Your Package--your face to the customer--is an asset much more valuable than most small business owners realize. For many companies, a promotions archive is a vital but untapped resource to aid in crafting profitable marketing campaigns.

Dont let your promotions become buried treasure. Often our best creative breakthroughs get lost in the hustle-bustle of getting out an ad campaign, creating the next weekly ad for the newspaper, or penning the copy for a newsletter. We small business marketers are busy people. But here is a way for you to put some creative marketing money in the bank.

Build a Promotion Idea Vault. Its easy, its fast, its cheap and its useful! Does it sound too good to be true? All that you need to do is to collect samples of your old ads, flyers, newsletters, coupons and email campaigns and store them in your Promotion Idea Vault.

Do you have a marquee out front that you create a new slogan for each week? Take a digital photo and then print it out. Are you planning on changing your website? Greatjust make sure you archive hard copies of your current pages.

Why? Because if you just stack all these marketing gems in a corner filing cabinet they will become buried treasure

and you or your successor will have to initiate a scavenger hunt to find these old brilliant--or at least adequate--thoughts you once had.

Dont let this happen to you. The key is to build in one quick step each time you create your marketing material and save a completed, printed copy. Heres an easy way to remember what to do:

• Insert
• Label
• Save

Youll need a three-ring binder, about 30 clear sleeves, and a couple of sheets of 1 labels. Sizes on all these materials are our suggestions; use what fits your promotions volume. Write or type the following on each label:

• Date
• Quantity produced (if applicable)
• Contents
• Media
• Audience

Then, slide in your sample piece and stick the label on the clear sleeve. Youve just saved a piece of your mind for later and saved yourself hours of time on some future promotion.

One next-to-last note: a digital or hard-copy backup of your vault is a must. Even if all you do is toss an extra copy of every brochure or sales letter or print ad in an old shoebox and store it offsite, at lest youll have backup in case catastrophe strikes your small business.

And a final note: building a Brand, grooming People, crafting and delivering a Package that reflects your Brand--all these take consistency and discipline. Incorporate this same disciplined consistency into archiving your marketing efforts (and failures!) and your small business will succeed where your competitors fail.

2006 Marketing Hawks