New Branding Building Programs for Franchisees from Clayton Kendall
Filed under: Marketing by Sasha on September 25, 2007
Many companies today, especially those in the retail and food industry, successfully operate as franchisees of established brands. Franchising proved very effective and over the decades grew into one of the most attractive and rapidly developing business models in the world. Why? Because franchise companies are pretty quick to start up: no need to invest tons of money into brand development, methodology, business approach, advertising and training - all these items are supplied by the franchiser.
It takes quite a bit of time, talent and strategic thinking to get your franchise company up on rails. Apart from a strong brand, highly disciplined management and impeccable business process your franchisor ambition must be backed by a reliable chain of suppliers & fulfillment experts. As a franchisor you will have to keep stock of a whole bunch of products for promotional & brand enhancement needs. Here is a short list:
- Uniforms & corporate apparel
- Print Advertisements
- Office forms and paper products
- Brochures, signage, banners
- Promotional items
- Employee rewards
Your franchisees will always run short on the above items and you’ll need to be bale to provide an effective means for them to get the items they need quickly and without delay. Basically it’s one of the must-haves if you want your franchise chain to grow and bring you profit.
Having an in-house team to handle the fulfillment tasks related to the above items may be quite costy and require more administrative effort. Luckily there are companies offering outsourced order fulfillment services that cover all possible tasks that a franchise company may have.
These companies usually provide a complete range of fulfillment services to support a franchise chain. Clayton Kendall, for instance, offers warehousing, print services, graphic design, company store websites, promotional products, awards, employee incentive programs, rapid order fulfillment, direct mail fulfillment, multi-media presentations as well as unique branding programs.
So you have a blog, now what?
Filed under: Reviews by Sasha on September 24, 2007
So you have a blog and you want to be rich like a million other webmasters out there but you do not know how to make money online, you keep writing new posts every day but you do not make any money from Adsense, banners do not make enough for you because you don’t have enough impressions and you ask your self is it worth to do stuff online. Guess what? It is cool to be online because you can get paid to blog if you join PayPerPost!
PayPerPost connects advertisers and link builders with blog owners in the most exciting way for both parties. Link builders create both links and buzz plus gain some traffic while blog owners earn money and of coarse they get motivated to write new content for their blogs. As you can see at the bottom this post is sponsored by PayPerPost so you can see that I am a part of that network from a couple of days ago.
PayPerPost post also offers bidding tools for your blog where advertisers can bid for your review directly on your blog, definitely worth of putting on your blog if you want to attract more advertisers. My advice is to join PayPerPost if you are serious about making money online….
Marketing Your Venture with Promotional Products
Filed under: Marketing by Sasha on September 21, 2007
Some great news for business marketers: nearly 74 % of the people who receive promotional products use the product at least once a week, and an amazing 45% use it at least once a day. This is especially true of such every-day trivia as promotional pens or logo mugs that take over almost every office table and desk in United States and Canada
About 97 million people in the United States (plus another 12 million in Canada) own and use computers, and a good 50 to 55 million of them rely on computers for work. Of this, more than 35 million people telecommute one to three days a week – that’s 47 percent higher than the 22.6 million figure only five years ago. So it’s without any hesitation wise to invest in portable promotional gifts and gift sets like High Sierra Tahoe Computer Travel Set or personalized holiday gift sets containing promotional clips, lanyards, ID tags and travel wallets.
Every-day use promotional gifts provide for the highest recall rate among other means of brand promotion. If you are not satisfied with just words, let me give you the numbers just for the recall rate. It’s 27% for Internet banner ads, 53.5% for advertisements that you see in more traditional media, in print and on TV and when it comes to promo items the recall rate raises to 76.1%! Impressive even for us at rushIMPRINT, though I’ve spent quite a few years working in this industry.
Netscape gone! Propeller is here, the new Netscape.
Filed under: Business by Sasha on September 20, 2007
Woke this morning and what do I see, Netscape.com is gone! Disappeared, gone, not there, empty. I was really shocked; I mean Netscape is one of the best marketing tools that I have been using for a long time. It is also one of the best market research tools since you can monitor other people and see what is in and what is out.
Personally I don’t like when big things like Netscape change their identity. Oh, by the way Netscape is now redirected to netscape.aol.com and it is a portal, not a social media site. Propeller.com is the Netscape’s backup or new brand I guess. Will it bring something new other than the domain name? I don’t thinks so but the time will tell….
Online business and CRM
Filed under: Marketing by Sasha on September 18, 2007
Doing business online creates many opportunities to make money online but it also creates many different contacts with various people, companies or organizations. It is surely good to be connected all over the Internet but it also means that you need to keep track of all of those contacts. Since we live in a digital world where everything including business is done with the help of a computer the best way to keep all your contacts in one place is to use some kind of CRM software.
Before using CRM software you should be familiar with the concept of CRM or the customer relationship management. Let’s see what has wikipedia to say about CRM concept:
“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.”
What this means in lay man words is that CRM concepts brings more sales which after all means more money to you and your company by producing what your customers need and by taking notes about what they have to say about your companies reputation and the reputation of your products.
Another phrase that will certainly come up when researching customer relationship management is: lead management. Lead management is described as:
“One key objective of the Marketing function is to generate sales related leads, which finally get converted into Sales Revenues for the company. Marketing campaigns with the specific objective of generating leads (Prospective customers who may be interested in a product). Lead management deals with processing these Leads, carrying out a sanity check, evaluating the genuineness of the information (Since, there is a lot of information that is gathered during Marketing Campaigns it becomes necessary to screen these leads), and finally converting them to Hot Leads or Cold Leads.”
I order to implement CRM strategy your business needs to use some kind of CRM software. There are some open source (free) solutions but there are also customized applications that can be as custom as you want them but that of coarse means you need to spend some money.
The best open source solution that I have found is sugar CRM which is free and paid, you should check it out.
One of the best commercial software that I have tried is AIMpromote which is an on-demand web-based software application to manage the handling of sales leads. It has 14 day free trial with full features available. I have installed it myself, it looks pretty good but I don’t have enough time to do full time (8 hours per day) tests.
