The coming of a new year is the ideal time to think about revamping your company’s image and its offer. Reinvention is critical to success, and perhaps even more so now as the printing industry tries to recover from one of the most challenging years.
Thinking you can continue on the same path you’ve always followed, with fingers crossed that business will pick up as the economy recovers, may have worked in the past, but that kind of thinking just won’t cut it today. Print companies can’t rely anymore on just being print producers.
Print companies need to become marketing partners to their customers. And this means understanding your customers’ objectives, their target markets, and coming up with the best solutions, including e-communication tools, to meet their goals. If your customers win so do you.
But before you can become a marketing partner you need to consider your own business’s image. For an industry that is centred on the reproduction of high quality images on paper, print companies in the main lack a professional marketing approach.
As a marketer myself I am constantly surprised by the lack of attention to detail that print companies show in their own marketing materials. We are an industry with access to the latest technology, to designers, copywriters and professional photographers, but many print companies treat marketing as an ad-hoc activity – something you do when you’ve got a spare five minutes, not something that you budget for and give any real consideration to.
If you are marketing to marketers you have to understand the importance of creating your own brand, of presenting a professional image. Marketers aren’t interested in the speed of a press or dots per inch — they assume you know your stuff on a technical level. They are interested in whether you have the ability to meet their objectives, to understand the importance of brand building. And the best way to demonstrate your knowledge is to put forward a contemporary, vibrant brand image that instantly communicates the fact that you know what you are doing, on all levels.
Promotional materials need to reflect not only your technical ability to produce high quality print. They also need to demonstrate that you have an understanding of marketing. The use of good quality, professional photos and images, and cohesive, intelligent text are crucial to creating a positive perception, to building a respected brand. Happy snaps and some words loosely thrown together just aren’t good enough, especially in today’s environment where print is competing against a raft of other communications options. Everything you do needs to communicate that you are at the leading edge.
And you need to add an allocation for marketing to your budget. You expect your customers to continue to spend on their marketing activities, and so should you.
Start the New Year with a marketing review
The first step in any marketing review process is to canvass your customers to get their buy-in on how you are performing across all levels of your service. You don’t need to quiz every customer. A cross-section of customers who are representative of your client base will provide you with a sound insight into your performance.
Ask them what they like about doing business with you and what improvements they would like to see. Find out what new products or services they are interested in. For example, do your customers want to be able to order online? Would they take advantage of a web design service, or be interested in the provision of e-communication tools as part of an overall marketing campaign?
And ask them what they think of your brand image – does your branding reflect your service?
After you’ve undertaken the review get your employees together to discuss the findings.
Encourage your staff to add input to the process so they gain ownership from the outset.
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