Back to School Means Back to Business for OccasionOgraphy® Dealers

Have you noticed anything odd lately? Parents smiling while their children look somewhat distraught? Spiral notebooks and number two pencils featured prominently in the aisles of your grocery store? Yes, it’s back to school season. August is upon us and the kids can see the end of their idyllic summer vacation quickly approaching. It happens every year: the last few weeks of August are spent in a flurry of preparation and purchasing on the part of the parents while students are overcome by a semi-permanent pout.

But, what are the teachers doing right now? After all, they’ve been enjoying summer break as well. They are busily preparing for their students while administrators and office staff are putting together agendas for group meetings and mixers to make their team feel appreciated and ready for a new year. This season presents a huge opportunity for OccasionOgraphy® consultants to expand their businesses.

Let’s say that the school in your neighborhood has a staff of around fifty. We suggest that you approach the school with an offer to donate “schwag” to be given out during the year’s first staff meeting! Cherubs-N-Chocolate® candy wrappers can actually be customized with the name of each teacher and staff member.  Now, that sounds like a pretty labor-intensive process, but our current consultants can tell you that OccasionOgraphy® (specifically the “merge” feature makes customizing with long lists of names a cinch! Just upload your list and let the software put the individual names on each item for you.

Now, you also might be wondering how donating bars to a school could help your bottom line? The answer is really quite simple: Referrals. PLEASE make sure that you include your contact information on EVERY item you produce. It doesn’t have to be big or flashy. Just an email address or phone number on the back of a customized candy bar or water bottle will do. Also, please consider including coupons printed on the inside the Cherubs-N-Chocolate® custom wrappers or inserted in the custom foil pouches. This will help ensure that the teachers keep your contact information and it will encourage them to place orders for their own families and classrooms. (Hint: put an expiration date not too far in the future on your coupons!)

Now let’s take a look at the economics of this giveaway. The average teacher or staff member will tell three to six people about your product, so your promotion will actually reach 150-300 people. The cost? Around $40 and an hour of your time for 50 personalized bars. You can add about $20 if you want to include a catalog, business card and order form with each candy bar. So our total cost is $60 for up to 200-300 impressions — which translates to about twenty to thirty cents per impression! (An impression is just marketing lingo for every time your product appears in front of a new pair of eyeballs that might belong to a future customer.)  Anyway, cost per impression is a key metric when analyzing the efficacy of any marketing campaign, and let me tell you that twenty cents for an impression coupled with a personal referral is an absolute steal.

Although it would take just 1 order out of these 200-300 impressions to break even, the personal nature of this type of advertising and referral boosts response to 2-3%, which in this case could be 4-9 orders.  Never underestimate the power of referrals for growing your OccasionOgraphy® business... people are much more likely to buy if a friend or family member recommends a product.  So, what are you waiting for? Call your neighborhood school today and get a copy of their staff and find out when the first meeting is to be held. If you were to repeat this process at half a dozen local schools, you just might find yourself with dozens of orders within just a couple of weeks!  And of course, each of those new orders starts the marketing process all over again…