In economic downturns, marketers learn to do more with less. With advertising and marketing budgets slashed to save on costs, keep these copywriting tips in mind to make sure your business continues to get the exposure it needs. Creating a newsletter, offering a special report or issuing a press release can keep your business in the public eye. Creating copy that's informative, robust and engages customers is key to the ongoing success of your business.  

* Your business is newsworthy. Now is the time to give your business plenty of exposure by issuing a press release. If you have a new product line to announce, a new management member to introduce or an upcoming event, a press release is the perfect tool. Write your press release so it's newsworthy, not a blatant sales pitch or business ad.

You can promote a brief call to action at the end of the release to urge customers to visit your website or retail stores. Submit the release to your local paper and/or to an online site such as PRWeb or PRNewswire for greater national exposure.

* Get customers to invite you into their “personal” spaces. Write an informative weekly or monthly newsletter for customers. Web visitors have a tendency to visit sites, search for the items they need, purchase and click out of the sites. What happens after they leave your website? Unfortunately, you're out of sight and mind. Offer an opt-in newsletter subscription so buyers can subscribe to receive special offer notices and valuable tips. Best of all, your company stays fresh in consumers’ minds.

Now that the customer has invited you into his domain — i.e., his email inbox — on a weekly or monthly basis, here's a short list on what you can accomplish with a customer-based newsletter:

• keep customers informed on specials;
• provide company news and events;
• offer loyal customer coupon offers;
• print customer success stories using your product or service;
• offer tips on how to use your product;
• link to informative articles that can benefit your customers; and
• give customers a voice and let them offer feedback.

Giving your customers a voice provides an invaluable source of information for marketing purposes. Now, more than ever, is the time to listen to what your customers are saying about the services and products you provide.

* Did someone say free? Write and offer a “free” special report or pamphlet to customers. Have them download it off your website, or directly mail it to them. Everyone loves something free, and this establishes you as a knowledge leader in your field. For example, if you're an electrician, your pamphlet can be as simple as listing a few tips on avoiding electrical hazards.

Always make sure your free handout contains your complete company name and contact information such as address, phone number, website and email so you can be contacted. If they have to search for this information, you've lost the sale.  

Instead of viewing tougher economic times as a glass half empty, try to see the glass as half full. Continue to fill it a drop at a time until you reach your goals. There are more opportunities out there than you think.

Denise McGill is a freelance catalog, web and promotional copywriter. You can reach her at denise@mcgillcopywriting.com or visit her website at www.mcgillcopywriting.com.

This is the time of year when marketers are analyzing how to improve their businesses. As much as you might want to latch on to the latest fad, your success or failure comes down to doing a few key aspects of marketing better than your competitors.

To help you get a jump-start on the new year, here's where I suggest committing the bulk of your resources:

1. Identify your best potential targets. You’ve been hearing this song for a long time, but here's why it’s more important than ever: Marketing is simply too expensive to waste money on mass distribution and low response rates. That model worked when paper and postage were cheap, but those days are gone forever.

In addition, while you might argue that online alternatives provide the low costs you seek, print still powers many companies’ engines. Until that changes, spend more time figuring out how to make print work better rather than trying to eliminate it from your marketing mix.

That process begins with ongoing investments in database marketing tools, services and analytics that'll help you mine the most desirable customers. Developing customer intelligence is all about gaining individual customer insights that truly enable the delivery of “right message, right channel, right time.”

You can only accomplish this by taking a strategic approach to understanding your customers, rather than a last-minute, ad-hoc precampaign analysis. Building customer intelligence is a process that starts with understanding the value of each customer.

The next phase is to segment customers into relatively homogeneous groups that have relevance to your products. Typically, there'll be multiple segmentations that provide insights into the multidimensional nature of most people. There might be life-stage segments, relationship lifecycle segments, product needs’ segments or potential value segments.

Then add predictive analytics to provide a more quantified likelihood to purchase and potential value for each customer for each product or product category.

Investing in database marketing strategies to create more personalized communications helps organizations improve their marketing metrics and increase opportunities and incentives to improve the ever-important marketing return on investment.

2. Invest in quality creative. The 40-40-20 rule of direct marketing says your success depends 40 percent each on offer and list and 20 percent on creative. But have marketers become so obsessed with costs that they've forgotten the value of creative in making a good offer? Be certain your creative attracts positive attention and represents your brand with the image you want to convey.

I recently saw an ad from a major retailer of furniture and home goods featuring a right-hand, single gatefold that formed the door of an armoire. Opening the folded page displayed the interior of the armoire and its contents.

A little more expensive, sure, but my guess is that it was well worth the money. Get your creative team and printer together to see how you can enhance your creativity within a budget.

Creativity isn’t just about artistic elements, however. It’s also about finding innovative ways to help your customers find what they need, or finding ways to generate special interest for new product launches, best-sellers and other marketing priorities.  

3. Speak to your customers as if you know them. Don’t get the idea that I'm trying to pass the “Dear Sue” stuff off as personal communication. Today’s highly evolved personalization capabilities — both in print and online — dovetail perfectly with good database marketing practices. Doing the up-front database work significantly improves the precision with which you can select customers and create specific offers to their preferences.

Proven print technologies ranging from selective binding to ink-jet imaging enable you to customize catalogs to a high degree. Quickly evolving digital printing technologies now allow for complete customization of each piece. Variable data digital printing is being used as a stand-alone solution, as well as in combination with high-speed selective binding lines.

There's technology that uses an optical character recognition system to selectively insert highly personalized, digitally printed covers and outserts based on customer data, for example. The optical recognition system on the finishing equipment reads the barcode and matches the personalized piece to the catalog, which is then ink-jet addressed to the specific customer at the end of the line.

4. Integrate media … then integrate some more. Don't fall in love with a particular medium. No matter how well it performs, you can bet your last dollar it would do even better if you integrated it with one or more additional media.

This requires strategic thinking and campaign execution, including careful synchronization and timing. True integrated media also means integrating print. Study after study shows that the combination of print catalogs with the web, email and personalized direct mail delivers maximum results.

What’s more, new tools such as the Intelligent Mail barcode help track letters and flats. You can now receive more detailed information than ever on how and when catalogs are being delivered, along with how customers are responding. Moreover, you'll acquire and retain customers you know are likely to generate strong lifetime value.

Virtually no one has enough time and resources to do everything. That means you have to make decisions about what will bring you the best return and then spend accordingly. Focusing on good database marketing practices in combination with strong creative, high-level customization and integrated campaigns will produce the superior returns your company seeks.

Bruce Jensen is the group vice president of sales for Transcontinental Printing’s Magazine, Book & Catalog group. Reach Bruce at jensenb@transcontinental.ca.

This is part 1 of a multipart series on how virtual catalogs can be a valuable tool for marketers looking to build their online presences. This week I examine the costs of publishing a virtual catalog, as well as the features it offers. Part 2 will take a look at the metrics that need to be tracked to measure the effectiveness of virtual catalogs, as well as what those metrics can tell you and how virtual catalogs compare to “email on steroids.”   

Digital catalogs have been around for a long time, but they've suddenly become a valuable tool for marketers. The technology has dropped in cost to the point where marketers are almost forced to learn how to use digital editions — not to mention the fact that they've become very user friendly, too.

Now that the technology has arrived, marketers are learning how to leverage their catalog creative and use it much more widely to generate revenue beyond traditional print.

How much does it cost to publish a virtual catalog? Prices range from $6/page to upward of $30/page; so a 52-page catalog could be as inexpensive as $312. Even an average cost from your printer to provide a virtual catalog at $20/page totals $1,040, which is peanuts compared to your total bill for printing, paper and postage.  

How can the cost be so low? Vendors take the same PDF files marketers use to print their catalogs and simply convert those files into digital editions. Minimal work is required to turn those files into virtual catalogs, therefore costs have really dropped.

Printers (led by Worldcolor, Quad/Graphics and Brown Printing) have really committed themselves to building out virtual catalog solutions as part of their pre-press package of services because virtual catalogs represent a value-added service that can distinguish one printer from another. Stand-alone providers like Movado have solutions with all the bells and whistles at almost the same cost as the lowest-priced solutions from printers.

How have the features evolved? Virtual catalogs have finally caught up to their potential as web applications that shoppers can embrace. Consider the following:

• Virtual catalogs link seamlessly back to online shopping carts.
• Virtual catalogs can be included as links on emails, allowing your catalog to reach your email file.
• Loading time for virtual catalogs is almost instantaneous.
• Virtual catalog features are intuitive, so you can either flip the pages, scan the thumbnails of the pages or scroll through the table of contents and get to the products you want to see quickly.
• A big change has been the ability to convert Flash to HTML search-enabled text so spiders and bots can search your catalog, as well as users via keywords.
• The ability to access catalogs anywhere or anytime — whether on your mobile device, at home or the office — without having to search for the actual printed copies.
• Marketers can capture email addresses as a first step for viewing virtual catalogs.
• Thumbnail previews and easy-to-use toolbars allow for effortless page navigation; bookmarks; post-it notes; sharing through email and social networks; and razor sharp text, zoom and digital rights management.

Jim Coogan is president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning. Reach Jim at (505) 986-9902 or jcoogan@earthlink.net.

The facts, stats and true in-the-trenches business experiences of 2009 now tell marketers a lot about what to expect for 2010 — the value-oriented, thrifty approach cemented in 2009 isn’t likely to change. Below is a quick review of some of the key things marketers should look for in the coming year.

1. Pent-up demand from the jet set. For the super wealthy demographic, expect that luxury items will be back in vogue as pent-up demand for jewelry, cars, homes, boats and fashion — at today’s reduced costs — increases. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to offset the dramatic falloff seen from the much larger affluent group that accounted for much of the demand growth during the run-up to the recession.

2. Personal fulfillment for the rest of us. Whereas pre-recession discretionary money was reserved for items people didn’t need but wanted, the recession and its epic duration have now made people’s hobbies and passions indispensable as a means to relieve stress and add back pleasure into their lives. Revenues from home improvement; home-based interests like gardening and exercise; and passion hobbies like crafts, music, fishing, etc., will stay in vogue and continue to capture wallet share.

3. Just the basics for the apparel market. Recovery in this sector will likely take all of 2010, and I believe we’ll see minimal increased spending. An exception to this could be wardrobe maintenance and accessories: “yes” to blouses, shirts, jackets, slacks and low-cost accessories, but “no” to high-end designer fashion unless it also has a high perceived value. It’s an exciting time for the fashion industry to diversify and pursue new opportunities.

4. The mature market will keep booming. I expect the mature market — including insurance, financial services, health care products and domestic travel — to see revenue growth throughout the year as aging baby boomers continue to need to make ongoing decisions about their futures.

5. Paid content will test its limits. This year will be the year of publishers testing paid content business models as lean advertising has forced publishers to develop new revenue streams without significant cash outlays. Where the line between paid and free exists, and whether the fundamental shift in technology and the internet’s jarring redirect of consumers’ reading behavior has made getting paid moot, will be tested.

6. Newspapers will leverage strong regional brands and databases. National and large regional newspapers are rallying together to create higher-value advertising relationships that result in higher ad rates. In order to successfully create their own ad networks and potentially bypass Google and other low-CPM advertising outlets, they'll have to offer refined demographic targeting of their databases.

7. Social media will grow up. This year will mark social media's crossover into the demand requirements of traditional return on investment-based search, display and email campaigns. Marketers know audience measurement and impact need to be brought into the calculation, but figuring out just how and what to measure will require a different set of analytics.

Chris Paradysz is CEO of PM Digital, a New York City-based internet marketing agency specializing in search engine marketing. Chris can be reached at cparadysz@pmdigital.com.