This year has been a pretty big change for me and my company. We have switched a lot of what we do and we have moved some of our marketing processes in-house as well. The change for me has been to take over some of these tasks and to source a lot of materials for our company and how we are going to go about making these changes actually valuable to us. The whole goal of the move was to save money and to allocate those extra savings into doing either more marketing or simply to pay salaries if things start to get a little dicy. It is 2020 and the pandemic is shutting down tons of companies due to local regulations and many of our clients are being affected greatly by it. So this was my task and I wanted to jump into a few things that I found along the way.
The first project that we brought in the house was our direct mailing and corporate gifting programs. These are both for marketing and then also for some goodwill with our clients as well. These two areas though set us apart from much of our competition and skimping on the quality of either of these areas was not going to be worth the savings if we did not do these areas correctly. With that being said we wanted to duplicate for the most part what had been done and the only way to do this was to get samples of what we had done in the past and then find the cost of those programs.
Once I found all of the information I was able to then find a pricing scheme for all the things I needed. For direct mailing, I had a limit to try and beat for 1000 pieces of direct mail to our potential clients this month and a 15 gift corporate package to create. These two tasks had a lot of individuals pieces involved and the fact is that I needed more information on packaging supplies to understand what I actually needed to do.
What I have learned is that research is great but great research comes from actual knowledgeable sources that can solve your problem fast. So I ended up hopping online and finding the biggest packaging supplies company online and giving them a call. What I actually found was that their customer service was basically a marketing team all on their own because they had created all of these things thousands of times for massive clients through the decades. I got all the items lists fulfilled and customized and was given tips on tape to use and ways to lower costs by getting the correct items and not the off the shelf ones that we see at big box stores. This company took me through the behind the scenes look at what major corporate gifting marketing companies are doing and we were able to buy the same things we used before at a 50% discounted rate. We were also able to do the same for the direct mail, letters, labels, and paper.
The savings we got by doing this was more than we had hoped for and it was all because of the information given by the major companies themselves. If I went to Amazon to buy these things I would simply not have gotten any advice and would have spent way more on basic pricing and in failures.
No comments:
Post a Comment