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How To Stick In Your Customer’s Memory

As the number of trade show visitors who can make purchasing decisions continues to climb — the number was at 82 percent in 2015 — there comes a mad scramble to be the booth or company that customers remember. This way you’re the company that companies buy from. So how do you stick in your customer’s memory so that you’re the company they choose to buy from?

The KISS principle — keep it simple, stupid

The driving principle behind any kind of design, whether it’s your trade show booth or website design, should be simplicity. Most systems work best if they’re kept to the essentials and not bogged down with needless complexities. When you look at your trade show booth design or website, step out of your own shoes and imagine that you’re in your customer’s shoes. Is the overall message of your booth obvious? Is your company’s website easy to navigate?

If the answer to either of these questions is “no,” go back to the drawing board.

Simplicity’s the name of the game

What consumers want most from marketers is simplicity. The ease with which a customer is able to gather trustworthy information about a product and then use that information to weigh their purchase options is called “decision simplicity” and it’s this principle that makes a customer more likely to follow through on an intended purchase, buy the product more than once or recommend it to others.

So how do you build decision simplicity?

Figure out your customer’s intent

The first step toward building decision simplicity for your customers is to figure out “the why of the buy.” Why are your customers buying your product? What do they intend to do with it? Answering these two questions will go a long way toward finding out your customer’s intent when it comes to your product. Once you’ve figured out your customer’s intent, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Tailor information to the customer’s needs

To make a customer’s buying decision as easy as possible, the best thing to do is give them trustworthy information at their fingertips.

While highly-detailed information about a product’s capabilities serves to educate and instruct the customer, it does little to help facilitate a decision. Instead of letting your product talk to others, let others do the talking about your product. Guide users to review sites where your products get good ratings, feature user reviews on your website and then group those reviews into relevant categories as necessary.

Once customers have all the information they need to make decisions, the best thing you can do for them is to make their decisions as easy as possible.

Make decisions easy for your customers

So now that you have all of this information, how do you go about making decisions easy for your customers? First things first, rate your site or booth on the "decision simplicity index,” which tells you the following:

How easy it is for customers to gather and understand information about your company from your website.
How much they can trust the information they find on your site.
How readily they can weigh the options they have based on the information they’ve been presented with.

The easier a company makes any one of the three things above, the more likely a customer is to purchase from them and recommend them to others.

Once you have a solid grasp on how your company handles the way its customers make decisions, you can work on improving that. The biggest thing you can do is to create a more efficient navigation path for your customers by making it so that they have to ingest less information before they decide on a purchase.

While making decisions easy for your customers is a big part of increasing your company’s decision simplicity index, there are other things you can do:

Build trust. Make it so that your customers are more likely to trust the information that they gather. Focus on brand recommenders who dive into their decision criteria and intended usage, not just product features and benefits.
Make it easier for customers to weigh options. Help customers identify and weigh the features that are most important to them. Frame complexity in simplicity — the same way DeBeers does with the 4Cs when it comes to their diamonds.

So there you have it: our method for sticking in our customers’ memory. What do you do to be memorable to your customers?

5 Print Marketing Trends to Follow in 2018

Storytelling

When you put together a marketing campaign for a new product or service, you don't want to just give customers a call to action and then expect them to fall over themselves in droves to buy your product. Instead, you need to tell them a story. Your story. Draw them in. Why should they buy your product and not a competitor's?

Storytelling is a crucial part of print marketing. But how can you tell a story without (necessarily) using any words?

Use compelling visuals to convey an aspect of your brand narrative
Use imagery to convey voice, tone or feeling
Take standard tropes and invert them on their head
Use a picture to suggest movement or action

Combine these pictures with good short and long-form written copy – but not the informational copy that most people put on landing pages and product pages. Go with the good stuff – the story that makes your brand special. After all, everyone loves a good story.

Personalized prints

Instead of telling just a general brand story, you can tell a personal customer story, too. Reach the customer on an individual level and use that to build a meaningful relationship.

But how?

Here's the deal:

People love a personal touch. Use techniques like personalized flyers and custom poster printing to give your print marketing an edge. The best way to impress your customers is to be predictive – get some data about your customer's preferences and find a way to include that in the print – it's a surefire way to keep them reading.

Use unique coupon codes

You might be wondering:

"What's the difference between a unique coupon code and a generic one?"

Unique codes are only released in limited quantities (like to people on an email list) and can only be used once at checkout. Generic coupon codes, on the other hand, are codes that anyone can use to receive a discount or other promotional reward from an online retailer.

Unique coupon codes generate much higher ROI than generic coupon codes because they can't be shared with other customers. This lets you use the unique coupon codes you generate to track customer purchasing and spending on a more individual and targeted level: instead of "this many visitors to our site bought X," you can narrow it down to "this many people on our mailing list bought X" – a much-smaller demographic to analyze and make advertisements for.

Sell the seasons

When it comes to setting up your company's sales catalogs throughout the year, consider the seasons. What I mean by this is that when it comes to the summer months, put out a catalog that's full of products that work best in warmer weather. When the months get colder, put out products that work in colder weather or that require no maintenance besides setup – no one wants to trudge around in the snow fixing feather flags.

Use brochures

Brochures are a traditional piece of the print marketing kit, even with the rise of digital versions in the form of PDFs and emails. Designing your product brochures well can turn them into collectible items – not just because of how well they're designed but also because of the wealth of specific product information they contain.

But why should you include brochures in your as part of your marketing arsenal?

Brochures can help capture the attention of potential customers
More effective and pocket-friendly than regular print advertisements in magazines – especially since you don't have to share space with anyone!
A brochure can be used to promote almost any type of good or service that the company offers.
Brochures function as another way to interact with the customer, generating leads for the sales team to follow up on.

What trends do you think are worth following in 2018? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

5 Advantages of Outdoor Displays

With temperatures rising as we get deeper and deeper into March, it’s time to turn our eye to the thought of outdoor displays. While indoor displays are great for things like trade shows, conferences and events, outdoor displays have several advantages of their own.

So what advantages do outdoor displays have over more traditional displays?

1. Expand Your Audience

Instead of just being confined to a trade show floor or convention center hall, outdoor advertising allows you to target a much larger audience – going from just one show to the whole town or city. This way, you can target people of a certain demographic without worrying that you’re missing some of them because they’re not in whatever space your advertisement or display is.

2. Build Your Brand

Outdoor displays and advertising are a great way to create and maintain brand awareness for your business or brand. Creating some kind of outdoor advertising helps you personalize your brand and further enhances your brand’s credibility.

You might be wondering why personalizing a brand is important. Here’s the bottom line:

If a potential customer sees a sign on their way to work or during their commute, it’ll start to stick with them. If your feather flag (or other advertising banner) is well-designed, so much the better – whoever views it will not only become more aware of your brand, but also begin to associate them with positive things – like a well-crafted advertising experience.

3. Perform Better

One of the biggest advantages that outdoor advertising has over traditional advertising is that it performs better. An outdoor advertising campaign is “always on” – whereas you have to pack up your advertising materials at the end of the trade show. This ability to be always on means that your viewers are much more aware of your campaigns. It also means that they’re much more aware of your campaigns when they change, too – so keeping your campaigns constantly evolving is a great way to keep your viewers constantly engaged.

4. Spend Less

Out of all the different marketing options out there, running a series of outdoor displays is probably the cheapest. And I’m not just talking about money, either: once you set up an outdoor advertising campaign, you can safely forget about it until and if you have to change your messages.

But that’s not all: outdoor advertising campaigns have a much higher ROI than comparable advertising methods – as shown by a study from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. In fact, out-of-home advertising generates almost 6 dollars product spending – an 83% return on investment.

5. Engage Your Audience

Not only do outdoor advertising displays allow you to expand your audience, but they also let you engage with your audience. The sheer amount of space that’s available for outdoor advertising means that it’s that much easier to set something up that your audiences like. Audiences just like outdoor advertising by itself, too: according to APN Outdoor, 71% of people preferred buses with advertising to those without, and 36% of people called advertising “a welcome distraction”.

Does your company or its clients use outdoor advertising? Let us know how in the comments!

A Guide to Prolonging Your Flag’s Lifespan

While a promotional flag from Tex Visions is a great way for your clients to get attention at trade shows and events, not many people know how to take care of them. Knowing how to properly take care of a flag will not only help your clients increase the longevity of their flags, but also help them maximize their return on investment.

What factors affect the lifespan of my flag?

In order to help our customers figure out how they can expand the lifespan of their flags, we’ve performed a couple flag weather tests with our printed flags. The bluescale (DIN 53387) test helps figure out a general assessment of both the material and the inks used in our flags. Here’s what we found out based on our bluescale tests.

Lightfastness (according to bluescale)	Summer	Winter	Hours of intensive sunlight before fading	Days of average sunlight in PA before fading
1 = satisfactory	N/A	N/A	Up to 20 hours	About 5 days
2 = below average	N/A	N/A	Up to 40 hours	About 10 days
3 = average	4 - 8 days	2 - 4 weeks	Up to 80 hours	About 20 days
4 = moderately good	2 - 3 weeks	2 - 3 months	Up to 160 hours	About 40 days
5 = good	3 - 5 weeks	4 - 5 months	Up to 350 hours	About 80 days
6 = very good	6 - 8 weeks	5 - 6 months	Up to 700 hours	About 160 days
7 = excel lent	3 - 4 months	7 - 9 months	Up to 1500 hours	About 350 days
8 = superior	over 1.5 years	N/A	Up to 3000 hours	About 700 days

Aside from lightfastness, there are three other big factors that affect durability when it comes to flags:

1. Material

The material that your flag is made out of has a big impact on how long the flag lasts. Common flag materials include cotton, nylon and polyester, with nylon being the most popular choice for outdoor American flags and polyester being the most popular choice for outdoor flags in general. We strive to give our customers an advantage by using polyester to produce our flags. Unlike nylon, polyester won’t fray because the fibers of our polyester flags are knitted together rather than woven.

2. Weather

While many outdoor flags are made for year-round use, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep an eye on the weather when it comes time to hoist up your flag. Adverse weather conditions can include heavy rains and strong winds (anything over a 6 on the Beaufort scale). Any kind of adverse weather can increase the weight of the flag and put strain on the flag itself. Make sure to always take your flag down in adverse or inclement weather conditions.

3. Environmental pollution

Air and light pollution are the two biggest environmental pollutants that can affect the lifespan of your flag. Air pollution will make the white areas of your flag to grey out, while UV and light pollution can cause the fabric to fade or otherwise deteriorate.

Because of all the factors involved, it’s generally impossible to completely predict the lifespan of a flag. However, we usually tell our customers that their flags will last 6 months plus or minus 50% -- so anywhere from 3 to 9 months, depending on conditions.

To increase the overall durability of their flags, we recommend that our customers wash and repair their flags after 8-12 weeks. Repairs such as trimming, reinforcing and re-hemming should be done on a standard sewing machine using nylon thread to ensure robustness.