Holiday Gifting Is A Great Marketing Idea by Martin R. Baird As we enter the holiday season, it's time to think about gifting. The old adage that it's better to give than receive is true. And before you start ordering this season's gifts, you also should give some thought to why you are sending gifts. Perhaps you do gifting to thank people for being your clients and supporting you over the year. Maybe you're just celebrating the season. Gifting could even be a marketing effort. It's true, giving gifts can be a great way to grow your business. As you think about why you are giving your gifts, you also need to think about what you are giving. Sending a fruitcake with a card probably will not get the best response from most people. You want your gift to stand out and get noticed. Just sending a gift is not enough. It needs to tell the recipient about you and your company. We use a company called Gift Solutions (www.giftinghq.com) for all our gifting. They do all our gifts custom. We talk with them about 45 days before we want the gifts to go out, and we tell them what we want to accomplish. They then find a way to help us reach our goal. Each year when we do this, we get great response from all the people who receive our gifts. Some people have even told us they didn't want to open them because they looked so nice. We have found that it doesn't cost any more to do it this way, and we get a much better response. One last point about standing out is you may want to send your gift at Thanksgiving rather than the end of December. By doing this, your message gets noticed, and you have much less clutter to cut through. We've had clients do it, and they get more calls than they ever received doing gifts in December. I used to work at a large corporation, and we controlled several million dollars in advertising. Needless to say, we got our fair share of gifts. All the magazines and ad agencies wanted us to remember them. The problem is that for two weeks we got mountains of gifts and not one company stood out. Thinking about your gifting earlier can pay great dividends. Gifting is a great marketing tool because when you have a limited budget, you need to leverage your investments to get the maximum return. Gifting is a wonderful way to do that. The gifting company we use allows us to put custom labels on many of the items. This is a perfect way to keep your message in front of your clients and prospects for a long time. For example, if we do a gift that has chocolates and different kinds of coffee in it, we know the chocolates will be eaten very quickly. We also know the coffee may last a little longer. So we put our own custom message on the coffee. By doing this, we not only have the impact of giving the gift, we also get name recognition over time. When you invest a little time up front, you can have great things happen with your gifting. It would be fun and easy to develop a gift that has a wonderful holiday theme and a variety of messages inside. This can also be a big hit when you send your gift to a client's office. As people in the office stop in to sample the sweets and treats, they are more likely to ask about you if the gift has your company name and information on it. This could be a great way to get new referrals. Hallmark says, "When you care enough to send the very best." My version of that is, "When you think enough to make it the very best!" Now, I don't want you to think that I don't care about the holidays or that all I want to do is get my marketing message out. I love the holidays. I think they're a time of great celebration. I also know that people are wasting time, energy and money sending out generic gifts hoping they will have an impact on their clients and prospects. If you want to make the most of your gifts, it takes some time and some thought. It's not the gift's fault if you didn't start thinking ahead of time. Anyone can run into the mall and get a cheese pack for clients. The gifts that get noticed are those that are special. And they're special because you devoted time and effort to make them so. Martin R. Baird is president of Advisormarketing, a full-service marketing management firm that provides a variety of services to financial advisors to help them improve their marketing methods and increase revenues, including seminars and conference speaking engagements on such topics as referrals, marketing, goal setting and customer service. The firm's Web site, www.advisormarketing.com, offers free marketing information and tools for financial advisors. Baird may be reached at mbaird@advisormarketing.com or visit www.advisormarketing.com for marketing tactics that will help your business grow.