New Marketing Ideas

I’m always trying to come up with something new and innovative to help market our company and products. As New England Machinery builds bottle cappers, I came up with the idea of putting a message inside a clear plastic bottle, capping it, and sending it to our customers. The message invited them to our booth at the upcoming trade show and offered a free gift if they appeared with the invitation. For the customer, the uniqueness of receiving a message in a bottle via U.S. mail was enough to prompt them to open and read the message. Our response rate in the booth was four times the standard response rate for unsolicited mail/reward-type mailings.

Our machines are built to last for generations, so for our company’s 30th anniversary in business, we held a contest to uncover the oldest NEM machine still in production. (We actually own the first machine NEM ever built after having bought it back from Schering Plough when they finally retired the machine in 2000. It still runs beautifully and occasionally we take it to an exhibition to show the quality and longevity of our machines.) The contest’s winning machine was still in production over 28 years from when it was originally built and sold. The winner received a digital camera for their personal use and a second digital camera was given to the company. The contest was another successful campaign that put us in touch with companies that had purchased our machine on the used market.

We will be unveiling a new marketing initiative in a month or so, but want to keep it ‘under wraps’ until it’s time. In the meantime, feel free to share your successful marketing ideas with us here.

The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at http://www.neminc.com/.