The yearbook is the classic reminder of the good times people had during a specific period of time. Many yearbooks are created for seniors as they graduate from high school, but there are also a number of college and even work-related yearbooks that you can find sprinkled about the nation that provide the same reflections. Not everyone included in the yearbook may decide to buy it, but you can market the yearbook to as many people as possible.
The first step on this journey is to help remind people that they’ll have a concrete record of their memories from school or work with this fun book. It can always be used to look back on special times and push the bad stuff out of the way for good. It must appeal to the targeted crowd, so here are a few ways you can increase that appeal and ultimately your sales.
Great Marketing Ideas for Yearbooks
1. Bring in people from all the different groups as you design the yearbook so that more people have an investment into the final product. When there is a higher level of personal work and investment into the yearbook, sales levels increase because people want to keep a record of that work.
2. Offer discounts to people who might be featured in the yearbook. This can be done in real time when your photographers are documenting the life and times of work or school for the yearbook. Once a picture is taken, the photographer can offer them a discount off the yearbook when purchased because their photo might appear.
3. Consider offering payment plans for the yearbooks so those who might not have an awesome job can still afford to be able to get one when they otherwise would not. Even a payment plan that is $10 per month can help secure more sales.
4. Include the entire household in the yearbook marketing effort because even though a student or a worker might not want a permanent record of their memories, their families might want a copy. Send home mailers, mail postcards, and even include fliers in different languages to accommodate foreign exchange students that might be included in the project.
5. Create a firm sense of urgency that is reflective of a few short sales periods at a time. You can promote these short sales periods through t-shirts, car fliers, window stickers, and even poster advertisements on the wall.
6. Be enthusiastic with your marketing approach. If you don’t have a real passion for the yearbook you’re selling, then why should anyone else have a passion for it either?
7. Make your marketing efforts stand out in a variety of different ways. The simplest solution is to make your materials very bright and colorful so that they’ll catch the eye of people as they walk by them. Putting the posters in interesting places can help to get more attention to the product as well. Ever think about putting a poster in the men’s room above the urinals?
8. Create other visual stimuli to encourage visual contact with your marketing materials. If your mascot is a bear, for example, you could create paper cutouts of bear paw prints that would lead down the hallway toward the location of your poster.
9. Talk with the snack vendor for the lunch vending machines to see if you can get yearbook stickers stuck onto the snacks that everyone purchases. You don’t have to stay inside the school to take advantage of this visual impact either. The local pizza parlor, for example, might be willing to put a sticker on their pizza boxes. The gas station might put stickers on the pumps. If there’s a business in your community, there’s something they could slap a sticker on for you.
10. Create a giveaway that will award someone with a good product if they make a yearbook purchase in a specific amount of time. A good product could be a raffle entry to win something simple, like an iPod or MP3 player. It could even be tickets to prom if you want.
11. Create special pricing on specific days to encourage sales blitzes at times when there will be a guaranteed level of people around. At school, for example, a class registration day would be the perfect time to offer a discount on the yearbook. For work-related yearbooks, a good place to offer the discount would be the company picnic or annual employee celebration that is held.
12. Give people discounts for spreading the word about the yearbooks on social media. Friends talk to friends over Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and plenty of other social media platforms. Pay people to discuss the yearbook on these platforms through a yearbook discount and you’ll have an easy and very personal way to market your product to more people than ever before.
13. Make sure the website of your school or place of employment places a link to purchase the yearbook somewhere on the home page, preferably above the fold. This will help to remind people to purchase one, even if they’re not around to get one in person.
14. Email reminders are a great, no cost way to encourage people to purchase yearbooks. You can provide added value by including specific discounts in the email so that people feel like opening up the sales pitch was actually worth their time.
15. Use a tiered pricing system so that the yearbook is cheaper right away and more expensive later on. When the difference in price is more than $50, you’ll encourage more people to purchase the yearbook right away if they want one because they’ll feel like they’re saving money in the long run.
16. Put marketing materials in common bulletins and event programs so that there is a lot of individualized exposure. If someone gets bored during a football game, they might read the yearbook flier and decide to want one. The same is definitely true for a company-wide presentation with a lot of speakers.
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