Let’s Talk About Marketing….Part One

Greetings everybody…For this month’s blog I am going to break away from the wonderful world of embroidery and write about something that is very near and dear to my heart, marketing.  In these tough economic times what will separate you from your cotemporaries is the manner in which you market your company.   And let’s be clear about one thing, advertising and marketing are not the same thing.

I am not going to bore you guys with dictionary definitions of the difference between the two.   For the sake of this conversation brevity I am going to keep it simple.  All of you marketing majors out there will probably have a bone to pick with me…but this is how I see it.  Marketing is the “big picture” and any single advertisement is the “little picture.”   For those of you who have been our customers for a while you know that Qdigitizing sends out monthly newsletters.  We have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, My Space and others.  We also send email ad blasts.  We market directly to our database of customers both active and inactive.   We participate in several trade shows every year, I write this blog, I am published in Stitches Magazine and Apparel Magazines.  I am on the Education board with ASI and Editorial Board of Stitches Magazine.   I have spoken at numerous industry events and Qdigitizing has won several digitizing awards.  I don’t tell you these things to impress you.  I am outlining part of my marketing plan.  Any of those things independently can be considered an advertisement, direct when in the form of something like an ad blast or indirect when a speaking engagement.  But the sum of all the components is a marketing plan.

This is what I want to talk about with you today.  I am by no means an expert on this field other than what has worked for me.  I am not going to tell you what will work for you because I don’t know.  Different things work for different companies and what worked today might not work for you tomorrow.  But that does not mean you should just throw a bunch of mud on the wall to see what sticks.  That is what  ”spammers” do and Qdigitizing is not that, and neither should you.

Qdigitizing does not directly “market” to companies like funeral homes and car dealerships even though it can be argued that either of those organizations can use our products and services.  There is actually a huge niche market of embroidery professionals who service funeral parlors and we all know car dealerships use a lot of embroidered product.  Qdigitizing wants to market to the professional who sells business to business on a daily basis.  I’m not going to post our entire demographic base in a public forum (sorry competitors) but our obvious customers are screen print houses, promotional product distributors and embroidery houses.    Simply put, we know who we are and you need to who you are too.

This is probably the most fundamental marketing concept I can pass on to you.  You must know who you are and you must be able to define yourself in one sentence without qualifiers and additional explanation.  If you know who you are you should be able to tell me in less than 30 seconds.  If I am interested in learning more I will stick around for what comes next.   Practice your pitch and never feel you have to justify what it is you do.  One of the mistakes many newcomers make in this industry is trying to be everything to everybody.  Those of us who have been around the block know it is impossible to be that.  So we find what we are good at and we specialize in it, occasionally branching out to keep things interesting and alive.  One last thing you should remember, not everyone wants to hear your message.  Just like you change the channels when a commercial comes on you don’t care about, so too will many of the people you might come in contact with on a daily basis.  What you need to do is figure out what the properties are of the people who don’t change the channel on your message.

That brings me to the next topic.  And it all links in to the marketing plan.  You must keep your business alive and dynamic.  Stagnation is the stink of death and as soon as you are not growing you are dying.  This means as you bring new products on line you must understand their introduction alone is part of the marketing plan and advertising to the new product is again, part of the marketing plan and must support “the whole.”  You need to plan for developing new products and new ideas.  You need to plan to advertise those new ideas without abandoning what is your primary product or service set.

For example, Qdigitizing recently introduced www.Qemblem.com and www.Qstockdesigns.com.  These two products were the number one and two requests from our customers over the past two years.  We did a great deal of research and decided it was time to launch these two products.  However, we have not gotten away from our primary products, embroidery digitizing and vector art services.  While any of the products will stand on their own each supports the others.  I can promise you, we will never start selling things like consumer electronics or books.  They don’t match who we are.  But patches and stock embroidery designs certainly do.

This is why it might be a good idea for a screen printer to offer embroidery or an embroiderer to offer Direct to Garment Printing.  Each of those products supports the other and vice versa.  And while each discipline requires its own skill set and learning curve, as part of a larger marketing plan it “makes sense.”  Your marketing needs to make sense to who you are and what you are doing.

 Your marketing plan needs to support and define who you are.  Each individual advertisement you distribute needs to clearly state who you are, what you are selling, where to find it, why it is better to get if from you and how to make the purchase.  Each component of your marketing plan needs to support who you are.  Be it Facebook or a radio ad, the content through direct or indirect means must support why your product or service is superior to your competitors.  

In a nutshell, you must tell me why I should buy from you.  You must tell me repeatedly and skillfully.  Your marketing plan must be a comprehensive set of tools deployed to support why you are the best.  Anything less is selling yourself short and you deserve better.

Next month I will get more specific and talk about internet advertising starting with Facebook and why it may or may not be for you.  I hope to see you back for more.  And as usual, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post here or reach out to me off line by emailing to steve.freeman@qdigitizing.com.