By Michele Stillwell, Director of Marketing and Accounting at MEDiAHEAD

In case you didn’t know this, MEDiAHEAD is a Woman Owned Business. Yes, 100%. Our fearless leader is Kat McDaniel-Ditch.

There are several steps to take to get certified as a minority owned business. If you’re looking into doing this type of structure at your business, I recommend doing the research first. It’s an extremely daunting task! It ends up being well worth it, but it does take a considerable amount of time to earn this designation.

We are certified in Missouri, Kansas, the City of Kansas City and Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC). There are several advantages of being a minority-owned business. One advantage is that many organizations want to do business with minority-owned businesses and prefer to do so.

Making Companies Stronger

Business leaders are aware that supporting minority-owned businesses isn’t just good for public relations, it can also make their companies stronger. Adding more diversity to a company’s supplier base allows a business to better survive an economic downturn, deal with labor strikes or shortages and bring new products to market more quickly.

When you are a minority owned business, you can participate in special government programs, including government contracting opportunities. Federal government agencies are mandated to reward a substantial number of contracts to certified minority-owned businesses. Anywhere from five to twenty-five percent of the money spent on contracts for certain projects must go to minority-owned businesses.

Large companies benefit from working with minority-owned businesses and some have set goals around expanding their partnerships with them. Also, many corporations have a supplier diversity program in place. For most companies, the commitment to minority and women-owned business purchasing is goal-focuses and measured. The pressure for more supplier diversity initially was created by affirmative action; however, most companies now see many benefits when working with smaller, minority owned businesses. Small businesses, women, and minorities make up their customer base. Government contractors understand the importance of supplier diversity for winning contracts.

Supplier Diversity

Most large corporations have sizable staff, large budgets, and large dollar amounts devoted to supplier diversity. For example, roughly 97% of the Fortune 500 companies set percentages or dollar goals on supplier diversity. In those Fortune 500 companies, the staff to support supplier diversity is growing as well, with an average of two to three individuals assigned to this function. As budgets have increased, so have the requirements for personnel, programs, advertising, marketing, training, conferences and seminars.

Secondary programs, such as mentor-protégé and training, are growing as more companies seek to help minority suppliers gain more training and access to contracts.

Purchasing-based association advocates are also gaining clout. The Minority Supplier Development Council, the Women Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), and Women Business Development Council, the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Women Business Owners Corporation, the Minority Business Round Table and the Latin American Management Association are gaining influence with corporations.

As more money is spent with suppliers, pressure will increase as interest groups send report cards to corporate CEO’s diversity councils, and Boards. The government and media pay attention to supplier diversity programs, and awards and recognition in this area are on the rise. They actually have a checklist; they have to report on.

Supplier Diversity Program Checklist:

• Total dollars per year
• Dollars spent last year
• Percentage of total procurement
• Executive Support
• CEO
• Executive Diversity Council
• Board of Directors
• Structure and Staffing
• Provide staff leadership
• Provide structural support
• Communicate goals and results
• Publish goals and results
• Use internal and external publications as well as the Internet
• Highlight some of their suppliers
• Ensure accountability for meeting or exceeding the Supplier Diversity Goals
• Measure results
• Award performance
• Penalize deficiencies and goals not reached
• Link to performance evaluations
• Provide periodic reports
• Encourage Special Programs
• Matchmaking
• Mentoring

Best-practice companies should always evaluate vendors to find the ones with the most experience, knowledge, and capability needed to provide products and services that reflect the diversity of their company. A huge factor of these efforts involves nurturing relationships with typically underutilized businesses and working to incorporate these companies into their network of vendors whenever possible.

Growing a diverse supplier base only makes sense. We see increasingly diverse markets that companies serve in this global age. Companies that combine outstanding supplier diversity initiatives and outcomes with other best-in-class diversity and inclusion programs will maintain a competitive advantage, win new business, support local businesses, retain customers, and reinforce their brands.

Support Minority Owned Businesses!

MEDiAHEAD supports diversity in the workplace. What is diversity? It means that a company employs a wide range of diverse individuals. People with different characteristics. Diversity in the workplace includes individuals of varying gender, age, religion, race, ethnicity, cultural background, sexual orientation, languages, education and other attributes.

Some of the benefits of diversity:

• Variety of different perspectives
• Increased creativity
• Higher innovation
• Faster problem solving
• Better decision making
• Higher employee engagement
• Reduced employee turnover
• Better company reputation
• Improved hiring results

Please take a moment to learn more about our story and our team. We would enjoy working with you on your next project!

By Michele Stillwell, Director of Marketing and Accounting at MEDiAHEAD

Oh My GOSH. I’m not sure if you have experienced shipping problems recently, but we sure have.

We needed to do something fast. We saw COVID-19 hitting and knew that the industry was going to suffer. Kat had a great idea to sell branded hand sanitizer, face masks and COVID-19 safety kits. Great idea, right? Have you ever tried to get plastic 2-ounce, 6-ounce, or any ounce bottles during a Pandemic? I can tell you… it’s literally impossible!

We finally found a vendor who could get us 20,000 of the 2-ounce bottles with lids. Happy day for us! But it was going to take 4-6 weeks to get them. In the meantime, we had a supplier for some small amounts of bottles here and there, coming in from anywhere we could get them, to fulfill our orders.

So back to the 20,000 and tracking every day….

Where are the bottles?

They got held up in you guessed it… US Customs! Meanwhile, orders are coming in and we are really needing to get these bottles. I’m tracking the shipment every day, still sitting in customs. We’re getting nervous waiting on the big order of 20,000 bottles to come in.  I could tell they were finally moving.  The truck was in transit, thank the Lord above!

We received our bottles about 8 weeks after we placed the order. When the boxes came in, Kat, Bill and I rushed to the loading dock and started opening the boxes to look at all the bottles. YAY!!! But where are the lids? Oh no… did they forget to send the lids for crying out loud?

We were frantic at this point. The very last box was still on the dock and guess what, it was filled with nothing but the missing lids. WHEW!

So, we have lots of hand sanitizer and lots of 2-ounce bottles. If you are needing some for your office we can even get your logo placed on the bottles. Go to www.mymediahead.com for more information and you can place an order here!

By Michele Stillwell, Director of Marketing and Accounting at MEDiAHEAD

Why do women always say they’re sorry? It seems like we apologize for everything, even when we didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the weirdest thing, and I am so guilty of it. So, I made a deal with myself. I am going to do my best to STOP saying it.

Why? Because I usually haven’t done anything wrong and it’s ridiculous how many times I’ve caught myself saying it. Once it was on my radar, I started realizing just how often I apologize unnecessarily.

A University of Waterloo, Canada study found that women tend to apologize more often because they have a lower threshold than men for what they consider offensive.

I found this awesome poem, and really wanted to share it with you.

Stop apologizing.

You don’t have to say sorry for how you laugh, how you dress, how you speak. You don’t have to be sorry for being yourself. Do it fearlessly. It’s time to accept, this is you and you have to spend the rest of your life with you. So, start loving your sarcasm, your awkwardness, your weirdness, your unique sense of humor, your everything. It will make your life so much easier to simply be yourself.

– Author Unknown

Practice Self-Awareness

Realizing that you are apologizing all the time is the first step. A good way to figure out if this is an issue is to keep track of how many times throughout your day you apologize. Over the next few days, write down each time you say the word, “sorry.” You might be surprised how many times you apologize without even realizing it.

Change Your Vocabulary

Do you have a project at work that is weeks overdue? Apologizing for missing a deadline is reasonable. But there are plenty of situations where using the words “I’m sorry” aren’t necessary.

• “Sorry, could you send me that report?” could be changed to, “Please send me that report.”
• “Sorry, I won’t be able to make it on Wednesday.” could be, “I wish I could make it on Wednesday. Keep me on the list for next time!”
• “Sorry, could you repeat that?” might be, “Excuse me, could you repeat that?”

As you become more self-aware, replace the word “sorry” with more appropriate words and phrases. You may be surprised how much confidence this gives you once you figure it out. Good luck!

By Michele Stillwell, Director of Marketing and Accounting at MEDiAHEAD

Research suggests that on an average, companies across the globe feel that 26% of their address data is inaccurate. This contributes to enormous loss. In fact, bad data costs the average business 15% to 25% of revenue and in the US economy over $3 trillion annually.

There are two things that really irritate me when looking through the mail. At home, it’s getting mail addressed to my previously married name. I mean come on, that was 16 years ago. When I get something that has that name on it, guess what? It immediately goes to the trash!

Then, when I go through the mail at work, what really irks me is getting mail for people who have not been with the MEDiAHEAD for more than 20 years. And it happens regularly. I’m consistently thinking, “Where do these lists live, and why is no one looking at them? Why has no one updated them for 20 years?”

Data cleansing is so important.

Improving your data quality increases overall productivity. After your data is cleansed, the outdated information is removed, and you have good, clean information to move forward. Today, nearly 67% of businesses rely on CRM data for growth of their bottom line. However, an amazing 94% of B2B businesses suspect inaccuracy in their databases.

So how do you manage this?

What is the value of marketing analytics these days? It’s so high apparently, that companies plan to increase budgets for marketing analytics over the next three years by 198% according to a recent CMO survey. Marketing analytics offers a treasure trove of customer information and performance insight to overall business success. Which is why you would think that managing marketing data with tools like a CRM database and other analytics systems would be a more agile and rigorous process than it actually is.

Since 70% of marketing leaders expect to make the majority of their decisions using data for everything from building, personalizing and executing the next campaign to targeting, reaching and forming deeper customer segments – there should be a way to overcome the data cleaning roadblock. There are data cleansing tools/software applications that will help to clean and correct lists and databases by identifying incorrect, inaccurate, irrelevant data and clean your data accordingly.

Here are some best practices when it comes to creating data cleansing processes:

• Standardize Your Processes
• Validate Accuracy
• Scrub for Duplicate Data
• Use it to Analyze – for business intelligence and analytics
• Communicate with the Team – Keep it clean
• Get Your ROI from your Data

When managing your data, keeping on top of it consistently and accurately are two underlying jobs you have to deal with every day. The steps above should help make it easier to create your daily protocol. Once you’ve completed your data cleansing project, you can move forward using that data for deep, operational insight now that your data is accurate and reliable.

Large corporations invest so much into advanced information systems that collect, store and analyze their data. Collecting data isn’t the goal… it’s the means to the end. The real opportunity is the customer intimacy. How well can you get to know your customer? How will you leverage this knowledge to improve their experience and satisfaction?

Quality over Quantity

There must be some method to the madness, right? To be of service to an organization, data must be more than just prolific; it needs to be useful. It should provide strategic insight and support data-driven decisions. And the quality of the data is crucial. You should be able to measure everything from the number of views to the number of clicks. This helps your sales team as well as providing customer success stories.

Clean data is of utmost importance. Without it, leadership can’t make strategic decisions. Dirty data inevitably leads to dissatisfied customers, and that’s a dangerous slope to start down.

Keep your data clean!

By Michele Stilwell, Director of Marketing and Accounting at MEDiAHEAD.

The lyrics from the song by Elvis:

I gave a letter to the postman, he put it in his sack. Bright and early next morning, he brought my letter back. She wrote upon it: return to sender, address unknown. No such number, no such zone.

Well, I can’t count the number of times we receive mail at our office with names of people who have not been with the company for YEARS. It’s crazy!

Did you know?

Simply put, First-Class Mail is more expensive, but it will be delivered faster and comes with additional services like return service. First-Class Mail is intended for personal or business communication. Standard Mail is used more for advertisements and mass communication. Both qualify for discounted, bulk mail rates.

First-Class Mail

First-Class Mail is delivered faster by the USPS than Bulk or Standard Mail. Also, First-Class Mail is generally delivered in 1-3 days locally and 3-5 days nationally by the USPS. First-Class Mail is also more expensive than Bulk Rate Mail. Rates are based on size and weight — you can mail up to one ounce at the lowest postage rate.

Certain types of mail must be sent via First-Class Mail, such as invoices, statements, and other personalized mail. First-Class Mail is also forwarded automatically or returned to the sender if it isn’t deliverable.

First-Class Mail is generally perceived to be of higher importance by the recipient, so it generally gets looked at more closely by the recipient. First-Class Mail can be pre-sorted to qualify for discounted bulk mail rates, but a minimum of 500 pieces are required.

Standard Mail

Bulk (Standard) Mail is generally delivered by the USPS in 2-5 days locally, and 1 – 4 weeks nationally.

Many companies use Standard Mail because it is less expensive than First-Class Mail. Bulk mail is not automatically forwarded or returned to the sender if it is undeliverable (though you can pay extra to receive these services.)

Rates for Bulk Mail are also based on the size and weight of the mail piece; in general, you can mail up to 3.3 ounces at the lowest Standard Mail rate. There’s a minimum quantity of 200 pieces in order to mail at bulk rates.

Non-Profit Mail

Non-Profit organizations qualify for discounted bulk postage rates.

Non-Profit Mail is treated as Standard Bulk Mail and is usually delivered in 2-5 days locally, and 1-4 weeks nationally. Authorization by the US Postal Service is required to receive Non-Profit mailing rates, and only applies to Agricultural, Educational, Fraternal, Labor, Philanthropic, Religious, Scientific, Veteran organizations, as well as some political committees.

Ref: Action Mail Marketing and Direct Mail Services.

So back to Returned Mail…

Why do we get returned mail? Here are a couple reasons.

1. Missing forwarding information. If the addressee on the mail piece no longer resides at that address and USPS does not have a current forwarding (change-of-address) on file, the mail piece will most likely be returned.
2. Missing secondary information (apartment, suite, number, etc.) is invalid or missing, the mail piece may be returned.

If you get returned mail with both the address and the yellow non-delivery sticker, you can usually find out why it wasn’t delivered.  The sticker has a code on it. You can find the official definitions of all the message on the USPS site, but here are a few of the common one’s for you:

Not Deliverable as Addressed – Unable to Forward
Somebody moved but didn’t tell the USPS to forward their mail or forwarding period ended.

Attempted Not Known
This means the letter, as it was addressed, was delivered (or attempted) but then put back into the mail stream because the recipient didn’t match the one currently at the address.

Vacant
Addresses marked as “Vacant” reached the destination but were then returned as undeliverable because the mail carrier marked the address as vacant. The USPS can sometimes take up to 90 days to get a vacant status into their system.

Insufficient Address
This means the address is just plain bad. You should verify your address.

As our lives become more and more consumed by digital media (especially now that we’ve been ordered to stay at home) we give less time and attention to the messages we receive. The average lifespan of an email is 2 seconds. Brand recall after seeing a digital ad is just 44%. Direct mail on the other hand has a brand recall of 75%.

Mailing is perceived as a more trusted, personal form of communication. Think about who in your life would love to get a letter from you. Make sure you have a good address for them!