This year has been quite the learning experience for myself and even my company.  We are starting to do a lot of our own marketing in house and it has been a huge change in all the different types of boxes, bags, and tape we have needed. In all honesty, I never imagined we would be doing so much manual labor, but it is saving us lots of money on our marketing budget.  So some of the things we have learned have been on the basis of manufacturing or warehouse work instead of what we normally do.  Today I want to go through some of the things that we learned when getting into the whole self-marketing area and some of the products we ended up needing and how to get them.

Luckily, we have some very detail oriented people on our staff and that helped us save thousands of dollars this year. That is a big deal especially when our marketing budget had some cuts due to covid-19 and our economy.  Having people count and take note of each process was key to us.  We wanted to learn how to take a marketing gift and put it in a box or bag and put the best amount of tape, bubble wrap, and labels on it to send efficiently.  The last thing we wanted was to end up needing to buy double the amount of shipping supplies to send a marketing gift.  This really was a big part of how we saved money because we had a contest of who could do the fastest job, with the least amount of product possible. 

What this all told us was how much product we need per project and it allowed us to project our costs for each marketing endeavour.  This really is a big deal because the cost of thousands of boxes, leters, stamps, and tape adds up fast.  Our first major hurdle was the tape problem.  We started and most people are used to putting lots of strips of tape on boxes and not even thinking about it.  I know I was one of those people, but when it takes 3 strips per side and then 3 strips per label.  We were using 15 strips of tape when we could in reality use 3.  The problem was not necessarily the fact we were putting so many strips on the box.  In reality with the packing tape we were using that was what I needed. We ended up calling a shipping supplies company and finding out that a different type of tape was what we needed.

There are actually lots of different kinds of packing tape available.   This was at the time far beyond my thoughts when working on simply taping up marketing packages.  So when they told us that we could use a little thicker type of tape and use only one strip per side we started to get excited. But the price had to be right. It turns out the cost was 10% more but using 200% less saved us so much money. It was such a small thing, but taking a few minutes to ask questions and learn good advice sold us on a company to buy things with.  Plus they gave us discounts for the quantity of items we bought, so it was a win all around.