Sometimes, the hardest part of a business transaction is marketing yourself to potential clients. You could have the best products and capabilities in the entire industry, but if customers don’t know you or what you do, your inbox will be quiet.
Like so many of her peers, Beth Levine, founder of Multi Media Promotions, Plainview, New York, had to hustle for business during the pandemic. She found the most success when she was able to educate her clients on the value she and her company could provide, which amounted to much more than giveaway items.
Print+Promo Marketing: Can you tell me about a campaign you’ve worked on that blended both print and promotional products at the same time?
Beth Levine: We do a lot of signage. And especially during the pandemic, when everyone was saying, ‘We’re not doing giveaways,’ I turned around and said, ‘Great. Let me get you to focus and pay attention to all of the things we do that you’re not aware of,’ which was signage, gifts and incentives, awards, award programs, employee recognition, and more than giveaways. So, we started focusing more with utility companies and construction companies. Now, we actually do a lot of signage for construction companies for the city, car charging station branding — that’s all a combination of it.
First of all, everyone knew my background was printing. But they didn’t focus on it as much, people who didn’t know me. And then I started turning around and I reach[ed] out to people I knew and said, ‘You’re a utility company, you’re in the transportation company, I know you’re working with the airports, too. Do you know we do uniforms? Do you know we do programs? Do you know we do signage?’
And then I kept putting it out there, joining webinars, introducing myself, and someone gave us the opportunity to work on the East Coast Utility Project, which is on the East River by 23rd Street [in New York City]. And we did all of that fencing signage. From there, our word started getting around, and people started seeing what we were doing. So, we actually started wall signage for utility companies, for a physical therapy company, we did 3D signage for an architectural firm and it just kept expanding. Now, people reach out to us all the time for all kinds of signage.
PPM: When you were working on these projects, did you run into any roadblocks or hurdles you had to overcome?
BL: Not really. The biggest thing was trying to get people to understand and get to know us in that capacity that we could do all of that.
PPM: What advice would you give distributors interested in doing something similar?
BL: I know my own clients and people that I’ve been meeting are amazed by all that we offer, because we’re not just promotional or print. We deal [with] a lot of companies where we’ll do their trade show signage, but then we’ll also print their brochures and their flyers and all of that other stuff.
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