PPB April 2020

Q A SUPPLIER ASKS: What have other companies found to be the most effective paid advertising strategy? For my business, aside from industry trade shows, it’s been email campaigns and SAGE advertising. What are your experiences? You will often hear me remind distributors that if they claim to their clients that the most effective means of acquiring and keeping clients is promotional products, then they need to be their own best case study and build their brand using the mediumof their claims. If a distributor can’t stand out from their own competitors using brandedmerchandise, they have no business telling these companies that they can help them stand out from theirs. The same theory applies to suppliers. With such a crowdedmarketplace, we can have the coolest, most amazing products on the planet, but if no one knows about them, you aren’t going to sell any of them. Optimizing our products in search engines is imperative to our success, but just like distributors need to use promo to sell promo to their clients, we need to be a product of the product and use our own wares as marketing tools to reach distributors as well. We need to put products in distributors’ hands and use creative messaging and a clear call to action to drive them to our websites, lead them to follow us and engage with us on social media, remind them to customize our ZoomCatalogs and even prompt them to search for certain itemnumbers on SAGE. PPAI does a great job of telling us that promotional products work, but quite frankly, it’s up to all of us to prove it. That’s my 10 cents. CHARITY GIBSON National Account Coordinator Peerless Umbrella Co. Newark, New Jersey PPAI 112666, S10 Your own products should be among your best brand ambassadors, and to the point that a call-to-action will drive distributors to your website, take a moment to reflect on your website, your only 24-hour on-call resource. While virtually every supplier has a website, many of them are simply inadequate, outdated placeholders. Virtually, all your marketing and advertising dollars will drive traffic to your website—but what happens when distributors get there? Does your site inform, enlighten and engage? Or does it lie there, inert, boring and essentially useless? A well-designed website can be an invaluable resource tool for your customers, and it can save you money, too. (Ask me—I have specific examples.) And a great site can reduce inbound calls and questions. Conversely, a poor site all but says, “try our competitors instead.” SCOTT A. NUSSINOW, MAS Executive Vice President ArtworkServicesUSA.com Auburn, Maine PPAI 231735 Do You Have An Answer? A Distributor Asks: I’m curious as to the policies, consensus or best practices for using a supplier’s product images? I’m new to the industry and working to gather content across social media platforms, and I’d like to highlight different supplier products that clients may find interesting. What’s Your Answer? Email your answers to Question@ppai.org for the chance to be featured in a future issue of PPB. Danielle Renda is associate editor of PPB. | APRIL 2020 | 13 INNOVATE