If you were not thinking about selling online last year, you most definitely are this year.  The fact is that almost every company does things online now or remotely.  Rather it is with your company or dealing with others, this is the way. For me, our business decided to pivot how it does work and many of us in our line of work started doing internal marketing.  This means that we have had to purchase a lot of our own packaging supplies and have gone through a wild ride of price and how we were able to accomplish lowering our costs.  Thanks to local lockdown laws we are trying to save money.  This is a hard thing to do and part of it is simply trying new things and learning to work on our time spent on projects.  For the marketing side, we went through a big process to figure out the supplies we would need to take on the task of doing our marketing work on our own. 

This is not an easy decision because the biggest cost is actually time.  It takes our top officers time to get it all ready and working.  And we pay for the mistakes personally.  The first thing we had to do was decide what were the most effective marketing projects in our past.  Cost and time are going to be the deciding factor and all of that has to be based on the success of the projects.  This means that we have to go through all the marketing reports of the past and decide rather the digital or the physical campaigns were the most successful and which ones will cost the most and take the most time to implement.  Once we went through all of our records we found that the hand-delivered or mailed platforms that we used gave us the most success in sales for the least amount of cost. We took the most important things and did them on our own. 

We had to get the products somewhere so that took some time to work out.  We ordered cardboard boxes, tape, paper, and even envelopes.  We printed and designed our first campaign and then we took note of each and every step.  We counted the cardboard boxes and the strips of tape, and the time it took to accomplish a set amount of each campaign.  This was a terrible painstaking process and we knew it was not going to be fun.  We filled many excel spreadsheets with data and finally, we were able to get the actual costs of what it took to make our marketing in-house.  Then we knew we could cut down on the processes and also the products we used. 

Then we had to find the best company to work with. This was a wise choice because I was able to find different products to use that allowed us to buy less and work faster.  Tape for instance was one.  We were using 6 strips of tape for each marketing gift.  It was because the tape was not strong enough to do it all in two strips. So with the advice of our packaging supplies representative, I ended up getting thicker tape which was less expensive in the long run and took less time to put on the boxes.  So we cut costs and started to thrive.

\