5 top tips for making the most of your print marketing materials

5 top tips for making the most of your print marketing materials

5 top tips for making the most of your print marketing materials

It can be hard to believe in printed marketing materials. In an age where our phone pings every few seconds with a new email, or notification of the latest deals from our favourite brands. But having a combined marketing strategy that looks at both digital marketing and printed materials is the best way to reach as many of your customers as possible. Which is why we’re focusing this month on print. Traditional marketing methods, ‘offline marketing’, and how you can be making the most of your print marketing materials.

In this blog we’ll be looking at tops tips of making the most of your printed marketing materials. As it can be easy to overlook the differences of advertising to someone through digital methods than it is to someone through a brochure or letter.

 

Professional design

Though it may seem a sales pitch coming from a marketing company. Approaching a professional designer is possibly one of the best choices you can make when it comes to printed materials.

As we have spoken about in previous blogs, your brand’s credibility is made up in several ways. With one of them being what you give or send out to the general public. If it looks professional and polished, it is much more likely to attract customer’s attention for the right reasons. Rather than something that looks like you haven’t put in much effort.

Not to mention designer’s do this for a living, they’re good at it! Just as with your own services, that you know going for a professional is more cost effective in the long run. Than trying to attempt it in your own, and the same applies to the creative process. Invest in a good designer who understands what you are trying to achieve for your company. This will serve you a lot better in the long run, than rush designing some leaflets yourself.

 

Understanding print jargon

As with anything, it can be hard to know if you’re getting what you are asking for. Knowing if it is the best possible product if you don’t know the jargon. Now, any reputable designer will talk you through any terms you don’t understand, but that’s only if you ask.

It can be very easy to nod along to a designer who is telling you a certain stock is better. Or you should definitely choose a silk varnish because you don’t want to look silly for not knowing what it is.

If you don’t understand what your designer or printer is talking about, always ask. As it’s your finished product they are working on! However if you would like to build your own knowledge, there are plenty of jargon busters such as this one. Which will give you an idea of all the basic terms. So you can have some idea of what you are working with, and if that choice is what you want.

 

Your audience

This may seem an obvious point, but one that can be forgotten when it comes to offline marketing. Knowing your customer personas means you will be able to better advertise to them.

This can come down to simple observations. Like knowing that your main audience are of an older age group, and would respond really well to a personalised letter. Or that you do a lot of exhibitions where everyone is after a free pen.

Or it could be more focused on your product and how it may benefit a certain group of people. We mentioned in one of our 12 days of Christmas blogs, about ADT’s box campaign. Where they looked particularly at apartment blocks and buildings. With most people considering apartment blocks to be reasonably safe. With a number of locked doors to get through to eventually get to your apartment. They may not have been ADT’s normal customer base. However, using a clever spring-loaded box, they were able to approach a whole new demographic of people.

ADT used their spring loaded boxes (which could be folded flat) and pushed them under the apartment doors. Once pushed through the door, the box sprung to shape. With the message “breaking into your apartment is easier than you think” along with the company branding printed on the box. Giving the impression someone had been in the apartment to pop down the parcel, and no doubt scaring people into thinking about their security systems.

Printed materials can focus on customers ‘pain’ points just as much as digital marketing. You just need to have enough knowledge as to what your customers react to.

 

Time dependent offers

Unlike digital marketing, where you can set up email automation, or notification & reminders, or even place a pop up for when people are about to leave the page, you really need to get people to react quickly to your printed material.

Though your materials may stay pinned to their notice board, or on the paper pile, and may possibly be picked up at a later date. To be able to track your efforts effectively with printed materials means getting a quick turnaround.

This can be done through time dependent offers. So your potential customers have to react within a certain time period to gain the discount or offer. By the amount of people you have taking advantage of the offer within this time limit makes it a lot easier to assess how well people have reacted to an offer, and if you should have similar offers in the future.

 

Combining your efforts

As we said in our introduction, it is no longer a case of picking printed materials or just using digital methods to market your business any more. You have to allow fluid motions between the both. Which means making it easy from your printed campaigns to reach you online, and letting people know online they can gain printed materials if they wish.

If you are advertising a certain campaign through letters or leaflets, sending people back to a landing page not only allows you to feed those people through the sales funnel for that particular product or service, but also allows you to track your efforts, as you can see who has taken action from your material.

 

If you’re looking for help with your printed materials, or want to begin a combined marketing campaign but would like it all managed in one place, then why not give us a call? Based in Burntwood, Staffordshire, we can take care of all of your marketing needs in-house, meaning less running around for you. Contact us today for a friendly chat on how we may be able to work together. Or if you wish to read more about Print then why not check out our other blogs. 

Taking care of Training Manuals for Quality Care

Quality Care Montage

Quality Care Montage

Even if your businesses internal documents will never be seen by customers it’s still important to make sure they are in brand.

As well as reinforcing the brand for your staff. It also shows them that you’re paying real attention to everything involving the business. Including internal documents which don’t have to be in brand.

Handing your staff a branded, neat and tidy training manual may boost moral. Because it makes them feel like they belong and that you’ve gone to the effort to produce something that looks nice for them to use.

We were recently approached by long-time clients of ours, Quality Care. Who wanted training manuals printing to give to their trainees and trainers. To ensure their 100+ trainees were trained correctly and were compliant.

After receiving the training manual in various formats. We edited it, added contents pages, formatted it and compiled it into one master PDF.

We were then able to move onto the graphic design process. Which involved applying the brand and designing a cover.

Once the graphic design stage was completed, we proofread it. Had it approved by the client and sent the training manual off to print and had it delivered to the client.

What did quality care have to say?

Quality Care were thrilled with their new, updated and branded training manuals!

‘I would like to thank you and your team for your professional assistance with the conception and completion of our new training materials. You have provided faultless service throughout and I would not hesitate to promote and recommend your services.

Once again many thanks and look forward to working with you in the future.’

–          Richard Smith, CEO

Whether your customers see a document or not. It’s worth putting the same amount of effort into branding internal documents than you do into branding client facing documents and marketing collateral.

If you’re looking for internal documents to be designed. Or marketing collateral such as brochures or catalogues. We can help create something that will benefit your business. To find out more and arrange a chat call us on 01543 387 047 or fill in our online contact form.

The Marketing Dogs Ideas for Christmas Campaigns, From iBones to Cat-alogues.

the marketing dogs ideas for christmas campaigns

the marketing dogs ideas for christmas campaigns

Bonjour humans, as you can see, I’ve been dressed up as Santa Paws, poor Chops didn’t get off lightly either. She’s had antlers stuck through her head.

This means one of two things; Christmas is around the corner or our humans love to humiliate us, or perhaps both.

If it’s time for humans to dress their dogs up as Christmas folk. It’s definitely time for you to be thinking about your business Christmas campaign.

The run up to Christmas is a time of year where humans are spending. Whether they’re buying gifts for their loved ones, a new outfit for a party, or dressing their dogs up as elves, they’re spending.

You want them to buy that knitted dog jumper from your business right?

So how can your business capitalise on the Christmas spirit?

Christmas is the one time of year when retail businesses can almost guarantee an increase in sales. So they’re all advertising and promoting themselves, or they should be.

Other sectors may see a down turn in client activity and have the opportunity to think about re marketing to existing clients. Or marketing for new prospects and keeping their brands front of mind for when orders pick up again.

Whichever you are, this means you need a well-planned marketing campaign to help you stand out from your competition, and be the dogs!

It can be anything from a well-designed leaflet to an advertising campaign.

You don’t need to run special offers either, though it’s always an advantage – if you can save a few pennies on something, you will.

Digital

A lot of people will start their search for Christmas gifts on the internet, so promoting your business on the internet is really important.

Remember that your customers are busy. So if you have a special range of products or offers, create a ‘Christmas’ or ‘Offers’ section on your website. To help people find those products or offers easily.

As with all of your products, the product descriptions should be able to sell off the page. And the meta descriptions should be able to draw people in from search results.

Once you’ve uploaded your festive products, why not send an email out to your customers to let them know about your new products? Including links back to the website will encourage them back and might even encourage them to buy right away.

Then there’s advertising to think about. Whether it’s on the Google Display Network or on Facebook. It can have a huge impact if you know your audience and target them correctly.

Take full advantage of social media and blogging by writing blog posts about your offers or Christmas products, and then promote them on social media.

Everyone is looking to save money so if they’re on Facebook and come across a link to a blog post about offers on products they might want as Christmas gifts, you can bet they’ll follow it. Then they’ll have more money on their dogs – we love to be spoilt, we prefer roadkill toys to antlers by the way!

Something else to consider, which isn’t just limited to Christmas. Is whether or not your website runs and displays correctly on mobile devices.

The increase in smartphones, tablets and other devices with internet access, means more and more people are buying from a mobile device. But they can’t do that if your website doesn’t display correctly.

A Rackspace study found that mobile devices have increased impulse purchases, so it really is worth having a mobile optimised website. There are few things I enjoy more than looking at a great mobile website on my iBone you know.

Print

Me and Chops had a real argument about whether print should appear in this blog post or not. I’m a modern dog and I don’t like print, I like digital, but Chops is adamant that print is just as important.

Chops says that just because people can access things at the touch of a button, doesn’t mean they don’t like to hold a well-designed high quality piece of print anymore. I must admit it is fun chewing up a piece of print too, try it.

If you have a huge selection of Christmas products. Or lots of offers. It might be worth creating a leaflet, catalogue or a brochure for people to flick through. You can then include a call to action which will drive them back to your website. Getting them to purchase right away.

If you don’t want to bombard your customers with all of your products. You could send them a leaflet instead just letting them know that you have Christmas offers on, or give them an exclusive Christmas offer just for being an existing customer.

Another great thing about print is that while you can delete an email without opening it. The chances are you’ll probably have a quick glance at a piece of print even if you think it’ll be of no use to you.

You don’t have to stop at leaflets or brochures, you could create signs to go outside your shop to let people know about your offers, or you could advertise in a local newspaper.

It’s never too late

Humans are notorious for procrastination, (not like us dogs, we love to do everything right now). So it’s never too late to promote your business and your offers.

Some businesses begin promoting for Christmas as early as July. And some people will have all of their Christmas gifts purchased and wrapped up by the end of September.

However, some people will still be rushing around on Christmas Eve. So keep promoting right up until the last minute to get as much as you can out of the Christmas rush.

Have you thought about January yet?

As soon as everyone’s finished their second helping of Christmas pudding and let us sneak onto the sofa. They’re already thinking about the Boxing Day and January sales and what they can spend their Christmas money on.

As you’ll probably be taking a few days off over Christmas. You need to have all of your Boxing Day and January sales promotions and advertising ready and waiting for your first day back.

Infact, it might even be worth emailing customers or sending them a leaflet out with their Christmas orders. To let them know that you’ll have offers on from Boxing Day or News Years Day onwards.

You need to think about the same things you will have done for your Christmas marketing campaign;

  • What offers are you running and for how long?
  • Have you got new products?
  • How and where will you be promoting yourself?

What if you aren’t a retail business?

Retail businesses do really well over the winter and Christmas period. But it’s not such a boom time for other businesses for a number of reasons.

If your business struggles during the Christmas period, you need to be doing something which will stick in the minds of your customers so that when they’re ready to spend again, you’re the first people they think of.

The easiest and cheapest way of doing this is to email, or even post, a Christmas card out to your customers.

This isn’t something many businesses do, so it will make your customers feel special and will make you memorable, especially if your Christmas card has a picture of a French Bulldog dressed up as Santa Paws, who wouldn’t enjoy that?

Who can help?

My humans know that the run up to Christmas is busy and it can be easy to run out of time to promote your business, so give them a call on 01543 387 047 and let them take care of it for you.

Whether you want to send your customers an email to remind them about your business, or want a full on Christmas marketing campaign, they can handle it while you’re doing the day to day running of your business.

Au revoir, I’m off to round up a few more dogs and dress them as reindeers so they can pull me around the office in my sleigh.

 

George the French bulldog and Chops the pug are our resident Marketing Dogs. They are full of fun, cuteness and even sometimes some useful pointers too. You can follow their adventures through their blog, or see their latest updates on twitter.