The Solutions Marketing Group (SMG) has the knowledge, strategic insights, and innovative programs to create loyalty-building relationships between companies and people with disabilities. Our consulting firm helps clients reach a market larger than any other minority group in the country: the nation’s 54 million people with disabilities.

The Solutions Marketing Group’s team understands that marketing to people with disabilities involves more than the basics of placing a universal access symbol outside a business, using a person with a disability in an advertisement, or including disability inclusive jargon in promotional material. Effective disability marketing also entails

• having buy-in from your company’s senior leadership,
  
• conducting research to understand the disability community’s culture,
  
• training your staff to have the knowledge and skills to provide excellent service,
  
• planning, developing, and implementing a comprehensive, integrated promotional strategy that touches consumers with disabilities, and
  
• recognizing that the loyalty you gain from the disability community will also touch the people in their circles of influence.
  

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

SMG's experience covers a broad spectrum of qualitative and quantitative research services. Programs that include Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) and web-based data collection comprised of targeting qualified lists, designing surveys and analyzing data. Qualitative research enables clients to understand the experiences and beliefs of consumers with disabilities. Clients also discover and explore disability-specific trends. For qualitative research, SMG's team conducts in-depth interviews, focus groups, and round-table discussions. SMG's team provides these services end-to-end – from recruitment, coordination, logistics, and discussion guide design, to facilitation and reporting. SMG's team also completes Mystery Shopping to assess the customer experience in retail store or call center.

Strategic Direction

SMG utilizes the research it conducts on behalf of its clients, as well as its existing expertise and refined knowledge to assist clients in the development of strategic direction to develop disability marketing programs.

Internal and Grassroots Communications

Since the needs of the disability market are distinct, SMG develops internal communications strategies to support external communications to consumers with disabilities. The objectives of the strategy are to create buy-in and educate employees about services offered to the market.

Additionally, SMG regularly activates its vast disability community communications network, which includes list-serves, disability media, and personal contacts with disability organizations. It is critical to an effective marketing campaign to maintain and cultivate relationships with the grassroots disability populace throughout the nation.

Education and Training

We will help your company embrace the human side of compliance to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) through trainings in customer service, diversity and disability, recruitment and retention, awareness, and leadership.

Our training options include the Opening Doors® program on customer service and disability etiquette. This program provides your employees and managers the awareness and sensitivity for serving customers with hearing, visual, mobility or cognitive disabilities. We also offer customized and company-specific services ranging from video scripts and production, customized training manuals, and employee materials to on-site training, consulting, and project management services. Finally, we can present webinars and keynote speeches for clients.

Media Placement

SMG includes media planning as an aspect of its marketing services. SMG provides key contacts in the mainstream media and the disability press with story ideas and hot button press releases that focus on disability topics. SMG's articles have been placed in various national media outlets. SMG can facilitate press conference management and point-of-contact communications services.

Partnership Development

SMG works with clients to understand their needs and pinpoint the best organizations to forge mutually beneficial partnerships with. We leverage the partnership to create marketing opportunities that meet our client's objectives to gain visibility and market share.

Creative Services

The Solutions Marketing Group develops copy and ad design for print ads, manuals, brochures, and web sites. We develop strategies that maintain a client's brand image, while still speaking to the needs of the consumers with disabilities.

Direct Mail and Email Distribution

SMG designs direct mail campaigns, customized emails and eNewsletters that hit home with people with disabilities by writing winning ad copy, designing direct mail pieces, customized emails and eNewsletters. We also locate and broker the most active and responsive lists.

Employment Training

SMG will support the diversity and human resources teams to ready the workforce for employing people with disabilities. By advising employment staffs, we strengthen internal departments to ensure that they are prepared to begin the recruitment process - from sourcing, pre-screening, screening, on boarding, retention and management and separation of employees with disabilities.

Disability Branding

Companies that successfully market to people with disabilities, and employ them understand there is a strong correlation between brand leadership and the presence of an unyielding disability commitment. Forward looking companies are strengthening and promoting their diversity brand by spreading the word about their disability investments, creating an inclusive work environment where all belong, improving community relations, and enhancing productivity and profitability by building a trusted relationship with their employees and customers.

SMG will develop strategies that help you:

1. Offer practical tips, tools, and strategies to develop a positive corporate image and distinguish your diversity brand from your competition;
2. Communicate your disability commitment to the widest audience; and
3. Increase your reputation as an "employer of choice" by investing in the diversity of the disability segment to include individuals, families, caregivers and stakeholders.

Social Media

As January 2011, there are over 600 million Facebook® users and over 100 million Twitter® users. Why is this data relevant to your business? Put simply, your customers are already using social media. They are making connections, sharing photos, telling stories, watching videos, buying online and yes, they are talking about you on social media channels.

Our social media marketing services can help you harness the power of social media to help you grow your business. What can social media do for you?

• Connect with customers & build relationships
• Increase brand awareness
• Manage your company's reputation
• Build your mailing list
• Generate more leads and online sales
• Access friends-of-friends via social networks (Word-of-mouth marketing at its best)
• Increase traffic to your website and achieve higher SEO ranking

Through our social media analysis and custom-built strategies, we'll teach you how to take advantage of the social Web. We can show you how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal.

Street Team Promotion

SMG offers Event Staffing for effective brand representation and Street Marketing solutions. Our programs offer measurable results and are designed to strategically get the word out about your products, services or events within the disability community.

We work with you from strategic planning, through production, on to staffing and finally the execution. Through the expertise of our Brand Ambassadors, we support your company to strengthen its presence and credibility within specific market segments. Street Marketing is an effective tool when targeting consumers, parents and caregivers, or teachers, therapists, and other influencers who serve the disability market.