you need to use every marketing channel you can afford and more importantly, the ones which your customers and prospects prefer, and get the word out in one concise, synchronized branding message.

Building an effective synchronized marketing strategy

Synchronized marketing incorporates all of the elements of your marketing strategy including print, online, email, social, PR, trade shows, sales, and customer service and allows them to work together and feed off of each other.  Integrated marketing ties together a few elements, but synchronized marketing ties everything together.  Why does an orchestra make beautiful music?  How can your favorite football team score on an unbelievable play?  The answer to both questions is they work together as a team with perfect synchronization.  Everyone knows what their role is and they know what the goal is of the team.  Let me give you a real-life example of how it can work.

When I started working at a company, prior management didn’t believe in advertising or marketing.  We were dealing with a 60+ year old company that everyone thought was out of business, two black and white catalogs and a web site that had a whopping 15 indexed pages on Google.  The prior management thought that if they dropped a black and white catalog when all of their competitors had color catalogs that the phone would ring off the hook. It didn’t.

After I arrived, the first thing we did was to eliminate black and white catalogs and had one color-coded catalog annually.  We also rebuilt the website using that same color-coding on a platform that Google liked and indexed easily.  All of our marketing and promotional materials used the same color-coding.  Our call center, direct and inside sales reps were also trained to help guide customers on the phone through the catalog based on the color-coding.  The goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to find and purchase our products.  We even created a custom trade show booth with color-coded back-lit shelves displaying representative products for each section on their respective shelves.  We also leveraged social media through contests that drove traffic back to our new and improved website.  We re-introduced the company to the marketplace through print and online advertising as the best kept secret around. It worked.

Everyone was on the same page.  The catalog, website, social media, online and print advertising, Google Adwords, SEO, promotional materials and the trade show booth all working together to reinforce the brand.  The first trade show I attended before we built the color-coding booth, customers would say things like “I thought you guys went out of business.”  After we launched our synchronized advertising and marketing campaign, the next trade show we attended, we were hearing comments from customers like “I saw your ad in XYZ magazine and had to come see what you are doing.  I have been seeing your ads everywhere.”  Those comments were music to my ears.

The Elements of Leadership

My last post about leadership talked about Bo Schebechler’s famous speech to his Michigan football team called “The Team, The Team, The Team.”  It emphasizes putting The Team ahead of everyone else including the head coach.  Servant leadership is a key element to strong effective leadership.  I’m going to highlight some other elements that I feel are equally important.

One of the foundations of being a good leader is honesty.  You need to be honest with your team, your customers and yourself.  How many times have we read about companies that made millions or billions of dollars only to find that the company as built on a smoke-screen of lies.  Enron’s C-level management stole $74 billion from shareholders.  Honesty is always the best policy.

Another very important element of good leadership is integrity.  Not only being honest, but having a good, strong moral character is key.  Leaders who have questionable moral character have that dark cloud over their heads.  Do you know what the leaders in your company stand for and believe in?  If you don’t, find out.

Tied very closely with integrity is trust.  Leaders with questionable integrity are difficult to trust.  Immorality is the enemy of business.  We’ve all done the test of trust at team building events when you fall backwards and trust that the person behind you is going to catch you.  You have to trust that the person behind you is going to catch you.  It’s the same in business.  It is much easier to do business with people you know and trust.

One element that is often forgotten is compassion.  Are your leaders compassionate to others? Do they contribute to charitable organizations with time and talents in your community?  How are your leaders giving back to the community?  Have you ever seen or can you envision your leaders working in a soup kitchen to help those less fortunate?  Do you serve your community?

To be a leader, you need to be courageous.  They take chances and do things that others won’t.  They are brave facing strong competition and are often criticized, but still stand strong through adversity.

One of the key drivers of any good leader is passion.  The leaders that have impressed me the most are ones that have a fire in their belly about what they are doing.  They love what they do and love doing it with the team around them.  If you don’t love what you are doing, do yourself and your team a favor.  Do something else.

The best, most effective leaders that I have observed are overflowing with humility.  Arrogance is another enemy of business.  Leaders don’t know everything.  Some leaders think that they have to always have the answers.  Good leaders don’t, but they do know where to get them. Good leaders have a great deal of experience and expertise, but they realize that they don’t know everything.  They surround themselves with talented people that are experts in their fields.  It is through this diverse and talented team who offer recommendations and suggestions to the leader that the leader grows and helps the team and the company grow.

The final element of good leadership is being experienced. You can implement all of the elements of leadership above, but if you don’t have the hands-on experience in the marketplace, you are trying to lead from theories and concepts, not real-world trials and tribulations.  A good leader is battle-tested.  They’ve been there, done that.  The other leaders of the company should be battle tested too so when they come together to lead the organization, their collective experiences should be shared and best practices should be gleaned from them.

To summarize, the elements a good leadership are:

• Servant – Serving others and putting the team first
• Honesty – Being honest with your team, your customers and yourself
• Integrity – Be of strong ethical and moral character
• Trust – Trust your team and be trustworthy
• Compassion – Give of your time and talents to those who need it in your community
• Courageous – Be brave and fight what you believe in
• Passion – Love what you do and appreciate those around you.  Passion is contagious.
• Humility – Humble yourself.  You don’t know everything.  Surround yourself with people who you can learn from.
• Experienced – Learn and grow from your experiences.

People like Bo Schembechler, Ronald Reagan, Pope Francis and others have demonstrated these elements and helped make them very effective leaders.

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