Email Marketing is Easy, Affordable, and Gets Results
Email is a basic tool, but it is very powerful and has decades of marketing practices behind it. It’s perfect for a printing company on a budget. Using affordable and strategic marketing tools such as email on a regular schedule will help plant your brand firmly and positively in your prospect’s mind. BENEFITS OF EMAIL […]
Control Pricing and Put Print Profits Back in Your Pocket
Assumptions about pricing can kill your business. Here’s an example. Recently I helped a printer get rid of half of his business that was dragging him down. He had spent ten years using loss-leader pricing on half his products. For an entire decade, he made pricing assumptions without backing them up with facts. He had […]
10 Things To Do When Updating Your Website
Whether you bring in a pro to help you update your website — or do it yourself — there are 10 things to do before you hit the publish button. But first! I’d like to talk about one of my early clients. Mike Hasson was the founder of the Hasson Company, a luxury real estate […]
Timing is Everything When Educating Customers About Print Marketing
Timing. Is. Everything. Do your print customers know this? Do they know the clock is ticking? Do they know that time is flowing and tomorrow things may look very different? Are you prepared to educate them so they can get time on their side? Then and now. I help a friend sell ads for our […]
Lessons from a Printing Company Working with Netflix
I toured a printing company that printed the DVD packaging and disks for Netflix, back when the entertainment giant sent DVDs to people’s homes for viewing. The printer was growing and had the floor space to install a brand new specialty press with a dedicated production area — exclusively for Netflix. At that time, Netflix […]
How to Sell Print to the Real Estate Industry
No matter what’s going on in the economy, there’s money to be made for printers who can get in the door with real estate brokers. To sell deeply and profitably, you must develop relationships and earn a seat at the project planning table. To do that, you need to work with the brokers and top […]
Authority Matters in How You Market Your Printing Company
To stand out online and in your customers’ minds, authority matters. Whether you have the biggest company on the planet or you run the shop down the street, you need “cred” to attract attention. There are two types of attention you want to cultivate. The first form of authority is from real live people, especially […]
Say YES to Customer Lists from Colleagues Who Are Closing Their Doors
When the magazine I ran for 22 years closed its doors, the owners offered me all the business data and customer lists for free. They were not going to do anything with it, and everything would be purged by the end of the tax year. So I said yes. Saying yes not only gave me […]
Hybrid Marketing Teams Are Here and They’re Hot
Marketing departments in printing businesses are being disrupted. Today’s employees have been adjusting and adapting on the fly. Many have been deployed elsewhere during the pandemic. Most marketing people I talk to are carrying multiple roles within the company. They’re covering for other employees who need flexible time off, or they’re pivoting to address urgent […]
Getting Creative with a $20 Marketing Budget
Doing a small project — even one with a ridiculously cheap budget — can be a way to show customers that creative marketing gets direct, measurable results. Having some fun in the process makes you endearing and spotlights you as a preferred vendor. Helping customers make critical business decisions based on marketing input makes you […]
Chutes and Ladders is This Year’s Game of Life
Remember the game Chutes and Ladders? The kids’ board game where you have to climb to the top before anyone else? Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders) is ostensibly about luck, random spins or rolls of the dice, and avoiding the slides that send you careening to the bottom. It’s also about hanging in […]
How to Make Business Decisions for a Wonderful Life
A printer came to me with a dilemma. One of his customers wanted to buy his family printing business and turn it into an in-house print-design department. Since he had the only print shop in his small town, he felt a responsibility to stay independent and serve the community, just as his parents did before […]