Can you imagine what it would be like if you could exponentially increase the return you get for every marketing Euro spent? If you have ever gone fishing for mackerel you will probably be aware that on each line there are many hooks, this means every time you cast your line into the sea the number of fish you can catch is multiplied by the number of hooks on your line.

There is a way that you can apply this technique to your marketing so that each campaign is aimed not just at one prospect but many prospects for the same price.

Find out how you can multiply your marketing results today.

The secret to getting this magnified effect on your marketing is to discover your “customer’s watering hole”. You probably already know where all your customers must gather from time to time, just like the watering hole the hunter waits for the game beside.

There is an old saying which goes “you will catch more bees with honey than with vinegar”, so it probably makes sense to start thinking about what is the type of honey that will attract your customers and where is the best place to put it, so they will find it.

The reason animals and game can always be found at the watering hole is because they need water to stay alive. So you should ask yourself the question, “what are my customer’s needs that must get on a periodic basis, in order for them to function?”

While some of you might want at this stage to book a blueprint for success workshop, others might well be able to figure this out for themselves. To go back to our earlier analogy, the honey that will magnetically attract your clients to you, is in fact your value proposition or as some of you may know it by, your unique selling proposition.

Once you have created this compelling message, which appeals at an emotional level, to your client’s desires or to help your client move away from some pains, the next step is to determine precisely how to present this message to get the most impact.

Let me give you an example. If your customers were accountants or accountancy practices, it might be a good idea to attend meetings specifically for accountants. This way everybody that you meet would be a potential prospect for your service. Let us say the proposition that you have, will enable accountants to increase their fee income. It might be a very good idea to have a question which you will pose to any accountant you might meet, which will get them to start thinking about how you can deliver something that they want. The question might go like this; “if there was a proven way that has worked with many other accountancy practices, to increase your fee income, how interested would you be?”

Specialist conferences might be a good opportunity to network with these accountants, however you still have not yet found their watering hole, so it’s probably a good idea to understand what each member of the accounting profession must do every year. Accountants in order to retain their professional qualification must attend, what is known as CPD, which a set number of hours of professional development.

So if you were able to partner with a CPD provider who would meet all of these accountants who must undergo this training and thus make your offer through the partner, then all your marketing efforts would be focused through the CPD provider which is in effect the accountant’s watering hole.

Each target group of your customers will have one or more watering holes so it is your responsibility to know your customers well enough to understand precisely where or what those watering holes are. If you are still having difficulty in ascertaining this, please then book your blue print for success workshop, where you will not only discover the marketing message to attract clients, you will find out how to precisely word your questions using psychology and most importantly you will find out where to use these new found skills.

If you are reading this and decide to see great benefit from taking action on this article, how much more will you get if you just visit 3R for sales, training, marketing and coaching services?

There is a lot of hype today about recession proof marketing, personally, based on the results I have seen, I believe it is a bullshit claim! No marketing is immune to change and even in good times the nimble and successful are constantly adapting. In recession you may find that you must become even more inventive to attract more leads on a smaller budget.

So what should you really do? How can you take action now and attract more clients in these challenging times?

So if you want to know where to start – then read on…

You are probably already painfully aware that the actions taken to bring in more business a year ago just don’t work today. So you are probably wondering what you can do differently, especially now that you have smaller budgets as a result of reduced cash flow.

The rulebooks that existed a year ago have to be torn up and thrown out. It is probably a good idea for you to review precisely who are your most profitable customers and in what segments they exist.

Many people, who are still extremely successful in these tough times, have taken stock and reviewed their entire marketing portfolio. The first step is to revisit your value proposition. What your customer may have viewed as a valuable before now have dramatically changed as a result of their current circumstances.

As Darwin said “it is not necessarily the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that will survive; rather those most adaptable to change.” So what are you doing today to adapt your approach to ensure you can make the most of the changing conditions and your customers changing preferences?

While headline figures state that consumer spending has fallen by 25%, this also means that 75% of spending is still taking place. The question you need to ask yourself is:”am I getting my unfair share of this reduced market?”

A couple of successful customers of mine who in the past had asked for a Blueprint for Success Workshop have realised that now is the time to rethink their strategy. It is no longer acceptable for business owners to stick their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and just hope that things will start to improve.

We all know that hope is not a strategy for success!

What you must do right now is to stop and assess where you are in relation to current market conditions and create a plan for your future success. As people are considering how to trim back costs, at the same time you should also be looking at how to generate additional sales thereby increasing the revenue. We all know the principal formula of business; sales – costs = profits. Therefore it is very important that you focus on both sides of the equation.

You must increase sales while reducing costs.

Therefore slashing marketing costs willy-nilly is not going to help you achieve more sales. What you must do is become vigilant and ruthless about how you apply your marketing budget.

And remember, what worked a year ago, won’t work today and is unlikely to work a year from now!

Therefore in conclusion this is why there is no such thing as recession proof marketing. Your marketing, like the market in which you exist, must adapt to change. And as you adapt to change you will start to see a new stream of clients flood your business.

If you’re unsure of what steps you should take now then maybe you might want to consider signing up today for a blueprint for success workshop. As many customer testimonials attest to this, it is the most important first step in ensuring you have the right marketing messages and sales questions to ensure your continued survival and future success in today’s economic climate.

If you are reading this and decide to see great benefit from taking action on this article, how much more will you get if you just visit 3R for sales, training, marketing and coaching services?

For a long time now, people have been using t-shirts to advertise. Printed t shirts for promotions could be the thing your business or company needs to get out there and get noticed. While it’s a method that’s been used for many years, it continues to be popular because so many people love t shirts.

People of all walks of life can use a t shirt. Even if you’re not the type to generally wear them out in public you may use them for housework, lounging around on a Saturday, mowing the lawn or playing some ball for fun. Whatever the reason that you wear a t shirt, the fact remains that most everyone uses them. This makes them one of the most common and versatile promotional tools available.

What better way is there to tell people about your business or company that with a great t shirt? Printed t shirts are also very inexpensive and affordable. When purchased in bulk, they can even be obtained at a great discount.

Printed T Shirts for Promotional Sales

You can also use printed t-shirts for promotional sales. For example, if a customer buys one of your items, they get a t shirt for free. Or if the customer spends a certain amount of money in your store, they get a t shirt for free. You could also do a punch-card promotion where they get a free printed t shirt once they have shopped at your store a certain number of times. The ideas are really endless and it all comes down to how creative you can be.

A t-shirt can actually be a great promotional tool to get someone to make a purchase, fill out a survey or give personal contact information to your company or organization. What creative ways can you think of to use printed t-shirts for promoting your cause?

Choosing Printed T shirts

Once you’ve decided to use printed t shirts for advertising or promotions, you have to decide what kind of t shirt to use. You will need to choose:

• The type of material (cotton is most popular)

• The color (or colors) of your printed t-shirt

• The sizes of shirts you will order

• How many shirts you need

• What will be printed on them

• What type of printing you will use (screen printing or digital)

Printed t-shirts are a great idea for promotions of all types. Whether you’re trying to promote a band, a new business or company or an upcoming event, you can get the word out with t-shirts. When people wear your shirts, it’s like you have a walking billboard for your advertisement. Since people enjoy t-shirts so much, they will wear just about anything if it’s comfortable. Printed t-shirts are great for giving away at events for this very reason. The person may not even know or care that they are advertising your business. They just want to wear a great t-shirt. If they got the shirt for free, well that just sweetens the deal a little more.

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of printed t shirts and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com

If you’re looking for a new way to promote your company or business, you should consider printed tumblers. Maybe you haven’t previously thought about it but this is actually a great way to market your business or company and who you are to other people. This is a practical and simple item that people can use and that’s easy to get and give away.

You can give these printed tumblers out for free (everyone loves something for free) and every time they get used, that person will think about your company. Even if they don’t use the tumbler for drinking out of, they can use it to store things. For example, they make great pencil cups and some types of tumblers can be used for stuffing and giving away prizes.

Printed tumblers are one of the simplest and easiest advertising tools you could ever use and they are as classic as the T-shirt when it comes to promotional items. The more creative you are, the better able you will be to advertise and market with printed tumblers but here are some ideas to help you out.

Ways to Use Printed Tumblers

Do you know about the different ways that you can use printed tumblers? Here are some ideas:

• Give them away at a business expo or convention

• Give them away from your place of business

• Give them away when someone makes a purchase of a certain amount or on a certain day

• Have them printed with your URL

• Have them printed to advertise a special event

• Have them printed with your company name and logo

• Have them printed with your contact information

With a little creativity and imagination, you can think of your own ways to use printed tumblers to advertise and market your business or company.

Reasons to Use Printed Tumblers

What are some reasons why you may choose this as an option for promoting your product or service? Tumblers are usually relatively inexpensive and can be an affordable advertising method. You can buy in bulk and save even more. In fact, there are places where you can get wholesale tumblers and then have them printed with whatever messages you need or want on them. This can save you a ton and make a great way to get the word out about who you are.

Tumblers are easy to get printed and you can have almost anything you want printed onto them. They come in a variety of colors and it’s possible to get your business or team colors on them as well. These details should be thought out before you set out to purchase your tumblers. It’s possible you can get the same company or service to give you the tumblers and the printing in one place but if not, you may need to buy the tumblers from one place and then have them printed somewhere else. When you shop around, you are better able to get the best deal on these services.

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of printed Tumblers and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com

What’s on your underwear? Let’s be honest for a minute and think about it. Go check if you need to- we’ll wait. Printed underwear is not just for children anymore. Just like your toddler may sport underwear with their favorite cartoon character or superhero on it, many adults have branded underwear, too.

In addition to printed underwear in favorite or popular designs, we also have to think about brand names. Have you ever purchased a pair of underwear just because of the company who made it? Calvin Klein was incredibly popular for this very phenomenon.

This doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on the underwear market though and with careful planning and preparing, you could have people scrambling to get underwear with your name on it. Ok, well maybe they won’t be lining up to wear underwear with your name on it but it’s likely they’d take it for free if you offered and then they have a permanent reminder of who and what your company is.

Reasons to Use Printed Underwear

Now that you know how and why people are using printed underwear to advertise their businesses, you can take time to look at more reasons why this method works.

Here are some reasons why printed underwear as an advertising tool works:

• Everyone wears underwear (or at least most of us do)

• It’s cheap and easy to buy in bulk or at discount

• It’s easy to have your logo or other information printed on the underwear

These are just some of the most popular reasons why printed underwear can be a good advertising tool for you to consider. When you weigh the pros and cons of using underwear as a promotional tool, most businesses will agree that it’s a good choice to try out.

What to Do with Printed Underwear

So what do you do with printed underwear and how can you make it work as an advertising tool for you? Well, first you need to choose the underwear. What kind will you buy? Where will you purchase it from? How many will you get? What type of style will you use? Boxers have proven to be one of the most popular types and men and women alike will wear them.

Next, you need to determine what you will have printed on it. Will you use your business name? logo? URL to your website? Once you have determined what you will print on it, you need to have them printed.

Then you also need to consider where you will give these away. Is there a business expo, convention or promotional event you can attend? If so, it will be easy to pass out the printed undies so people can remember who you are.

Additionally, you may give them away at your own place of business. If people come into your store or shop, you can pass them out. Maybe you can devote a special high traffic day to giving out the underwear at your man location. Perhaps everyone who shows up on Saturday gets a free pair of boxers or something like that.

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of printed underwear items and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com

Maybe you’ve never thought about using underwear as a promotional tool but time’s are changing and this calls for new and creative ways of advertising and marketing. There are people out there meeting this challenge. Are you one of them? Are you willing to push the limits and try a new way of promoting your business? Would you be open to trying a type of apparel marketing for your business to see how it works?

While apparel has been used for some time now to advertise and promote businesses, underwear is a fairly new form of clothing used in this way. It’s not as unusual as you may think though. More and more businesses are trying out promotional underwear as an additional way to market their product or service.

Reasons to Use Promotional Underwear

So what are some reasons why a business person may choose to use promotional underwear to get the word out about their business?

• It’s cheap

• It’s attention-getting

• It’s different

• You can have them printed with anything you want

• You can license your “brand”

Maybe you’re thinking that promotional underwear is not an area that your company wants to get into. I mean there are a lot of other types of apparel you could use to advertise your business or company, right? Wouldn’t you rather have your logo on something nice and normal like a ball cap or a t-shirt?

Well, those things are boring. It’s not about t-shirts and socks anymore; it’s about who can find a more creative way to get the word out there. Promotional strategy is calling for new techniques and underwear may be the wave of the future. Wouldn’t you be glad to get in on it while the getting is good and finding a new, and affordable, way of marketing your business or company?

Examples of Promotional Underwear

Maybe you think you’ve never seen promotional underwear but we invite you to think again. Do your children wear undies with their favorite super-hero or Disney character on them? That’s a classic example of promotional underwear. Your child likes a movie or character and begs you to buy that kind of underwear for them. This is promotional underwear.

While you may not have people lining up and begging to buy undies with your brand on them, that doesn’t mean Disney has a monopoly on the practice. You can use promotional underwear for your own business as well. What’s true for children’s underwear can also work in the adult world, even if not in the exact same way.

Types of Promotional Underwear

So what types of promotional underwear exist out there? Well, when it comes to styles and types, nothing is really considered off limits. However, men’s underwear styles are the most popular and of all the types of men’s underwear, boxers are the most commonly used.

Boxers may come in singles or in packages and you can often get them at a wholesale discount which makes it even easier to get more of the underwear needed to promote in the way you choose.

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of promotional underwear items and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com

Have you thought about the ways you can use USB hubs in your promotional endeavors? You’re not alone if the thought has never crossed your mind but luckily there are creative people out there looking for new ways to promote and advertise businesses, events and more.

To understand promotional USB hubs you first need to know what a USB hub is. It is a device that allows many USB devices to be connected to a single USB port on the host computer or on another hub. For example, if you only have two USB ports on your computer but you need to plug in three or four (or more) USB devices, you can instead plug the USB hub into the USB port and then the additional USB devices into the USB hub.

Many businesses will find the use of a USB hub very useful which is likely where the original idea surrounding promotional USB hubs came into play. People are always using USB ports. In fact, USB is the most common method used in connecting other devices to the computer these days.

What is USB?

If you take a look right now, you will probably see that several or more devices on your computer are using USB ports to connect them. Keyboards, external hard drives, mice, headphones and other computer devices can be connected using USB.

Promotional USB hubs can be used to advertise your business or company. You can have your business name, logo or contact details printed on the USB hub and you can then give them away as needed. Don’t mistakenly think that your business has to have something to do with computers or networking to benefit from a USB hub. Other businesses that have nothing at all to do with computers have found this type of advertising and promoting useful and so can you.

USB hubs can also be built into equipment but personalizing these types of USB hubs might prove more difficult. For example, they are often found in keyboards or monitors and very rarely, they can also be found in printers. Separate USB hubs will take different shapes and forms such as boxes that resemble network hubs and small designs that can be plugged directly into the USB port on a computer without a connecting cable.

Promotional USB Hubs

These smaller, direct-connecting types are most often used for promotional USB hubs. They are portable and can be personal, making them a great choice as promotional tools. They are also small enough to be more affordable for a business or company to have printed as a promotional item.

Personalized promotional USB Hubs make great exhibition giveaways, company incentives and marketing ideas so get yours today and start spreading the word about your business.

Promotional USB hubs are not limited to businesses, although this is likely the most common way that they are used. It can also be a good way to advertise a newly opened store or business, get the word out about a concert or show or tell other people about your event. What ways can you think of to use promotional USB hubs?

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of promotional USB Hubs and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com

When your business is trying to make a sale or bring in new clients, you know how important it is to advertise. Advertisement is probably the single most important part of actually selling your business. If you’re in the business of speakers you need to understand the value of promotional USB speakers.

Almost any consumer will tell you that you can’t compete with free. If you put a box on a table with a sign that said free and filled that box with rocks from the street, people would stop and take the rocks. Imagine if those rocks had your logo or business name on it. You can achieve the same thing with promotional USB speakers.

Computers Need Speakers

At this day and age small and big companies alike have a use for a computer. All computers could use a good set of speakers, especially promotional USB speakers. USB or universal serial bus comes with just about every computer made after 2000. With the addition of “thumb” drives, USB has become a very common name among business owners.

Taking your logo and putting it on a set of promotional USB speakers, then sending it off to companies is a great way to get your name out there, especially for companies who use speakers and computers on a day to day basis. While sitting at their desks, they will see your business logo or name every day. This is a great way to promote to all types of companies.

It’s not just desktop computers that get the most benefit from these speakers either. A lot of people prefer to have a set of speakers for their laptop since the onboard ones might not play as loud as they’d like. There are also many converters out there that allow USBs to be plugged into regular stereo systems.

Music Is Key

Not only can companies in office buildings use promotional USB speakers but the small shop owners can as well. Many businesses like restaurants, gas stations, and clothing outlets use music to help their customers feel more at ease. Easing their consumers helps them make money because a happy customer is more likely to buy their products.

Not only can this be a beneficial thing for the store owners but for you as well. Not only do you reach the people that work there, but their customers see your promotional USB speakers as well. There are many different uses for promotional USB speakers but selling yourself is one of the most beneficial.

Even if you’re not trying to promote your business name or logo, you can still use promotional USB speakers to attach other messages as well. Simple words of encouragement or catch-phrases are great ways to get attention too. You can also use any number of pictures, letters, or numbers to get your message across, no matter what it is.

Types of USB Speakers

While it might not seem like it the type of promotional USB speakers you send people will have just as much impact as what’s on them. If you’re promoting a food company you wouldn’t want to send out speakers that are pale green and yellow in color. You also don’t want to advertise child safety and send out speakers in the shape of a spike.

These things may seem like something you’d think about before sending, they are something to keep in the front of your mind. What size, shape, color and style of promotional USB speaker you send will reflect on your company just as much as your message. Keeping all of these things in mind you can make use of promotional USB speakers for your company.

Matt Franks is director of Fluid Branding, the UK’s largest supplier of promotional USB Speakers and other Promotional Products at www.fluidbranding.com. For Eco Friendly promotional products, including Recycled, Organic and Sustainable items visit www.ecoincentives.com