On An Island with Nathan Hursh, MOTIF
We headed out to the Island with Nathan from MOTIF. We first met way back when we were newbies at Ideas Inc. We love collaborating with these guys and we are so excited to see their continued growth as THE place to go for promotional marketing. So sit back, relax, and learn a little with Nathan from MOTIF.
ISLAND: Tell us about MOTIF?
Nathan Hursh: MOTIF is a custom apparel and promotional product company located in Saskatoon, SK. We also offer in-house graphic design, which means we have the capability to work with your existing logo/branding and create a retail-inspired design based on a conversation.
ISLAND: What is promotional marketing and why is it important for business?
NH: Promotional marketing is basically putting your logo on a product to hand out or sell to increase awareness of your brand.
ISLAND: How do I know what promotional materials will work best for my business?
NH: It all depends on your end goals – if you want to track metrics based on ad impressions, than a Google or Facebook ad is going to be a good investment for you. If you pay for a magazine ad that specifically states “mention this ad to get 20% off your next purchase” you’ll easily be able to calculate your return on investment.
“With promotional materials we like to foster feelings…”
If you give a client a premium t-shirt with your logo on it and it becomes one of the shirts they wear in their weekly rotation, that’s a huge win. They’re wearing that to events and around their friends and family – your brand grew legs and gets in front of a lot of people.
The same goes for drinkware, hats & toques, a good pen – the list is endless, but it’s important to have items that are branded as an extension of your company and to be creative with quality products.
ISLAND: Where does your website and digital presence fit within the success of your business?
NH: Oh man…our website and social media has been a huge contributor to our success. Our goals for our website were to have something that’s both clean and functional. We want our clients and potential clients to be able to access the information they need right away, while also being able to “online shop” to familiarize themselves with our product offerings, which makes our initial conversation so much easier.
“Our social media has become our portfolio – especially Instagram”.
We didn’t know if we should show off our personalities through photos or our finished products for our clients and I’m glad we settled on doing the latter. It’s allowed for really good interactions and it’s a value-added perk for the people we do business with to feature them on our social media and tag them.
We’ve also done search engine optimization (SEO) to get those Google hits – keywords are important, haha!
ISLAND: If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about creating a promotional strategy for their business what would it be?
NH: I would advise them to think about who their target audience is, and to do something creative on a good quality item and to have fun with it!
ISLAND: If you were stranded on an island, what is the one thing you couldn’t live without?
NH: Books! Give me a crate of books and I’ll make that isolation into a vacation. I don’t mean to sound picky, but I’ll need a mix of Gaiman, Sanderson, Tolkien and Bendis – if all else fails, I can use the books for kindling or try to paper mache a raft off that island!
About Island