Tag: Holidays

3 Steps to Prepare Your Marketing for a New Year

December 16, 2024

Smaller brands often discover around this time what they already suspected. Despite their top-notch offerings, they lack the resources to invest more than 30 minutes a day in their digital marketing, and often skip it altogether.

As you cast your sights on new beginnings, we recommend honing in on three focus areas to end the year with a bang and get you back on track.

1. Bump up Your Shipping & Delivery Communication

The first key to ending the year on a solid note is to intensify your focus on your most urgent shipping and delivery needs. If production is shifting into overdrive, you almost certainly will need to bump up communication with folks awaiting your products or services. This is not the time to miss a complaint about a missed package because you weren’t checking your socials. If there is a minor glitch in your fulfillment and delivery system, communicating how you plan to correct course will keep it from turning into something bigger.

Shoppers will be more concerned about delivery details than usual. Will your service provider inform them when their product leaves the warehouse? Can customers choose when an item is delivered or are they given an open-ended time slot that makes it difficult to plan their day? Clients are always grateful when extra transparency is built into their orders. Alert them immediately regarding any product developments. When people know what to expect, they are much more likely to be pleased with the results.

2. Conduct an End-of-Year Digital Marketing Audit

Before leaping into the new year, it pays to take stock of the recent past. If you were to summarize your marketing experiences in 2024, what would that look like? A recent report in Forbes revealed that over seventy percent of small biz owners had negative feelings about their own marketing strategies. But you’re not an average, and paving a better way forward requires taking stock of your gains as well as your losses. Looking back at your plans from January 1:

  • Which targets were accomplished?
  • What strategies show evidence of working?
  • How many hours did your team invest — and how does that align with outcomes?
  • What was the total expense and return on that investment?
  • What measurable results have you produced, and what do they tell you about your individual strategies?
  • Where are your gaps, and who can fill them in next year?

If you’ve been conducting monthly or quarterly audits, there is already a record of data to help answer those questions. Hopefully, it reveals a happy holiday surprise. You can see a direct line from your PPC ads to your web traffic and figure out what portion of those views resulted in calls. Doing a final annual audit is important. You will know something changed if there was a sudden drop in sales after Thanksgiving and can act accordingly. Mostly, it offers you a clear, detailed picture of whether your long-term marketing is working the way you had planned.

3. Dig Into the Details in Problem Areas

SMBs usually have an idea of what’s missing. Examining the details will give you a more accurate picture of the state of your digital marketing. This makes sense, since digital branding has only gotten more rigorous as spaces are flooded with competition attempting similar techniques. Take blogging, perhaps the main type of content you will create after your website. Ten years ago, it didn’t take much to produce a successful blog. There was a lot less online competition, and SEO was more basic.

Fast forward to the present and it can take twice as long to produce similar tasks. This is partly because content quality is one of the top criteria search engines use to gauge a page’s relevance. Most internet users read blogs. Companies that produce them get more leads than those that don’t. Yet those same keyword strategies of yore will have the opposite effect in today’s online environment. A year-end audit of your efforts will let you know which areas need the most help so you can invest in better strategies in the year to come.

HYPTE Branded Solutions Can Create Your New Year’s Marketing Program

If you’ve been remiss when it comes to producing content, optimizing your web pages, or any other area of your digital marketing, it’s only because you need a partner with the skills to do those areas justice.

Ready to start a whole new digital marketing cycle on the right foot? Contact HYPTE Branded Solutions online, or call us at 708-343-9730 for a free consultation!

5 Tips for Better Warehouse Fulfillment & Logistics Before the Holidays

November 18, 2024

When holiday orders are in full speed, getting the performance you need from your distribution and fulfillment operations can be a real nailbiter. Getting this part right is vital to any growing business that relies heavily on holiday sales. To mitigate the risks, you need to start thinking about how you will address challenges before they arise. In the fulfillment world, they can include:

  1. Unexpected spikes in orders
  2. Unfamiliar service providers
  3. Unreliable sources of labor
  4. Supply chain disruptions
  5. eCommerce glitches and other tech issues

Once your products are ready to ship out, a whole new set of challenges is just beginning. Take it from HYPTE Branded Solutions, which has developed holiday marketing campaigns for a diversity of high-profile businesses, including prominent sports teams. Our dependable Warehouse Fulfillment & Logistics team is just one of many services our clients have come to rely on this time of year.

Tip 1: Vet Your Vendors to Guarantee a Dependable, Organized Fulfillment Process

Our years producing and delivering high-quality branded products and experiences have taught us that the best of intentions are nothing without an organized fulfillment system at the end of the tunnel. Even under tight deadlines, we start by ensuring that products are high quality and align with the client’s most important goals.

Since we handle solutions from concept to delivery, that gives us more control over the product fulfillment stage of a project. Knowing who you’re working with prevents the kind of unhappy surprises that stem from a disorganized warehouse, something that matters even more this time of year regardless of your type of business. Due to our years of experience developing relationships with trusted partners, we are able to produce a lineup of experts to complete and deliver creative campaigns from scratch in time for the holidays.

Tip 2: Have a Branded Merchandise Service Do the Heavy Lifting for You

The next thing you will want to clarify is what your role will be at the fulfillment stage of the game. Can your needs be met in a single format, or will you need to be in contact with your service provider every day to provide direction to them so things stay on track? Using a full-service branded merchandise solution is a perfect example of how to make this process as easy as possible. It’s one thing if you’re hand crafting goods and sending them out the door one by one. But in most cases, a contractor like HYPTE Branded Solutions will be essential in taking things out of your hands early on.

Tip 3: Factor in How Your Marketing and Promos Will Impact Sales

It’s not enough simply to base forecasts on last year’s sales figures. How do you expect upcoming ads, seasonal events and other marketing tactics to impact business? Crunching these figures to the best of your abilities will make it that much easier to line up sufficient shipping and fulfillment services in the coming weeks.

If you haven’t implemented a holiday season marketing campaign yet, it’s not too late to start. Reach out to HYPTE Branding Services for a partner that includes warehouse logistics and fulfillment as one of its primary holiday services, along with social media ad campaigns, holiday events, and other creative solutions.

Tip 4: Use Fulfillment Provider with Channels That Deliver Where and When You Need It

Assumptions are just that, and they cause us to miss opportunities to empower ourselves. Businesses that rely on third-party fulfillment providers to manage inventory and ship products need to be sure there are flexible options to get their products to the parts of the country and world they need, on their timeline. Check to see if your provider is set up to handle orders from multiple channels – such as FedEx, USPS (first class or priority mail), and so on – and be sure those channels can meet desirable shipping standards you choose.

Tip 5: Use HYPTE Branded Solutions for End-to-End Holiday Season Fulfillment

Do you want the seamless fulfillment of orders throughout the holiday season without any last-minute chaos? Reach out to the team at HYPTE for end-to-end branded solutions that include digital marketing, reliable warehouse management, creative consulting and more.

Contact HYPTE Branded Solutions online, or call us at 708-343-9730 to discuss your branding needs for the holiday season.