By Chuck Sink
“When you care enough to send the very best…” Actually, in my opinion, most Hallmark greetings are downright cheesy. I’ve received my ration of cheese over the years during Christmas and New Years. How ’bout you.
Most companies order from a catalog of stock cards, and have their names imprinted with a watered down “holidays” message. It is nice, however, when someone or the whole office signs the card by hand. That one personal touch is enough to touch me with some warmth.
This year, two holiday greetings stood out from the crowded incoming mail. One of my clients sent a Thanksgiving card with an absolutely beautiful art print image, suitable for framing. In it were 11 unique hand signatures of real people.
And then I was blown away by a gift that my media partner sent me. First off, these folks are on the West Coast and we only communicate electronically. Secondly, this newsletter is one of many around the country they place ads in for their clients. By the way, thank you for clicking on the ads! Finally, They go out of their way to manually
email me ad snippets and take the time to build a relationship with me in their weekly messages. They know something about me because they take the time to engage me and communicate in ways that are uniquely personal.
This shout out to LaunchBit has a clear business lesson. Hard work and adding real value to a relationship is still the only way to grow in business. It’s hard work to sit down, think about each person among hundreds of individuals with whom you deal and hand write a unique message to them along with a thoughtful (and delicious) gift. In this case, slight flaws in the hand writing and the scribble corrections in the message are just the kicker. Kaitlin’s personalized greeting
card message inside a hand addressed envelope along with a bag of some amazing gourmet cookies got me thinking that nothing is valuable without real effort behind it.
Putting effort – hard work – into your product and service delivery as well as your special communiques with customers & associates means real value and real money. This principle extends to content marketing (inbound marketing) in a huge way.
Adding value to the Internet with original, relevant and valuable content is rewarded by the search engines as well as those who consume that content. There will be more important information about this leading edge SEO/Internet marketing concept in the coming weeks. Thanks for your valuable time!
