We Need Better Marketing
Marketing an Advertising and Promotional Apparel Business
At Gaebler, we've seen what great marketing can do for a small business. But if you own an advertising and promotional apparel business, exceptional marketing may well be the determining factor in your long-term survival and success.
Think tired marketing collateral is all you need to succeed in today's marketplace? Think again!
Time and time again, we see ingenuity, hard work, and industry knowledge as the deciding factors for advertising and promotional apparel business marketing success.
Social Media Monitoring
The use of social media as a marketing tool is the latest wave to overtake the small business community. Combined with a functional company website, social media attracts new customers and converts them to brand advocates. Social media can quickly go negative, turning brand advocacy into "badvocacy", a scenario in which consumers and users create content deriding your company and your products. All advertising and promotional apparel businesses have too much at stake to ignore derogatory social media mentions. If your brand is taking a hit from negative mentions, it's important to generate enough positive content to push negative mentions down in search rankings. The more positive mentions that exist, the more difficult it is for negative comments (generated through social media) to gain traction on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Building A Community Around Your Brand
Does your business have a social media presence? If not, you may be falling behind the rest of the marketplace. Whether they realize it or not advertising and promotional apparel businesses need to do a better job connecting with their customers. To establish a solid community base, you may want to begin with a direct mail campaign using mailing lists obtained through top-end list providers. Using these lists, you can perform a direct mail initiative to invite prospects to participate in online brand community mechanisms.
Staffing Expertise
Right out of the gate, you are going to have to make an informed decision about who will be responsible for marketing your product offerings and your brand. For many business owners, in-house staffing is attractive because it can (theoretically) be performed by current employees and can give the owner more control over the process. To maintain marketing momentum, many advertising and promotional apparel businesses outsource marketing to a professional firm. A high quality marketing firm can deliver a much better ROI than internal stakeholders who aren't primarily focused on marketing functions.
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