Daily Biz Solutions

The beauty of custom jobs is that they allow you to do more with your regular marketing and advertising tools. Take a look at your simple 2″ x 3.5″ standard size business card. With a simple custom job, you can turn that into a folding business card that bears more than just your name, company, phone numbers and address. You can add value to it, a value that benefits your recipient directly, and indirectly works to your favor by making it a standout from the lot of business cards in your client’s wallet.

Know the score

Business cards are printed on thick cover stock so folding takes more effort compared to paper with regular thickness. A little mistake during folding and this can create crooked lines along the middle section of your folded business cards.

To address this, printing companies use a method called scoring. This is the process of creating an impression, like a shallow cut along the intended fold line. This is to ‘lessen’ the thickness and to help make folding easy.

6 instant business card makeovers

Exactly what can you do with the extra flap on your business cards? To get your folding business card online printing project started, here are five ideas to help give your business card more than its traditional function:

1. Calendar

You’ve got enough space to include a year calendar, and on the opposite panel, you can note down the important holidays. Since most handy calendars like those in cellphones don’t have holidays pre-marked, your business card can be the quick reference.

You can also note down important company events that would welcome client and customer participation.

2. Appointment card

This is a good way to monitor the attendance of your client or patient, especially those who need regular meet-ups with you. You can have fine lines in columns where you can write down the next appointment date, as well as mark those that were cancelled previously. It will give you and your client a simple but useful record of your meetings.

3. Discount card

You’ve probably seen this done in bookstores and other shops that reward frequent buyers. Cards are given out and these are marked whenever the customer makes a purchase of a certain amount. Repeated visits to the stores are rewarded with points that can be exchanged for different prizes or given discounts on their next purchase.

4. Location map

You can add a map that can help people find their way to your company or store. This is especially useful if your area is hard to locate, and if you get complaints about poor directions and lack of road signs.

5. Service and product list

Your folding business card can also have enough room to show your service and/or product list so business card holders can always refer to it whenever they need certain commodities that you may have.

6. Advertisement card

And if you have an upcoming offering like a new addition to your product line that you want to introduce early on, you can use the other flap to do just this.

You may choose to use one or two of these ideas for your folding business card batch. Make sure that the ones you choose would be what are most beneficial to your client base.

More Business cards printing services can be found at online printing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Zoe_Phoenix

It seems like a long time ago, but it has actually only been a few years since marketing campaigns were all print based. Today, the Internet offers businesses the technology to reach customers in whole new ways. The diversity in the argument of “print versus internet” has brought about the arrival of a new tool for services, integrated marketing.

Based on business development and branding, the benefits of this new medium are many. It offers numerous advantages over older marketing services and even some newer ones.

This article offers an overview of the benefits along with a look at why working with a single, specialized company is crucial to success in today’s business environment.
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Every business needs a plan – any plan – that will guide and inform their marketing activities. And yet, as essential as a marketing plan is, many business owners and entrepreneurs don’t use one; most claim being “too busy” with the running of their business as the primary reason.

With those people in mind, here is my guide to writing a 5-minute marketing plan.

What Pain Do You Solve?

In order to successfully market your product or service, you must resolve some form of pain for your customers. If you offer health products, the pain is disease – that one is obvious. If you offer financial assistance, the pain could be financial insecurity.

But what if you sell something that might be seen as frivolous or non-essential? There is still pain involved. The easiest way to determine what the pain is is to find out what the emotional payoff your customer gets AFTER they have the result you promise, then work backwards to identify the pain.

Target Market

Knowing who you are selling to is very important since they will inform you about things like message delivery, word choice, etc. If you are selling to teenagers the message you use and the means you select to deliver your message will be vastly different than if you are selling to an aging population.

Your target market can be divided into three categories: those who know they need what you are selling, those who need it but don’t know it and those who don’t yet need it but will in the future.

Those people who are actively looking for the solution you provide are your Primary Target Market and should receive the majority of your focus at first. They only need to be educated on your specific solution, not the need for it.

Secondary and Tertiary Market require more effort and often the timeline from communication to integration is longer. They shouldn’t be ignored, but should receive a smaller amount of your time, energy and financial marketing budget.

Develop Your Essential Message

Your essential message is the core of what you do and is a very concise explanation of the pain you solve, how you solve it and who you solve it for. It is also written (or spoken) in the vernacular of the market you are trying to reach.

A simple formula can be summed up in my Killer Elevator Pitch process, which is a 3-step process you can complete in less than a minute.

First, state the pain you resolve in the form of a question that is essentially rhetorical, as in: You know how the vast majority of all businesses fail in their first 5 years?

Next, concisely describe who you help and how you help them: I mentor new and small business owners on how to develop and implement a strategic marketing plan.

Finally, close with the major benefit your customers get, after they have achieved the result that you promise: So that they never have to worry about having enough clients every again.

Track Your Most Important Metrics

Metrics are the food that good marketers live by (and if you own your own business, you had better be a good marketer) because this intelligence informs future decisions, giving you a better chance of increasing success rates with marketing efforts you undertake

But all metrics are not created equal. In fact, there are certain metrics that stand head and shoulders above the rest. They are: qualified leads per month; conversion rate from lead to customer; average sale value; average number of sales per customer (lifetime); average profit margin per sale.

By tracking these metrics and by making incremental improvements to them over time, you can have a compounding effect on the overall profitability of your business.

Implement a Daily “One Step” Action Plan

The real reason that most business owners don’t do enough marketing is because it seems as though there is way too much to do. In the end, this feeling of overwhelm often results in no marketing activities taking place.

So for the busy entrepreneur who is doing it all herself, implementing a “one step” action plan can be the savior of your business. Doing just one thing each day – and making it the first and most important thing you do each day – will embed the habit of marketing in your business.

If you’re currently running your business without a formal marketing plan take 5-minutes right now to create a simple plan you can begin using tomorrow, by following the steps outlined above.

If you don’t run your business the right way, your business will always run you – and when that happens you can soon expect to be on the wrong side of those terrible set of statistics that are stacked against new businesses.

A 5-minute plan is better than no plan at all, but if you’re ready to develop a more complete marketing plan and learn the fundamentals of marketing strategy, visit http://www.MakeMyMarketingWork.com/ebook to get a copy of Make My Marketing Work, the essential guide to strategic marketing for small business owners.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Paul_Keetch

Before going on to discuss the employees role in services, we feel it is important to differentiate between products and services. Services in most simple terms are deeds, processes and performances. Services may also be defined as any activity or benefit that one party offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything [1]. These simple definitions give us a good idea about what services are. We can give examples of a barber, a tailor, or a restaurant as services. Products on the other hand are offerings that are tangible in nature like for example a car.

In today’s world, services are becoming more and more significant in any country’s economy. As Louis V. Gerstner said in 2001 “Services are going to move in this decade to being the front edge of the industry”. This quote comes from the former CEO of a company which claims to be the world’s largest service business in the world, IBM. The importance of services in today’s world can be further emphasized by the fact that services comprised of almost 80% of United States of America’s Gross Domestic Product in 2003 [2].
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If you are in any type of network marketing business or are considering joining one, then this is for you! It is a great choice to consider network marketing just because the compensation plans are worth the effort (if they are good). I am going to share with you some tips and techniques that can make you stand out and have targeted prospects calling you wanting to join your business.

I consider that it is a numbers game and if you have good marketing techniques you will definitely have more people contacting you. Some strategies that you can start using today are:
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