Story telling

John Foley Jr, CEO of Interlink1 and GrowSocially, encourages label converters to put their story at the center of the company’s marketing plan

I recently had a great discussion with one of our clients. During the discussion we talked about the ‘story’ of his company and immediately I could tell from his enthusiasm and passion while he spoke that he really enjoyed telling that story (and it was great listening to it as well!). It quickly made me think about all of the label printing companies that I’ve been involved with throughout my career so far and there is definitely a commonality between most of them.

The commonality is that many of those label printers have a rich history behind their brand. In many cases the story is something around the fact that the company started in a one car garage with a single color press, the current owner is a fourth generation label printer, and so on.

Now some of you may be saying, ‘my customers don’t care about the history; they just want the best labels at the best price.’ If you’re saying that then you’re really missing out on a huge opportunity and I’ll tell you why.

The rich history of your label company needs to be shared; sharing the story online is a great place to start with your online marketing strategy. The reason it’s important to share your story is because it helps humanize your brand. If you attended my webinar last week you know humanizing your brand is something I stressed quite a bit. Humanizing your brand is important because it gives your company a human face and feeling as opposed to being viewed as just another company that is trying to sell.

So want to know how to share it? There’s several ways to do that:

•          Add a ‘history’ page to your website where you can share the story of your company

•          Incorporate a ‘landing’ page along with the story so visitors can enter their information to request more information

•          Share the URL for the story on your social networks — post a quick snippet and link it back to your website

•          Create a Facebook page and a Pinterest page where you can share pictures that represent milestones in your company’s history over the years. The Facebook timeline feature is perfectly suited for this. And with the growing popularity of Pinterest, it certainly makes sense for label printers to put that site to use for them as well.

These types of steps will help to increase interest in your company within your targeted audience. It will also drive them back to your website.

Once they are at your site and read the story, they could use the landing page to request more information – and that’s what we call an inbound lead!

Would you like to learn more about how your printing company can use online marketing and social media to reach prospects and customers? Then please visit the Grow Socially booth #3802 at Labelexpo.

This article was published in L&L issue 4, 2012