In conjunction with this month’s State of the Industry report on marketing, our dealer panel has provided seven successful campaigns and strategies that were rolled out in 2022. A little creativity and a lot of ingenuity enabled these dealers to produce campaigns that speak to the needs of industry verticals, geographic-based prospects and even clients that may not be fully aware of how a product or service can align with their needs. In the end, it comes down to establishing one’s dealer as a thought leader and resource for information that can enable end-users to operate more effectively and efficiently.
All You Can Eat: The Printing Buffet
The subscription-based economy has invaded our daily lives as consumers. From fresh food to books, movies, video games, razor blades and even car washes, monthly subscriptions indulge our desire for unlimited goods and services, backed by the benefit of cost certainty. Whether it’s $9.99 or $99.99 per month, getting locked in provides a peace of mind that’s also attractive to the business community.
While not exactly novel in the office technology realm, all-you-can-eat print pricing still has great potential for growth. Swapping the click charge for a fixed monthly rate is an initiative being marketed by Advanced Imaging Solutions (AIS) of Las Vegas. Partnering with Kyocera, AIS piloted the Unlimited Plan, which built brand awareness for the dealer while driving new leads into the business—clients it doesn’t normally reach with other programs.
“It’s a fresh, new way for businesses to take advantage of a subscription-based offering, which many understand,” noted Keven Ellison, vice president of marketing.
As the name suggests, subscribers (clients) can have unlimited printing with a choice of five plans and eight different desktop/floor devices (black-and-white or color). Select plans offer unlimited supplies, service and maintenance. The company’s landing page for the offering includes an FAQ for specific details on contract terms and plan information.
In addition to the landing page, AIS’ marketing campaign consisted of Google AdWords buys, a dedicated phone line and customer follow-up contacts. “The key to this type of program is contacting the prospect as soon as they reach out to you,” Ellison said. “Consumers are just like us. When we want information about a program or offer, we don’t want to wait around for it. We’ve had to stay on top of this program as there have been many modifications in the creative, follow-up and execution of it.”
The Ideal Employment Destination
The concept of marketing your dealership to your own employees, suffice to say, wasn’t as critical three years ago as it is today in light of the Great Resignation. Office dealers and other businesses alike have long promoted the mission and core values they abide by to their own people, which is critical in helping to establish and maintain corporate culture. But when employees began to migrate in droves at a clip approaching four million per month during 2021 and 2022, extolling the value proposition of one’s business took on greater importance.
Fortunately for Datamax of Little Rock, Arkansas (with offices in Texas), there was no need to quickly mobilize in creating a culture-nurturing game plan—it had long since been in place. President Barry Simon preaches the notion that “culture trumps everything” at Datamax, and in 2018, the monthly internal enewsletter, The Rave Review, was born.
This webpage-based publication style was preferred over traditional email templates, as it allows more flexibility and creative freedom to design and continuously tweak the presentation, notes Robert Caldwell, vice president of marketing. A Google no-index code is embedded on every page so the newsletter doesn’t appear on searches to help protect personal content.
The enewsletter is further testament to numerous “Best Places to Work” awards attained by both its Arkansas and Texas branches. “Our people are our biggest asset,” Caldwell noted. “The Rave Review isn’t just a powerful communication tool, but an example of culture marketing that celebrates our people and digs into the ongoing industry and company current events. It also accomplishes one of the best things we can do as marketers: making sure people are aware of the great things that are going on, so they can share those stories about being a great place to work and a great place to do business with.”
Gaining Business Next Door
Leveraging relationships can be critical when embarking on a marketing campaign, as it incentivizes partners that can create win-win scenarios for both sides. Such was the case for Applied Innovation of Grand Rapids, Michigan, when it embarked on its LIT building campaign.
Applied Innovation worked with a carrier services provider to identify buildings with existing services where the dealer can provide the service for other tenants while furnishing a mutually beneficial discount and partnership. The dealer’s business development director married the carrier’s LIT building list with addresses of its current customers in Salesforce to find clients and prospects in that building. The list was optimized with sales intelligence, and Applied’s sales development rep (SDR) crafted a personalized email to each of the contacts, assisted by the content producer.
After the initial email inquiry, a call/email cadence was initiated, and the SDR logged the lead into Salesforce and credited the marketing campaign as the source. While a success, it wasn’t without obstacles; for instance, the SDR was sometimes pressured to do impromptu meetings on the spot rather than having a rep follow up.
In all, more than 500 personalized emails were sent by SDR/marketing, with 200-plus follow-up calls and another 200 email follow-throughs. Several deals are in various stages, including a bid for a project management company to expand into building tenants.
“Marketing and the SDR team have learned a lot since the campaign, and it’s helped to tailor our future campaigns and SDR-enablement activities to maximize time spent,” noted Alexandria Moran, marketing director. “This campaign was particularly strong due to the alignment between sales and marketing. We were able to get quality contacts and information.”
Where the client may be in the buying journey can certainly skew the initial results of a campaign, and in the case of managed IT, reps will brace for the longer sales cycle. “You have to exercise a lot of patience,” Moran remarked. “You need to understand that the growth you see within those contacts are going to be incremental, but they mean something. It’s not going to be a quick fix or a quick win, and that will help people in marketing to be a little more resilient, because it’s definitely a long game.”
Building the Vertical Approach
While Impact Networking has long been an industry-agnostic service provider, catering to the full spectrum of verticals, its marketing efforts over the past year have focused on individual sectors. One of the more notable initiatives targeted the construction industry, a five-step nurture campaign that included paid display advertisements and email outreach.
To support each push, the marketing team created a vertical market guide for the sales reps, according to Karlee Travis, chief marketing officer for the Lake Forest, Illinois, managed service provider. This not only helped reps learn valuable, detailed market information about each of the sectors, it also furnished them with a roadmap of the products and services Impact Networking offers that speak to the unique needs of a given vertical.
Verticals have personalities of their own, so to speak. Travis notes that certain sectors are more responsive than others, and construction is a bit of a difficult landscape to maneuver, although Impact has had much success with it. Those verticals with higher level of compliance needs, such as manufacturing and health care, are generally open to guidance. A degree of difficulty accompanied the construction push, however.
“Construction may have some compliance issues, but it’s an industry that’s a bit resistant to change,” she said. “We’re looking to work with companies that are high growth and see a need for technology, so that we can come in and provide a strategic roadmap and help them understand what solutions and services would be the best for their business. But when it’s an industry that has no interest in investing in technology, that’s going to be a harder sell.”
The ability to speak to the construction sector’s pain points helped foster success with the campaign, and complements the market research the dealer developed. Having case studies was highly important; peer testimonials carry more weight in the eyes of a construction prospect. By adding in vertical referrals, the overall campaign was able to meet its objectives.
Image 2000 David Versus Amazon Goliath
Joe Blatchford knows the war isn’t always won via one huge battle; many little triumphs can also have the intended effect. On Jan. 1, Image 2000 was slated to launch an ecommerce site produced in conjunction with MPS Toolbox and suggested by manufacturer partner Kyocera. It’s designed to help supplement sales, and Blatchford saw the value in garnering incremental revenue from everything from certain A4 products to low-end, common office/home office wares that are typically purchased through Amazon and other online behemoths. By steering clients to the ecommerce site, reps are able to obtain board credit. With Kyocera footing the bill for the site’s first year, Image 2000’s CEO saw it as a no-brainer.
The upshot is that Image 2000 will get more hits through Google searches, increasing its visibility. Blatchford doesn’t need to inventory the items or deal with any overhead associated with an ecommerce site; vendors are set up in the system, which picks the lowest price, and the goods are shipped directly to the end-user. Incremental or not, Image 2000 gets paid without lifting a finger.
“I’d be foolish not to do it,” he added. “The reps are incented when their customers go on the site and purchase. Clients have a login and can purchase virtually anything but A3 MFPs. I’m guessing that business on there will pick up by about the third quarter of 2023. With 25% of the workforce still operating remotely, we want to be able to get that business.”
The dealer hired a solutions sales specialist a little more than a year ago, a position working alongside the marketing department to spark more solutions sales. Blatchford notes that customer clients have increased in the aftermath of COVID (though still not to pre-pandemic levels), and they appear to have plateaued. Thus, the company’s social media maven is focused on driving more leads through the various platforms.
“I think we’ve done a good job of focusing on where we need to go, and I expect to see dramatic improvement,” he said. “We really needed [MPS Toolbox] to direct us and reel us in, because we were all over the place with our marketing. The marketplace is changing, especially in Los Angeles, where some of the big players such as POA and Impact Networking—juggernauts with mass marketing and people on the streets—are in play, so we need to have that same kind of presence.”
Building Toward the Better
In assessing the quality of Woodhull LLC’s marketing campaigns, Marketing Director Robert Woodhull takes a holistic approach that measures growth and development from year to year. Focusing on multi-faceted digital marketing campaigns has yielded the best results, but in the process, it’s created a challenge that Woodhull was happy to address—inbound call frequency increased to a degree that forced him to retrain the help desk on taking inbound calls.
The dealer uses software that records the people who click on advertising to call in, and Woodhull himself has used those recordings in the training process to reflect on how the dealer can maximize those opportunities. By using an actual inquiry as an example, he guides call center reps to better field the calls by providing resources to information.
Buffered by more-robust software applications, Woodhull has better leveraged its advertising spend to get on the radar of prospects. Clients have also embraced the value of doing business with a local, family- and woman-owned business. Instead of getting trampled upon by manufacturer advertisements, Woodhull has increased the company’s visibility within existing markets.
Channel diversity has been key. “The person who listens to the radio might not go online that often, and the person who looks at billboards may not listen to the radio,” he said. “There’s a variety of touch points, and we need to maximize them all.”
Don’t Fret—Keep it Simple, Sir
The difficulties of doing business in the wake of the pandemic have been well documented. With many end-users clamoring for a resumption of normal activities and procedures, Pulse Technology of Schaumburg, Illinois, is employing a marketing campaign in 2023 that will endeavor to keep it simple. The campaign is built around the message, “Running your business/organization can be less stressful if you simplify.”
The campaign leverages Pulse Technology’s wide base of product and service disciplines, from office design and furniture to managed IT, imaging equipment and more. The overarching goal is to emphasize the dealer’s ability to help current and prospective customers simplify and source all their business solutions with one vendor.
“To do this, we’ll beef up our social media presence, share extra value within our monthly enewsletter and provide blogs and webinars to educate and inspire,” noted CEO Chip Miceli. “We further share our ongoing news through our PR campaign, which includes press releases and thought leadership articles.”
