9 Ideas on How to Market Your Company Anniversary

Is your company celebrating a 10 year, 25 year or even a 75 year anniversary? How are you marking and marketing your company’s celebration?

I think that as long as you’re spending the marketing budget to celebrate, why not consider some additional benefits of marketing the anniversary with some memorable, clever ideas to catch the attention of a prospective customer or client?

Here are a few idea starters:

1) Flyer: Create a tip sheet with ideas for your target market to help them in whatever business you are in. If you’re a doctor, how about 25 tips for staying healthy? If you’re a realtor how about 10 tips for improving your curb appeal for potential home sellers? If your business is a greenhouse, how about 50 plants for shade and sun? Make the number of tips match the number of your anniversary.

2) Tell Everyone! Distribute the tip sheets to the local newspaper, post them on your web site, post them in the article banks, send it to your chamber of commerce, even your industry association.

3) Great Headline: Call it25 Tips for (Target Market) to Improve Your (Product/Service). Something like this:25 Tips for Home Sellers to Improve Their Curb Appeal. for a realtor. Of course it would vary by your business. In the first blank, list your best target market. Maybe seniors, teenagers, or homeowners. Fill in the second blank with your product or service. In the above examples, it might be health (if you’re a personal trainer), driving record (if you teach drivers training), or yard (if you’re in the landscaping business.)If it’s your 100th anniversary, it might be tough to come up with 100 tips, but maybe not as hard as you think. (Did you try it?! Ask other people in the office for their ideas!!)

4) News Service: Take advantage of the regional news services of PRNewsWire, BusinessWire, PRWeb or E-Mediawire. It’s not very expensive if you just pay for distribution in your region rather than national.

5) Make a Book: Create a corporate history book to honor the founders of your company. Give one to each employee. Provide some to the local libraries, historians, universities and your industry association. If it seems like a daunting task, contact one of the companies who create company histories. Or use Shutterfly.com and do your corporate history in photos with captions.

6) Brand with a Logo: Have a graphic designer create a special logo for your company that plays off the 25 years in business. Use it all year long on things that aretemporary stationery, Website home page, etc. Reinforce your branding and positioning with a statement in the new logo too.On Time Delivery for 25 YearsKeeping Homes Safe for Over 25 Years.

7) Use Advertising Specialities: Get golf shirts with the anniversary logo. Padfolios. Pens. Custom label wine bottles. Give them to each client, potential client and employee.

Open House: Invite key vendors, customers, and business friends to celebrate with the employees at an open house at your office, factory or store. Bring in snack food. Run a PowerPoint slide show of photos at every stage on each computer.

9) Quiz: Create a Trivia quiz with questions from the year the business was founded. Give out prizes (maybe customers only?!) for the people who get them right.

What other ideas do people have? I know that there are other companies who have had some great ideas for celebrating an anniversary. Please, share your ideas for commemorating a company’s anniversary if it’s 10 years, 20 years or 50 years or 100 What worked? What didn’t?

Chris Brown owns and runs a marketing agency in Northeast Ohio that acts as a marketing department for contract manufacturing companies and professional service firms. The company provides strategic marketing direction and also helps companies to implement their marketing tools (websites, brochures, e newsletters and press releases, for example.)

When she founded Marketing Resources & Results, Inc over 12 years ago, her business model was designed to help companies launch products and build their brands by providing the marketing resources they need to achieve the sales results they want. The company has substantially grown (you can read more at www.resources-results.com) to include a wide variety of success stories.

Chris also writes and publishesBranding & Marketing, an online publication with more than 700 helpful articles of tips, techniques and tools for helping business professionals to attract new customers.You can get in touch with her at http://brandandmarket.com or via email cbrown@resources-results.com.