2021 Wrap-Up: Our Best Blogs and Guest Articles of the Year
At Promo Marketing, we've been fortunate (and immensely grateful) to have hosted so many incredible bloggers and contributors over the years. It takes a village, as they say, and these fine folks have generously contributed their time and knowledge in service of helping others in the industry overcome their business challenges and learn new things.
This year was no exception. We featured blogs and guest articles on sales, leadership, marketing strategy, technology, accounting, management, hiring and much more—all written by industry experts who have lived it or live it every day.
As we recap 2021, here are a just a few of those articles. We can't thank our contributors enough—and we can't wait to read their stuff in 2022.
1. 5 Common Marketing Mistakes Distributors Make That Hurt Business Growth — Gloria Lafont
Gloria Lafont covers all things digital marketing for distributors, from social media strategy to website security. In this post, she not only ran down the most common marketing mistakes she's seen from distributors, but offered easy-to-implement fixes for each.
2. The Great Resignation Is Here: That Means Challenges, But Also Opportunities — Mark Jenkins
Mark Jenkins is a self-described road warrior with decades of sales experience in the promo industry. He's drawn on that experience—and his perspective on the supplier side—to cover big topics like price increases and burnout, but there was no better article from him this year than his honest but optimistic analysis of the Great Resignation and its promo industry impacts.
3. Reentry: Why Nothing—Sales, Health, Relationships—Is Ever Truly Lost — Alex Morin
Alex Morin, formerly of Debco, left promo for a year, but recently returned with PromoNoise, a new podcast, blog and educational platform. Appropriately, his first post for Promo Marketing was titled "Reentry," an introspective and uplifting fusion of business and life lessons. Beautifully written almost in the style of a personal essay, this is one you don't want to miss if you're looking for inspiration.
4. 3 Traits of Top-Performing Commission Sales Professionals — Pat Barry
When he's not doing his day job as vice president of sales at Boundless, Pat Barry is crafting some of the finest sales strategy content out there. In this article—the most-read of his 2021 posts for Promo Marketing—he broke down the three things that separate top commission salespeople from the rest of the pack.
5. Fail More to Succeed — Greg Muzzillo
In addition to running one of the industry's largest distributor companies, Greg Muzzillo is one of promo's most prolific content creators. For his weekly Million Dollar Monday video and podcast series, he's interviewed everyone from a "Shark Tank" shark to the founder of Domino's Pizza, but this early-year post in his regular Promo Marketing blog series is tough to top as his best work of 2021.
6. How to Market Without Facebook (and Why You Should Be Thinking About It Now) — Kirby Hasseman
Content creator, distributor business owner and marketer extraordinaire Kirby Hasseman lent his talents to Promo Marketing for this timely and remarkably informative article written in the wake of The Great Facebook Outage of 2021. If you do most of your marketing on Facebook, this is a must-read.
7. The 7 Best Sales Techniques We've Learned From 3,000+ Businesses — Luke Gardner
Content machine Luke Gardner drew on his extensive experience at Printavo to assemble this definitive guide to sales techniques that get results. The best part is the real-life examples that accompany each technique, showing how businesses used them to great effect.
8. Pushing the Limit of Performance: Lessons From Formula 1 for Every Business — Bill Petrie
This wasn't Bill Petrie's most-read post for Promo Marketing in 2021 (that honor goes to this post), but it was easily our favorite. Petrie combines his signature storytelling ability and humor with his business acumen to pull real, applicable business lessons out of a Netflix series about racing. Even more impressive: He made us racing-nonbelievers interested in Formula 1.
9. One Way to Handle Supply Chain Issues With Clients? Brutal Honesty — Bobby Lehew
As the supply chain started getting really tricky in mid-2021, Bobby Lehew was looking to provide solutions for distributors. This article acknowledged the emerging difficulty of the situation with a recommendation to face problems head-on by keeping customers informed—even if it meant telling the ugly truth about the situation. That advice would only become more important as the year wore on.
10. What Does QuickBooks Desktop Going Subscription Mean? — Harriet Gatter
Harriet Gatter has been churning out clear, helpful, no-frills accounting advice on Promo Marketing for years as part of her Ask The Accountant series. In this post, her most-read of 2021, she helped clear up some confusion about Quickbooks' switch to a subscription model.
Check back on Monday for the next 2021 wrap-up. Thanks for reading!
