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Kaye Z. Marks's Articles

  • Why Giving Away Stuff Works
    At this very moment, I have on my desk a small, plastic, yellow slinky. The name Home Depot is written across the side of it in black letters. I received this slinky in the mail a few years ago with a colorfully printed advertisement.
  • Why Free Still Works
    Why does ‘free’ still work when you market your business? People basically have a penchant for anything and everything ‘free’. There is no doubt about it, when your target readers see the word ‘free’ in any of your promotional materials, that is one factor that they sure cannot resist.
  • Why Different Is Anything But Bad When Advertising
    Time and again, most advice columns and expert opinions in marketing always suggest that in order for your business to stand out, you have to be different among the rest. In any business, such as your commercial color printing company, being different is not bad actually, but rather a plus factor to generate more leads to increase your sales.
  • Who Said the Only Thing Free Is Advice?
    An old business teacher of mine (names have been removed to protect the innocent) told me that holding sales and discounting product wasn’t a method of acquiring new customers, it was a method of getting rid of old inventory.
  • Where is Your Marketing Attention Focused?
    Not every product is meant for everyone. I know many companies are tempted to try to target as many people as possible in order to maximize profits, but they are probably going to get closer to maximizing the cost of marketing than anything else.
  • Where Does Your Brand Stand?
    In order for your business to stand out, you need to first look at your present brand positioning. Where you stand in terms of your brand recognition can be your means to boost sales and be ahead of your competition. Your brand positioning is your key in making your business a significant mover in your industry.
  • When Your Marketing Campaign Isn’t Working
    There are a few tell-tale statements that company executives make when their marketing campaign isn’t working or when they’re losing business. If you have found yourself or anyone at your company vocalizing thoughts similar to the following, immediately evaluate your marketing campaign. If you don’t change course, your company could be in trouble.
  • When Can An Ecological Product Work For You?
    Sustainability is an issue that many environmentalists are focusing on nowadays. It is what makes non-government organizations (NGOs) and several consumer groups target several companies that have manufactured most of the well loved products and brands worldwide.
  • What Every Advert Must Know About Advertising
    There are many truths to be found about advertising. In fact, whoever you are talking with would tell you about so many things that you should do and not do in order for you to have a successful marketing campaign. So let us start with some of the truths and myths that every advert should know to effectively run an ad.
  • What Does Your Marketing Design Say About You?
    Your marketing materials are a reflection of your company and your products. Every choice that you make in designing your marketing materials, from the color scheme to your font choices tell your clients who you are. However, do you know who you are? Do you know what image you are portraying to your clients? What is your design telling your potential clients?
  • What Are You Offering?
    It’s all about the offer. It doesn’t matter what kind of advertising you’re talking about. If you don’t have a good enough offer people aren’t going to care about you.
  • What A Professional Printer Would Probably Say…
    Except probably for most of the time, you, as a business owner, should know that having a professional commercial printing company to assist you with your marketing collateral is your best bet for an effective full color printing material.
  • Ways to Dodge Costly Printing Mistakes
    No matter what kind of advertisement you plan on doing, the process of designing the ad, getting the color printing taken care of, and the final product sent out to the public can be a long journey fraught with potential for mistakes.
  • Using Different Kinds of Promotions and Giveaways
    Small businesses, which usually have limited advertising budgets, often resort to unconventional methods to promote themselves. Two of the most common types of “small business” methods are cross promotions and freebies, or giveaways. Let’s take a look at each, along with some pros and cons.
  • Use the Right Words to Get a Better Response
    So you have got a great medium to reach your audience. Your ad has all the graphics spiffed up to attract attention and you have a great eye-catching photo. You know people are looking at it. But no one is responding. What’s going on?
  • Updating Your Image
    Ever sat around with some friends and gone over what was popular back when you were younger? Depending on your age you might go over the tie-dye, laid back look of the sixties, the bellbottom, platform shoes look of the seventies, or maybe the techno, wildly colored hair and shoulder pads of the eighties.
  • Untapped Gold in the Single Status Market
    Every expert marketer would tell you that you have to identify a target market if you want to make sure that your advertising campaign accomplishes its goal of generating leads for your business.
  • Understanding the Printing Process
    Do you know what dye-sublimation is and what impact it has on your commercial color printing? When you are going to be printing a catalog along with some flyers, are you aware of what kind of printing process is best for these different kinds of advertisements?
  • Trust and Testimonials Go Hand in Hand
    The chief goal of any company is to get people to trust them. When I go into a store and buy something I’m trusting that they’re the best person for me to buy from. For some businesses this is easier to come by, because the kind of trust you need is different.
  • Titles and Subtitles: How They Can Make or Break Your Campaign
    Your title and subtitles are one of the most critical elements that your ad campaign could ever have. It’s either your target audience is taken with your title and subtitle, or not. In fact, both your title and subtitle can influence your target audience to either keep you or throw your ad away. Well, so much for expensive commercial color printing method.
  • Things to Remember when Advertising
    Print advertising will always be one of the most cost effective means to reach out to your target audience without depleting your budget too much. In fact, most small businesses opt for this type of advertising precisely because they do not need to pay as much and yet get the same, if not the most, response.
  • The Unique Touch to Marketing a Service
    Product marketing is one of the more simplistic types of marketing you could hope for. I know there are a number of finer points to consider, and ways to do it exceptionally well, but the truth still remains that the product is what will ultimately sells a customer on whether or not they’re going to buy.
  • The Truth about Commercial Printing
    Commercial printing is all about those shiny marketing collaterals you use to entice your target readers to your business. In fact, commercial printing is all about creating a collage of beautiful colors that use halftone, spot colors, and process colors.
  • The Time is Now
    Sometimes we focus so much on ad layout and strong marketing pitches that we forget one of the most important questions regarding advertising. When? That’s right, the timing of your marketing efforts is just as important as the how’s and why’s. With that in mind let’s take a look at some of the times you should consider a new ad campaign.
  • The Tango between Formal and Casual Advertising
    Why is it that casual and personal advertising is so much more attractive than formal marketing? It seems that casual marketing is so much popular because when you use it in your ads you are most likely to have a good relationship with your clients and associates.
  • The Right Way to Build Up your Small Business
    Large conglomerates have similarly large advertising budgets allowing forays into all sorts of marketing avenues. Small businesses do not have such luxuries. They must make every advertising dollar count. There are some universal rules, which apply to all small businesses attempting to maximize their advertising ROI.
  • The Necessary Dialogue
    One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve come across in the field of marketing is the notion that advertising is a one way form of communication. If you give this notion careful consideration, though, I think you’ll agree with me that this is a faulty idea and one that can only hinder your ad campaigns. Advertising is more than just making a blind pitch to a silent, faceless customer.
  • The Mark of a Quality Brochure
    No one wants to spend the money you need to design, format, write, and have a batch of commercial printing done for brochures, just to see people never bother to pick them up and read them.
  • The Location is the Key
    I can recall the number of times I’ve been someplace I regularly frequent, and I see a poster up on the wall some company put up there.
  • The Language of Printing
    Every kind of business is going to have technical terms. I am sure you know people who are in one industry or another and periodically pull out those terms you have never heard before. The less you have to deal with the inner workings of the industry the less you need to know about it, so not understanding those technical words is not particularly important.
  • The Importance of Databases
    It can seem so technical. Only large companies are going to have extensive databases about all of their sales along with any other information they feel like keeping track of.
  • The Complicated Process of Graphic Design
    If you think a graphic designer simply sits down, draws up an image on his computer, and emails it right out to whoever they’re working for, there’s a lot more for you to learn. Logos are simple, right? Most of them are very basic, easy to understand designs. How long could they possibly take to make?
  • The Challenge of Being Consistent
    There are two conflicting yet completely true pieces of advice many companies have to be aware of: always be prepared to update your image, and be consistent.
  • The Benefits of Loyalty
    Loyalty comes with very important benefits.

    No matter what industry you’re in you’ll notice that people who are loyal to a company are people who get better deals, better information, and an all around better relationship with the companies they do business with.
  • The Balance of Art and Information
    Posters can often seem like a delicate balancing act if you want to get the most you can out of them.
  • The Added Weight of Logos for Businesses
    Off the top of the head, I am betting almost every person in this country can think of at least one company logo. We live in a society filled with logos.
  • Standard Font Sizes in Business Cards
    Design and material are not the only elements you should think about when you create your custom business cards. In addition to these two, you also have to consider the font you are going to use for your content.
  • Some Basics In Printing
    One of the things you need to learn when you’re printing your ad is to work with a graphic designer that knows and understands well the basics of color printing. Understanding different factors such as spreads, signatures and imposition can help you work out the best element for your print ad.
  • Setting Prices for Design Services
    If you are looking at hiring a professional designer for your color printing ad for example, or if you are a designer yourself, how would you set the price for the color printing design service rendered?
  • Sending a Great First Impression to Customers
    If you are a salesperson, you are always seeking ways to sell more. If you are a businessperson, then you are a salesperson, no matter what your business is. You are selling your product or service, and so you should always be seeking ways to sell more.
  • Say What? (Conveying the Proper Message in Marketing)
    Often, what makes a marketing campaign such as your full color brochures and color flyers effective is the message that is conveyed to your target clients. And it is not just quality message, but the right message that you convey in your advertising flyers.
  • Rules of Color in Print Design
    Researching the latest and greatest ways to implement effective marketing strategies is usually not the problem when it comes to failed marketing campaigns. The actual implementation itself is generally what holds people up.
  • Review Your Brand’s Performance
    If you are a marketer and advertiser, you know for a fact that a brand can be your powerful ally when it comes to being successful in the business niche you’re in. Without a powerful brand to represent you to your audience, you would find it very difficult indeed to sustain your business. A strong and relevant brand is your key to being successful in your field.
  • Research is Only as Good as How You Use It
    Any worthwhile company is going to know that they need to do a lot of research if they want to stay around for long. When it comes to the products you make, improving the products that you currently have, the commercial printing you focus on with your advertising, and the areas that you concentrate your marketing, you need to know what people think.
  • Remember Who You’re Writing To
    When writing for a postcard all you need to do is write a few short lines without going into very much depth. A poster is often just has a large, single quote or sentence and nothing else. A flyer gives some brief details about something and that’s about it.
  • Read This Before You Get Into Women Marketing
    Ah, women! What do women want? You can either ask Mel Gibson or you can learn from this.

    How do you market to women? If you are really that observant, you are probably aware of the fact that some companies are ‘getting’ into women more effectively while others have not been very successful.
  • Printing Flyers on a Budget
    One of the most economical ways to quickly get a word out is to print flyers. These fantastic little promotional tools can be extremely inexpensive and simple or glossy and flashy, albeit more expensive. Whatever your needs or financial limitations, flyers can be made to fit into almost any budget.
  • Practice the Proper Timing in Advertising
    Knowing the exact time to advertise your services and products could be vital in keeping your business afloat. Commercial color printing marketing tools could be the best bet for any company. You could create flyers, pamphlets, business cards or posters. You could use several methods to obtain more consumers for your products and services.
  • Planning Things a Year at a Time
    Too many companies focus on only the here and now. When it comes to their commercial color printing, they decide what they are going to do in the next month and that is all they have on their plate.
  • Plan Your Marketing Campaign For The Entire Year
    If you want your marketing campaign to be successful, do not just think one project at a time. In order for you to be effective, plan your marketing campaign for the entire year, not just when you have a need for it.
  • Overcoming Buyer Hesitance To Get That Final Sale
    Expert marketers and sales people know that product resistance is often part and parcel of selling your products and services. It's usually due to a particular concern on the reliability, usability or usefulness and feasibility of purchasing product that’s preventing your prospective customers to finalize a sale.
  • Original Advertising Draws in Customers
    If traditional advertising techniques aren’t getting the responses or business you want, you may need to think more originally. Try to come up with ideas that no one in your area has done. Try using color printing techniques that no one in your area or product industry has used.
  • Organize Your Business Cards
    Most companies are going to put a lot of thought into their business card printing. They will spend their time looking over different designs that create just the right image for them. They will get their color business cards and eagerly hand them out to everyone else in an effort to get more business, but one thing they will also be doing is collecting other people’s business cards at the same time.
  • Old Wisdom: You Have to Spend Money to Make Money
    I know it isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially for a new business. You spend the money to buy/rent a building, and then you buy all your merchandise. After that you hire people to run the store, and you spend money on the marketing, on the supplies, just money on top of money on top of money. Finally you ask yourself, “When am I going to make money instead of spending it?”
  • Old Wisdom: You Have to Spend Money to Make Money
    I know it isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially for a new business. You spend the money to buy/rent a building, and then you buy all your merchandise. After that you hire people to run the store, and you spend money on the marketing, on the supplies, just money on top of money on top of money. Finally you ask yourself, “When am I going to make money instead of spending it?”
  • Nurturing Your Company’s Personality Through Trust
    Your company, whether a small business or a Fortune 500, has a personality that you have to nurture in order for you to accomplish your goals. It’s like a person actually – it has its strengths and weaknesses, and individual quirks and qualities that you have to consider to make sure that your company works like it’s supposed to.
  • Mistakes to Avoid in Your Advertising Campaign
    Here are surefire ways to blow your marketing campaign
  • Meeting Marketing Campaign Deadlines
    If someone were to ask you, would you know the difference between urgent and important?
  • Marketing Your Printing Business
    Apart from your resolution to lose weight or save more money, now is a good time to make a resolution for this year for your business. With the right plan, your business can go from one that is already plunging, to one that is sky rocketing.
  • Marketing Internalized
    Are you a market-driven company, or a sales-kinda firm? Hang on. You are probably thinking, isn’t it the same thing? Aren’t every business’ marketing effort driven by our need to have an increase in our sales and profits?
  • Marketing in Your Free Time
    You might have the weekend off, but that isn’t any reason to stop promoting your business. A small business owner is going to eventually come to realize that if you really want to get your sales going you’re going to have to embrace your marketing a lot more than most companies.
  • Making Your Letterhead Look Good
    When a small business owner thinks of the essential items that they need, many of them forget about the letterhead. Others simply overlook the importance of the letterhead. But a company’s letterhead is truly an essential piece to their business identity. It sets the stage for everything else that follows. Almost every piece of advertising literature that the company produces will feature its letterhead, which continually reinforces its importance.
  • Making Your Business Card
    Business cards are an essential part of every businessperson’s arsenal. You have to have a business card ready to hand to anyone who might be a potential customer. Ideally, each business card will bring you an extra sale (or ten). However, that will only happen if your business card is effective, and it can only be effective if you make it better than the zillions of others out there.
  • Make Yourself Stand Out
    Take a moment to think about all the different kinds of advertisements you’ve seen over the years. This will obviously include the champions of the advertising world like brochures, postcards, and so on.
  • Make Your Brochures Effective
    Why spend the money on something unless you know it is going to be a success?

    Brochures are a form of advertising that can be particularly time consuming. Beyond just the costs, taking care of the designs, writing, layout, and pictures, along with all sorts of other details lends to a very time hungry advertisement. Because of the time invested, you want to make sure that the final product is the best it can possibly be.
  • Look to the Future
    Marketing isn’t really about what’s going on in the moment. A truly effective form of marketing is going to be focused far more on the future than what is right in front of you at this moment. Your color printing should be done with the future in mind and how this is going to affect you in the long run.
  • Logo Creation: A Reflection Of Your Business
    Your logo is one of the most important elements you have to promote your business. Your logo is so important that it is no surprise that you have it almost everywhere – your letterhead, website, your print ads using commercial color printing process, your business cards. In fact, if you want to promote brand recognition, you’d surely have your logo to reach out to your clients, prospects, other vendors, and most especially the media.
  • Let Your Personality Shine Through
    For the small business owner, every little thing is going to count.

    You have to be aware of every opportunity for effectively marketing yourself and your company. If you don’t have the budget for the huge marketing campaigns it makes the little forms of marketing even more important.
  • Knowing the Limits on Ad Designs
    The advice on design I’m about to give applies to any kind of advertisements, no matter what style it is. It doesn’t matter if you prefer brochures, the simple business card, or a large poster as the centerpiece of your commercial printing, there are still common design elements that all of these greatly varying forms of advertising share.
  • Know What Questions to Ask
    Question are always good at getting people into your advertisements, but only if you ask the right kind of question, and to do that you need to know what types of questions there are.
  • Know about the Commercial Printing Guide
    When you want to print brochures, flyers and other marketing materials, you might think it’s best to try to save money by printing them yourself.
  • Keeping Constant Market Contact to Strengthen your Brand
    Continuity. Business continuity. Contact continuity.

    If you look it up, continuity means constant chain of sequence. In marketing, it means continuous chain of your marketing campaign throughout the whole year.
  • Keeping a Professional Attitude in Your Career
    I am a full-time freelance writer, and I take my work very seriously. However, it took a while before I learned how important it is to remain professional, even though my “job” is quite informal.
  • Keep Your Message Simple and Focused
    When it comes to advertising like postcards and posters, it’s easy to make sure that the message you’re focusing on is short and to the point. With these forms of marketing you just don’t have room to have it be much else, which is why companies are typically good at staying on topic.
  • Keep Up With Your In-Store Marketing
    A very important and effective form of marketing is the in-store marketing. This extends to everything within your store that will encourage people to buy something. Whether this is using color printing to put up some banners directly advertising a product, or specifically positioning certain end caps to best display a new product, it is all designed to get people interesting in buying.
  • Irritating Ads - Good, Bad or Ugly?
    I am sure you can think of an irritating television ad. You have probably even been angry that its annoying jingle or phrase is stuck in your head all day. To marketers, what critics and consumers focus on as “bad” advertising really is not bad in most cases. If the advertising gets people into stores or leads more traffic to Web sites, it is all good advertising. It does not matter if people like it; it matters if people remember it.
  • Increase Your Sales by Narrowing Your Scope
    Some people seem to think that you need to target the largest pool of people possible to have the greatest success with your business. Sure you’ll be spending more money on those massive commercial printing orders, but you’ll be able to send out postcards or brochures to so many people of course you’ll gain more business because of it.
  • Improve Your Presentation
    The sales presentation can be the backbone of a strong marketing push, and can do wonders to help push sales, but a presentation isn’t always the easiest thing to do successfully. You have to really engage people and send out a strong message people want to listen to.
  • How To Sugar-Coat Your Ad Copy
    Time and again, it has been suggested that the best way to encourage your target clients to become definite buyers of your products is to get them so interested in your marketing campaign. And the only way to do that is if you can give them what they want.
  • How to Set the Price for your Design Services
    One of the most difficult questions for a graphic designer to answer is, “How much will it cost to design my logo?” It is hard to answer because, usually, the designer has no idea how much to charge. How much is the ability to design an attractive and impressive logo worth? Is there really a way to quantify it?
  • How to Print Business Cards
    So you’ve got your new business up and running, the customers are starting to call, but you really need some basic marketing tools, such as business cards, that you can give away to customers. You’re busy running a business, so you just want to print business cards and get it over with fast.
  • How to Market Your Small Business
    The first step to small business marketing is to identify and exploit the differences between you and your competitors. Once you do that, you need to communicate these differences and the benefits of customers choosing you over the competition with your marketing materials.
  • How to Market With Suspense the Right Way
    One of the ways a promotional campaign can become effective is if consumers are actually waiting for your product and service to be launched in the market. This is called “anticipation marketing”. It is building your new product or service to the public by getting them hooked with curiosity. It starts from pre-announcement up to the time your product or service is launched.
  • How to Make Testimonials Shine
    The question here isn’t whether or not testimonials work. Almost nothing else can improve any form of commercial printing as much as the testimonial. Here is someone’s word explaining to people how satisfied they were by your company, and hearing a compliment from a neutral party is always going to look better than listening to a company compliment themselves.
  • How to License an Idea
    Maybe you are the creative type that comes up with great ideas, but you do not have a clue on how to run a business. Alternatively, maybe you would just rather think of great ideas than implement them. Either way, licensing your idea is a great method to be paid for your invention ideas.
  • How to Implement Your Marketing Strategies
    Researching the latest and greatest ways to implement effective marketing strategies is usually not the problem when it comes to failed marketing campaigns. The actual implementation itself is generally what holds people up.
  • How To Get People To Advertise For You
    How do you get people to advertise for you? With a referral program of course! Now that you have made a sale from a client, this is the best time to ask for a referral.
  • How to Do Empathetic Designing
    Let us say you are a designer. Your task is to create the designs for a postcard marketing strategy that is going to involve direct mailing. You consider yourself an expert in the field. You think you know exactly what people want.
  • How to Do Empathetic Designing
    Let us say you are a designer. Your task is to create the designs for a postcard marketing strategy that is going to involve direct mailing. You consider yourself an expert in the field. You think you know exactly what people want.
  • How to Decide On Collateral That Works For You
    Marketing your products and services is one of the most valuable tools you can have to help you increase your sales. When promoting your business you need to have four factors to be successful: attract the attention of your target audience, stir up their interest, and kindle the desire to have your product, and finally get them to act on your offer.
  • How To Create Hard Hitting Ads
    You want to know how to create ads that work? The secret is actually in the time that your target audience looks at your color printing ads. Two seconds. That’s right, you heard me. It takes only two seconds to grab your target clients’ attention.
  • How to Break through Your Customer’s Doubts
    Expert marketers and sales people know that product resistance is often part and parcel of selling your products and services. It may be because of a particular concern on the product that’s preventing your prospective customers to buy from you.
  • How to Be Unbiased in Brand Planning
    When it comes to advertising your business, you have to set your personal preferences aside in order to make decisions that are right for your business. Although in some ways your personality is a reflection of your business, you do not want to make it so overwhelming that your advertising campaign fails to bring the results you expect.
  • How to be Aware of Your Brand’s Performance
    When any kind of problem comes along, many companies are inclined to gravitate towards the quickest, and often least extensive method of fixing it. For some issues this can be adequate to solve, but when the problem is related to something as intricate as a brand name, a much deeper consideration on how to improve things is going to be needed.
  • How Loyalty Pays Off With Your Printer
    When choosing your commercial color printing company to do your printing job for you, it takes a lot of time, effort and energy on your part to find the right one. In fact, it is not easy to shop around and compare one printer to the next just so you get the best one that can provide you the kind of service you need.
  • How Free Can Make Marketing Professionals Happy
    In addition to printed advertising strategies such as your posters, brochures, business cards, flyers and pamphlets, one of the best modes of promoting your products and services is through public relations. When done right, along with advertising campaigns that involve poster printing, public relations can help you boost your income by thousands of dollars in a few weeks’ time along with your printed poster campaign.
  • How Cross Promotion Can Work For You
    Cross promotion is actually the thing nowadays, especially if you are a small business working on a limited budget for your marketing campaign. With cross promotions, you are able to become a David ready to slay your Goliath…with the help of credible friends and associates who are also Davids just like yourself.
  • Helping Others Can Truly Help Your Company
    Early August is almost here and the anticipation of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing is steadily increasing. As hopeful spectator’s eyes turn expectantly toward China, their eyes will also be taking in the ads of the Olympic corporate sponsors.
  • Great Promotional Items
    If you plan on giving away items to help promote your company, you need to be aware of just what kinds of items there are to give away, and what categories they fall in.
  • Give Them Something New
    People like things they know and understand. People like shopping at companies that have proven themselves to be worth their time. This is a safety net most shoppers will gravitate towards if they’re able to. Why take a chance with a company you’ve never dealt with if you know that the company you’re currently shopping at does everything you want it to?

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