Marketing Ideas on a Shoestring Budget

Go After New Employees Early

Richard Beto: We provide writing pads to HR, and each new employee attending employee orientation gets one. Each pad has a post-it note on it from me, welcoming them. What better place to make a positive impression than new employee orientation? About 1,700 new employees join UT each year. So I must assume 1,700 of my customers are leaving UT. We had better be finding new ones if the old ones are leaving.

Charlotte Holden: Last year, we sent a "Welcome to HISD" package to all new school principals and department heads that included 50 standard HISD business cards, five personalized note pads (25 sheets per pad), 10 HISD thank you cards, and a few specialty items that we thought would help them with some of their printing needs to start work. Along with these items, the assigned customer service representative sent along a personal note with their business card and a 10-percent-off business stationery printing coupon. We received excellent feedback and we are doing it again this year.

Lure Them With Food

Steve Howe: Over that past few years we have tried many different approaches to market the in-plant for the City of Cincinnati. Our best promotion has been our open house. At the last open house that we did about a year ago we had more than 400 employees attend. I even had some of our suppliers involved to support the event. All of the food, drinks and decorations were done by the staff with no cost to the department. During the event we had karaoke, with different festival type of games to be played for fun. Employees remember our open house for months. We still have employees come in with jobs and comment on the outstanding job we did at the open house.

Beto: We hold a holiday party to bring customers, as well as vendors, together with our employees. I can't think of a better way to build strong relationships than over food.

Flyers, Notepads, Calendars and Coupons

Howe: We add promotional materials and flyers within completed jobs. Also, we provide scratch pads, which have been cut from paper waste or outdated stock. We will add a coupon for discounts with the next new order somewhere in the group of pads.

Glenda Miley: I am just implementing a marketing plan called "Did You Know..." We hear everyday "I didn't know you did that," so we have made several cards with different services on them. When a customer gets a job done, we place a card in their order that is a different service than what they had done. Sometimes it is to enhance what they had done, like say we printed their brochure and folded it, but we could have designed it, too, so we might put a card in there about our design capabilities. Or if we printed envelopes, we might put a card in there about our ability to also print address information on the envelope at the same time it's getting printed.

Holden: HISD Printing Services (PS1) does not have right-of-first-refusal or any other method to ensure the HISD departments and schools use the department. PS1 must get work by marketing the services and being competitive in cost, quality and turnaround time. We try to market once a month. We produce hanging calendars with information about our department, and tips and techniques each year. This is very popular with our clients. Of course, we have the standard brochures, note pads and other sales items needed for marketing. We send out flyers promoting specials on the months we do not have other things going out.

Sherri Isbell: Notepads or bookmarks on scrap paper or printed on the edge of press sheets can turn waste into marketing gold. Our notepads have always been a big hit, but recently we started producing notepads with a message on the first sheet advertising new services, employees or events. Some of our latest notepads use the first page to educate customers about QR codes with a QR coupon. We are also using this space to tout our In-Print Best of Show award.

Lori Fuller: Every year we do a planner/calendar that we offer as a give-away to our clients. We are able to showcase our designers and the digital press. These planners are highly anticipated, and with budgets tight they are also appreciated. It's one way we can stay visible to our top customers.

Tammy Golden: As part of our Green Program, we use scrap paper to make giveaways for our customers. We make note cards using photographs of Tennessee images such as the Capitol. We also print scratch pads with recycling tips that always include our name and contact information. We offer to give them to our customers to use when they have meetings and seminars, which helps to get our information out to those state employees we don't usually see.

Stress Your Savings

Michael Greetan: Our team is continually looking for new ways to show our customers the extra value we provide to them. Historically we have always provided our customers with less expensive print options. Lately we have been tracking these savings and reporting them back to our customers. We also let the customers "own" those savings and report them in their own budgets. The response from our customers has been very positive. In our current economic environment, our customers want and need to know what we are doing to lower their overall costs while still providing the highest level of both quality and customer service.

Howe: To show our value, we take their job and get estimates from the outside and compare them to ours. Then they can show their supervisor the savings and it makes them look good.

Personal Contact

Joanne Rotert: Due to state funding cuts, our university president came out with a statement outlining 14 areas where employees should reduce spending. These included marketing and advertising as well as printing/reproduction costs. The immediate impact for Printing Services was a decline in business because departments were afraid to print even the most basic forms, let alone direct mail or newsletters. At a time when we needed to get the word out about how print is the most cost effective means of communicating, we were advised not to send out any promotional mailings.

Our solution was to be involved in as many campus events as possible with a physical presence. The university is filled with various fairs on campus, and we asked to set up a table display with samples of our products and services. At exhibits for health fairs and environmental fairs, our materials reflected a theme of sustainable printing for a healthy environment. For a University Human Resources training conference, I presented a session on "Effective Marketing in Today's Economy," and we had a display table set up. We have also conducted a brown-bag lunch on campus with a presentation on "Maximizing Your Printing Budget During Tight Times Without Sacrificing Quality."

At each event, we have a raffle to win a prize. The prize is either a promotional item donated by a vendor or a framed print we produce on our digital color printer or our large-format printer. At one event we highlighted variable data by offering a personalized print with the winner's name printed to look like it was carved into a rock.

A raffle is a great way to gather information on potential customers by having them fill out their name, department, title and contact information. (For a few of the events there were two questions about the environmental impact of printing and the answers were posted on our Web site.) With new contact information we could update our customer list. A thank-you note or e-mail was sent to everyone who entered, along with any other information they requested. This face-to-face exposure is vital since our facility is located off campus.

We have seen an increase in our large-format business by having a vinyl banner displayed at these events. By drawing attention to our table, it demonstrates how effective it can be for other departments in their own recruiting and enrollment efforts.

Charlotte Holden: We call our clients personally on a quarterly basis asking them if they have anything on the horizon or just to ask how they are doing.

Isbell: Meeting with customers and providing tours is one of the most effective and economical ways to market and build customer relationships. This quality time with customers allows them to not only discover more about our organization, but it also allows us to find out more about the customer's needs.

Educate Them

Holden: We provide graphics workshops for secretaries and other people who want to know more about designing and printing.

Isbell: Our print education classes have been extremely successful. We host small groups to educate customers about the printing process and our department.

Fuller: We offer graphic/computer classes on how to create a successful research poster for various presentations. These classes have become very popular among the researchers as many of these presentations are tied to grant dollars. Our clients like the hands-on approach, which generates more business for us.

Keep Customers Informed

Golden: We distribute an online newsletter and use it as an opportunity to market all of our products. We always include a "Featured Customer" and let them provide a quote. Not only is it great to have a customer endorsement, but the newsletter often gets distributed from the top to the bottom of their agency because of their recognition.

Michael T. Kalstein: We have a listserv of department heads to whom we regularly send out information on a variety of subjects. Some are strictly informational in regard to deadlines, postal rate increases and the like. Others are promotional in informing them of new services, products or equipment available in the printing and mail facilities. This has generated significant work for our areas in these slow times and kept our operations in the forefront when departments are considering doing print or mail projects.

Hold Contests

Holden: I have a full-time sales person and three customer service representatives who are assigned clients to support. It is these folks’ jobs to make sure their clients are personally taken care in the department and to market to their clients. We have contests with the sales and customer service representatives as to who has the highest quarterly sales and has promoted the department the most. The winners get recognition and a chance to offer one of their clients a special deal. This seems to keep the energy up in the department.

Promote Your Achievements

Isbell: Advertising awards and recognition of any kind can be a valuable and inexpensive tool. Press releases in local newspapers or parent organization publications can be effective as well.

Selling Promotional Products

Rotert: About four years ago we started selling promotional products. It took some trial and error to find out we couldn't put a very high mark-up on the products, but it has turned into our own very strong marketing tool. Departments are thrilled to avoid the hassles of shopping around, and we are able to provide personalized service in a typically impersonal line of business. Promotional products are a foot-in-the-door to talk to departments about all of our available services. We also stress the importance of –branding consistency combining print, Web communications and ad specialty products.

Competing with E-communications

Rotert: As our customers are experiencing overcrowded e-mail in-boxes and tracking the low opening percentage of online newsletters, printing is increasing. We will soon start sending out postcards and fliers with short messages on print sustainability and effectiveness. Even more importantly, we need to educate [customers] on using print to drive action to the Web. Our marketing efforts will stress how to use traditional print, personalized digital print and Web together for the most effective results.

Working with Students

Kalstein: We handle class projects for students. This has been very valuable, especially for our design classes. The quantities are small, and are usually run on our HP Indigo digital press. We help the student with file troubleshooting, paper selection, content management and other aspects of their project. The projects range from brochures and posters to magazines. Last year one of our student magazines won two silver awards in the local PIA competition. This exercise does not necessarily bring in much more revenue, per se, but does help our case in pointing out the value of the in-plant to students and the impact we have on their educational experience.

Remember to Say Thank You

Holden: We send out thank-you items to our clients each year with our name and phone number on them, such as staple pullers, envelope openers, mouse pads, etc. The packet includes a couple of items, a thank-you card with all our names signed and some candy, so the box is full of thanks.

Be Visible

Kalstein: We use electric carts to deliver the mail and finished print jobs on campus. We have outfitted the sides of these carts with brackets that hold vertical and horizontal posters. We sell the space in these brackets to various departments on campus: Athletics, Theatre, Music, OneCard to name a few. They advertise events and offers here. It has kept our wide-format machine busier than normal and helped sell other posters to the campus.