Using A Theme For Event Promotions

When coming up with design ideas for your printed promotional materials for an event, always work for consistency and a single message to maximize your impact.

A theme helps tie the event together, whether you're organizing a concert, a dance event or an art display. It goes without saying though that you should come up with the design for each item at the same time - whether you're looking to promote with postcards, flyers or posters. Otherwise, the layouts might end up disjointed. While the loose theme might not do serious damage to the actual event, it can dampen people's overall enjoyment of it.
More Than Information

Most promotional materials are designed to impart information - names, locations and dates. Worse than being simply typical, they're downright boring. Having an integrated theme worked into your promotion ensures an attractive packaging to your marketing approach.

For instance, say you're organizing the promotion for a heavy metal band that's coming through Calgary. While sorting out ideas for possible themes, you decide to use the cover of their latest album as inspiration. Imagine having flyers, posters and concert tickets that use the same graphics and layout. It can make for a truly powerful theme that should help reinforce fans' desire for the event and, consequently, increase their enjoyment of it.

The theme of your promotion can also give people an idea of what to expect from an event, heightening their anticipation and allowing them to be better ready when attending it. A retro-themed flyer to a dance party pretty much lets people know what kind of music will be playing and how they can dress for the occasion. A dirty cut-and-paste lettered punk rock styling on your flier should do the same.

Flyers and other printed promotional items can truly help make a good event even more special. Don't settle for a generic stock image with the time and place - be excited about your promotion and your audience will likely be as enthused about it as you.

5 Ways You Can Use A Custom Postcard For Your Business

There are many ways you can take advantage of a custom postcards for use in your business. Here's five of them:

Invitations

Send potential clients a well-designed postcard inviting them to a special event in your restaurant or a product launch in your store. It's cheaper than a fancy invitation and should work just as well. If you're showing off an art or a product collection, you can use the actual product itself as the main graphic on the card.

Launching A New Shop

If you're opening a new store in downtown Toronto, you can send postcards to local residents via mail informing them of the upcoming launch. Marketing through postcards can prove a colorful way to introduce your new business while reaching out to people on a personal level.

Reminders

You can use postcards to drum up repeat business by sending them to former customers. Whether they have forgotten about you or just haven't come around to needing your services again, a timely postcard in the mail should help keep you fresh in their mind.

Exclusivity

Regular customers who bring in a hefty chunk of your business can definitely appreciate receiving a custom postcard in the mail to show your appreciation. Even better, you can send them postcards to announce exclusive sales and private promotions reserved for only your best clients.

Upselling

Less invasive than a phone call, you can use a postcard to upsell customers a few weeks after you've closed a sale. You can use it as a thank-you note along with an offer to contact you if they need any assistance. Additionally, you can mention a discounted sale for a related product or service that they may find of value.

Color Guide To Your Printed Advertising Materials

When deciding on a design for your business cards, brochures and similar printed materials, color is undoubtedly one of the main considerations you need to take up with your commercial printer. After all, colors can convey messages all on their own, apart from making your printed advertising more palatable to the eyes.

A poor choice in colors can render your material boring or just plain unreadable. A good choice, on the other hand, will immediately attract attention and prod potential customers to take notice. Colors can elicit certain emotions in people. Take note of color use in your promotional materials - after all, it can mean triggering the right combination of feelings to finally push that sale.

What do specific colors tend to do?

• Blue is one of the safest colors you can use for your business materials. Lighter shades of it can invoke feelings of tranquility and peace while darker shades often trigger images of reliability and confidence.
• Black is a serious color and paints an immediate picture of authority. Done well, it can bring up feelings of elegance, sophistication and class.
• White keeps things simple. Used throughout your printed materials, it can be used to communicate purity, innocence and a clarity of intentions.
• Green is a lively color that is often associated with nature. It can invoke images of life, vitality and good health. With the current trend of eco-awareness, green can also associate your business with an environmentally-friendly disposition.
• Red is the color of passion and is perfect for campaigns looking to invoke sensuality, excitement and other extreme emotions.
• Yellow is a lively that, much like orange, can manage to stand out from a crowd with little else involved. It symbolizes feelings of joy, warmth and hope.
• Orange is all about fun. Great for creative campaigns, it brings up images of enthusiasm and a dynamic vibe. It's also attention-grabbing - great for promotional materials that can stand out from the crowd.
• Purple is often used when targeting younger consumers. Children, for one reason or another, gravitate towards purple shades more than any other color. Employed for a more adult audience, though, they can be used to convey ideas of royalty and nobility.

Five Ways To Improve Your Postcard Marketing

As good as we think we've designed our marketing campaigns, it pays to step back occasionally and try to look at it with fresh eyes. Is there really nothing else you can do to make it even better?

You can use these five things as possible guides when working on your custom business postcards for better results.
1. Is it attractive?

Simply put, an attractive postcard gets kept and saved for later. An ugly one gets picked up with the mail and thrown away with the rest of the junk. Even if the person who received the postcard is not interested in your service, they are still likely to keep the postcard if its beautifully done, even just for the sake novelty.

Many people have a natural instinct to hold on to nice-looking things even when they don't need them. As a result, your postcard will likely survive long enough to be read by other people, some of whom may actually turn out to be potential clients.

2. Does it read like a message from a friend?

The more personable and intimate it feels, the better results your postcard marketing is likely to get. People are starting to numb from the multitude of advertising around us - you'll need to tug at their hearts if you're going to sway them your way.

3. Does it express the benefits of your service clearly?

Your postcard should clearly express the benefits of your product or service in the first few seconds of reading it otherwise, you run the risk of losing the customer early in the process.

4. Does it offer a way for interested customers to respond quickly?

Will they need to drive down the mall to get the deal or can they just call in with their special discount code and place an order? If an interested customer reads your postcard, you'll need to offer them a way to take immediate advantage. A hot prospect, after all, can only stay warm for so long.

5. Can it convey the same message with less words?

If you can express the same ideas with the same clarity in shorter copy, why not trim it down further? Your postcard will be easier to read and faster to process that way. Additionally, you won't run the risk of losing your reader with so many words.

5 Reasons To Choose Flyers Over Classified Ads

Some local businesses prefer to advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and print magazines to announce special promotions and brand new offerings. We think you'll be best served by opting for flyer marketing instead. Here are five reasons why.

1. Flyers Are Way Cheaper Than Classified Ads

In Toronto and Calgary, a small newspaper ad the size of a business card is likely to cost you several thousand dollars, especially when you're targeting publications with large print runs. In contrast, you can use a fraction of that money to print tens of thousands of flyers and have them distributed across your target market. From a cost and reach standpoint, flyers simply outperform newspaper ads, hands down.

2. Better Design Options

Flyers can give you better design options than what most publications will allow. You can choose to have your flyers decked in attractive color, odd shapes and unusual designs - things newspapers and magazines will likely have plenty of limitations on. Same with your font use, graphics and preferred design elements.

3. More Flexible Medium

With flyers, you can choose what kind of materials you want your advertising to run on - glossy sheets, bright-colored papers, pretty much anything you can find available. You can choose a run using more expensive materials to send out to your mailing list while opting for cheaper prints of the flyers you're handing out on the street. There's a wide divide you can traverse - a flexibility you won't enjoy with classified listings.

4. Handpick Your Customers

You can choose who will receive your flyers based on your own research of your target market - after all, who knows your customers better than you?

5. Say Everything You Want To Say

With flyer marketing, you won't be tied down to a limited length of copy. With a large helping of space available, you can say your piece without having to mince words. As a result, you can better explain what you're offering without having to leave anything between the lines.

Marketing Your Art With Postcards

If you're an artist - whether your medium is photography, painting or sculpture - postcards can prove a good marketing tool to get samples of your work out to potential clients and patrons. Postcards are definitely cheaper than other forms of marketing. It's also highly personal - ideal for promoting intimate items such as works of art.

How would you go about it?

1. Highlight Your Best Work

Pick representative pieces of your work. Choose the specific photographs or paintings that you feel will make the best impression on those you're marketing to. Use these chosen items as the main image in each postcard.

If you're a painter or sculptor, it might pay dividends to have a professional photographer come in to take a flattering photo of the art pieces. After all, even the most profound works of art may end up less than stunning when captured by an untrained lens.

2. Use Plenty Of Text

Like other forms of selling, marketing your work to art dealers and collectors will require you to pitch for a sale. While it's nice to think that your best pieces can sell themselves, most contemporary artists who manage to make a living out of their art know the importance of selling their work.

Use the small space in the front of the postcard and the wide area of the back panel to create a persuasive copy for your case.

3. Make It Personal

Postcards are an intimate medium. Use conversational language and informal tones when crafting your message. Direct mail is loaded with junk messages - separate yourself from the herd.

4. Let Them Know Your Accomplishments

When you're an unknown artist trying to make a dent in a seemingly unwelcoming space, it pays to list as many testimonies to your brilliance as you can. Choose your most prominent awards and most notable accomplishments along with a testimonial from a well-known artist, if you can manage one, to solidify your position.

Using Humor In Your Postcards And Brochures

Laughter, despite everything said to the contrary, is still the best medicine. This is why humor works so well in print marketing campaigns - both in regular advertising and direct mail formats. Intelligent, well-crafted humor, after all, is an art form. Using it well can paint your business in a sophisticated and insightful light.

Direct response marketing material, for one, is laden with boring, typical and uninspired work. Taking a step away from the same old offerings to deliver a laugh with your own promotional campaigns will easily let you stand out from the crowd.

What kind of humor typically works well for postcards and brochures?

1. Unlikely Contrasts

Promotional tools that contrast two conflicting concepts can make for a well-done humorous campaign. For instance, the picture of a completely decked-out goth rocker cross-stitching a butterfly pattern can make for a humorous contrast, possibly enough to convince people to try out your cross-stitch supplies store.

2. Self-Deprecating Humor

While most businesses will try to convince customers they're the best people for the job, you can set your advertising apart by pointing out a product's flaws instead. For instance, when promoting your vegan restaurant in Calgary with a flyer, you can feature made-up degrading statements from non-vegetarians who think your food is not fit for human consumption. With thousands of vegan jokes currently circulating, you shouldn't run out of one-liners to include.

3. Self-Aggrandizing Humor

Taking the opposite road from the second type of humor, self-aggrandizing humor makes downright fantastic claims. Borrowing largely from exaggerations many businesses use to advertise themselves, self-aggrandizing promotional campaigns take it a step further into a full-blown parody. The thousands of Chuck Norris one-liners strewn all over hip shirts and internet forums probably demonstrate this type of humor best!