Category: Business Cards

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Turn Your Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

brand ambassador

Your employees are the face of your organization. They are your brand ambassadors and leave an impression – positive or negative – with everyone they interact with. They are on the frontline interacting with your clients and prospects every day. It is important to your business that they leave a strong, positive lasting impression on everyone they interact with from customers to vendors. To best ensure they are leaving this positive impression, branding is key.

Strategically creating a strong brand starts from within. Is your frontline team acting as brand ambassadors in the way you intended? Your brand reflects your business’ reputation, popularity, visibility and viability in your marketplace. It increases both awareness and resonance distinguishing your organization from its competitors. Your brand also helps to retain and re-up/renew existing customers.

Five tips to turn your employees into brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadorship is too important to leave unwatched in the hands of your team without proper guidance. In order to do all this, you need to establish a shared understanding of your organization’s goals, vision, and mission. Building a successful brand requires an inside-out approach. Provide transparent communication on important news, goals, achievements, and milestones to inspire and motivate your staff. Keep employee experience high from day one.

Similarly, while building a brand with your clients and customers is important, failing to treat your employees as the heart of your organization can harm employee engagement and employer reputation alike. Have you created a common culture and an environment where people love to work through a strong brand? Four key ways to do this start with:

  1. Define your direction. Define your values, mission, and vision to provide a clear direction and give your business an identity or purpose with which your staff can identify.
  2. Strengthen staff loyalty. Help people understand why their role is important and how they fit into the overall picture by aligning them with the company purpose. Transcend your staff’s demographical diversity and create a common culture of togetherness and belonging that will make your staff love your organization.
  3. Support your workforce. Bring your most important resources directly to your employees to support them in their daily tasks and make their working lives easier.
  4. Inspire and empower. Encourage your employees to participate in the conversation and provide a direct line to company happenings and important information. Encourage your employees to participate in the company conversation by providing platforms for feedback and discussion.
  5. Make your workforce love your brand. Promote your brand internally through visual and engaging communication channels (not just email).

The concept and definition of your unique branding needs to be established amongst your team from top to bottom to create a meaningful connection to your brand. This will allow your employees to blossom individually but also collectively into brand ambassadors all rowing in the same direction. Once established internally, then you can focus on the outward presentation of your fabulous team…

Three print products to turn employees into brand ambassadors

Professionally designed printed collateral and promotional items can work to showcase your brand ambassadors in the best light. Minuteman Press Calgary Shepard is a print shop after all. Here are three print ideas you can use to help your team stand out embodying your branding goals:

  1. Incorporate branded apparel into your team’s everyday wear. Your team can become a living source of brand exposure by wearing clothing that showcases important brand-related imagery. Shirts, hats, and aprons worn by your brand ambassadors can be custom-made to feature the organization’s logo and color schemes. Any slogans created by the business may also be included on the apparel to familiarize visitors with the brand’s taglines.
    [Tip: Name tags offer a quick and easy opportunity for your brand ambassadors and your prospects to cut through the ice and engage on a personal level more quickly.]
  2. Provide your brand ambassadors with business cards. Your employees may hand their cards out to clients or prospects to promote future interactions with the brand. You should include details on the card such as your organization’s web and social media pages. This will help potential customers locate and connect with your brand online. Offering a business card to a person will also form a more personal connection between the recipient and the employee.
    [Tip: With today’s print technology, most printers can design and create business cards for your entire team – including small volume runs for your team who maybe aren’t on the frontline. It is a great way of showing they are part of a larger team.]
  3. Give your employees custom stationery, forms, presentation folders and/or notebooks to work with. Your brand ambassadors can be provided customized stationery to interact with clientele that includes  your company logo. This offers further employer brand exposure than a non-branded alternative.

Your brand ambassadors have a lasting impact on customers and can improve consumer recognition of a business. Companies can use branded apparel, business cards, and custom stationery to turn their workers into better brand representatives.

Post Press

All businesses should look within for their best opportunity to brand – their employees. Your employees – or brand ambassadors as we have called them throughout this blog – can become your single greatest secret weapon in branding. You can use the above tips assist you in framing how you can leverage this secret weapon most effectively. Don’t know where to start? Contact the team at Minuteman Press Calgary Shepard. 

We Design. We Print. You Profit.

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6 Autumn Seasonal Marketing Tips To Help Your Small Business Get Noticed

Autumn Seasonal Marketing

With Labour Day in the rear-view mirror, are you ready for Autumn seasonal marketing? We aren’t just talking pumpkin-spice lattes and use of spooky fonts. Just be sure that the messaging and imagery you use are in line with  your brand’s personality. And that you get going as early as you can. As with any other campaign, the more prepared you are, the better your results will be.  

There are a lot of things that you can get your clients and prospects excited about. With the pandemic, many events and plans are looking a bit different – much of it remains remote.  That is likely more reason to adapt your Fall seasonal marketing campaigns and possibly try out some new marketing ideas. Below are 6 Tips to kick your Autumn seasonal marketing into high gear: 

1. Add seasonal content

Themes like seasons can inspire great content! For example, Autumn seasonal marketing for a restaurant might be to design and print recipes with a Fall theme in mind. Similarly, a mechanic might run a feature profiling a winterization package. An accountant can write about how to prepare a business in the build up to tax time. Simply put, any type of business can get inspiration from the change of season and use it to provide relevant, up-to-date and interesting content for their business. Just be sure to ensure your seasonal content is of value. Creating quality content can and will pay dividends for your business. There’s lots of space to be creative with your Fall seasonal marketing content, but make sure it doesn’t come across as tenuous, opportunistic or, worst of all, useless. 

2. Add some autumn colour 

Give your brand a temporary refresh by designing your Autumn seasonal marketing with the amazing colours and distinctive hues of the season. You have a whole colour pallet to choose from across your marketing inventory to provide you the opportunity to adapt the look and feel of your Fall marketing materials. Autumn colours range from luminous reds and deep pinks, luxurious ambers and burnt oranges, radiant yellows and enigmatic shades of black. Although there is a wide range of seasonal colours to choose from, core elements like your logo, your brand personality, writing style and font, should stay consistent whatever the season. Deviating between visual or verbal identities will only serve to confuse customers and sacrifice your hard-won reputation and brand recognition. 

Pumpkins are synonymous with fall because of the weather, not just Halloween. Imagery can also be incorporated into promo emails you send your subscribers. You can tie each promo into a particular Fall holiday, occasion or theme (e.g. pumpkins, leaves that have changed colours, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc.) You can also try doing a play on words e.g. “Fall into _____ sale!” If possible, try to offer Autumn seasonal marketing promotions on products or services that are particularly popular or useful this time of year. 

3. Fall-themed Storefront 

An autumn themed storefront is like an open invitation to the community. Businesses with storefronts have a fantastic opportunity to have fun and create interest with the season. Decorating your business’s window with posters or window clings – any signage – in Autumn colour is like an open invitation for the community to come in and look around. You could also consider a sandwich board outside your storefront or in the neighbourhood with decorative messages and promotions.  These little touches can help humanize your brand and make your shop more welcoming. 

4. Don’t forget your online presence 

Your on-line stores and lead conversion websites can also get into the spirit with an Autumn-themed brochure. You could create autumn editions of popular branded merchandise. Items that people are more likely to use in autumn. Long sleeve T-shirt’s, branded socks, coffee/soup mugs and keep cups can all be produced in autumn colours and sold online. If you produce branded products, you could give them an autumn twist like using autumn colours on your labels and packaging. All of these things can refresh your brand and create renewed interest in your products. 

5. Create a marketing calendar 

As a business, it is very important that you shift your marketing strategies from season to season. Public dates like Halloween and Thanksgiving create the perfect springboard for Fall marketing activities. It shows your audience that you’re in tune with the transitions they are experiencing. And it helps them connect with you too, when they see you marking occasions that are special to them. 

On top of Halloween and Thanksgiving, there is back to school, seasonal start of Fall, World Smile Day (10/1), sports season starts, small business week, and more. Special dates provide the perfect springboard for marketing activities of all types, from time-limited promotional sales to an autumn specific menu. Creating a marketing calendar will help you identify dates you want to work around and will ensure you give yourself enough time to plan and implement a campaign designed specifically for this time of year. It will also ensure that you won’t forget a special date that has the potential to be significant to your business. 

6. Autumn themed direct mail campaign 

Showcase the changing of the season the old fashioned way with direct mail (and, don’t forget to add value by including a coupon). With the onset of digital marketing, sending things by mail is somewhat a lost art these days, which provides an opportunity to put yourself front and centre into your customers mind. Most people, when receiving a brightly coloured mail pack from a brand they have used in the past, will open and read it just to see what is on offer. Alternatively, you could simply highlight an autumn-themed sale your business is running. Ensure the design of your mailer has enough Autumn flair to draw your customers attention. 

Post Press 

Are you ready for your fall marketing?  Go ahead and take these Autumn seasonal marketing ideas as inspiration for your fall campaigns this year. And don’t be afraid to tailor and customize as needed to the needs of your business niche. You can use the above tips to assist you in framing how you “fall into the season.” Don’t know where to start? Contact the team at Minuteman Press Calgary Shepard. We Design. We Print. You Profit.