How a Print Buyer Focus Can Change Your Business

Is your printing business customer-focused?

Becoming a print-buyer-focused printing firm means focusing on how every interaction helps your print buyer, rather than how it helps your business.

While it sounds simple enough in theory, you’d be surprised at the number of business decisions that fail to consider the customer.

What is a Print-Buyer-Focused Business?

A print-buyer-focused printing firm puts its print buyers at the heart of everything it does, knowing that it will not only help customers but will also help build better relationships, increase loyalty, and ensure overall satisfaction with your business.

So, how can you make your printing business more focused on your print buyers? Try these tips to get started.

Tips to Make Your Print Business More Print-Buyer Focused

1. Seek to Understand Your Print Buyers’ Perspective

The best place to understand someone else’s perspective is to spend some time in their shoes.

Empathy is a tremendous gift in business. It will give you insight into the heart of your buyers like nothing else will. And, it doesn’t have to be complicated. You can practice this skill of empathy by simply asking yourself questions as if you’re the print buyer in various circumstances. For example:

  • If a print buyer’s boss emailed them a file and told them to order 500 of these brochures, how would they do it? What things would go well? What snags could they possibly run into?
  • If it was midnight and my print buyer just remembered that they were supposed to reorder those flyers to be ready on Monday, could my print buyer accomplish this quickly and easily?
  • If my print buyer wanted to start a direct mail campaign for their business, would they be able to find all the information and help they needed on my website?

By playing the print buyer’s role periodically, you can better understand their perspective and adapt your actions and provisions accordingly to better meet their needs.

2. Become a Better Listener

Your mother may have told you at some point in your life that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

If you want to understand someone else’s needs, your print buyer in this case, the best way is to listen.

Give your print buyers plenty of opportunities to express themselves and how they’re feeling about getting their needs met. For example, you could:

  • Drop-in on customer service calls to hear how things are going or went with the latest project.
  • Create a customer advisory board and make listening a part of your teams’ job.
  • Gather regular feedback through surveys, testimonials, case studies, or things like a Net Promoter Score (NPS).
  • Train your team how to do social listening to understand the needs of your print buyers

3. Build Ongoing Trust with Your Print Buyer

In any relationship, business or otherwise, a person wants to know that the other has their best interest at heart and is interested in making their life better.

How do you do this with your print buyer?

By keeping up with ongoing engagement and conversation. You can do this through regular posting of social media marketing content, monthly direct mail campaigns, or consistent email newsletter marketing content.

However you decide to reach out, the concept remains the same: to continually connect and reintroduce yourself to your print buyer, keeping your name front and center and allowing them the opportunity to see what your business is about and establish trust with you.

4. Keep Up to Date with the Print Industry

Don’t underestimate the simple fact that there is strength in numbers!

There are a ton of ways to connect and stay up to date with the print industry and with how other printers are seeking to be more print-buyer focused. In addition, you can also discover what others are NOT doing that you can start to give you the advantage of truly understanding and meeting your print buyers’ needs.

If you’re looking for a place to start, check out Networking for Printers: 9+ Places to Connect With Others in the Printing Industry.

5. Seek to Continually Improve What Your Have to Offer

Remaining stagnant or apathetic to your print buyers’ changing needs will not help your cause to be a print-buyer-focused company.

Just as needs change in any relationship, the same is true in the relationship with your print buyers. Print buyers don’t order printing the same way today as they did years ago. The demand, urgency, personalization, and more have all changed. And, if you want to remain relevant, you’ll have to change right along with it.

As you seek to improve your products and services, be sure you know your print buyers, can decipher their expectations, and then take steps to meet (and exceed!) them.

6. Take the Initiative

Consider this: what type of printer are you?

  • Are you the type of printer that goes about the day-to-day and waits for print buyers to come to you?
  • Or, are you the type of printer to go after prospective print buyers and woo them back to you?

Initiative in business is powerful. Your proactiveness to help a potential client can pay dividends in the lifetime value of your customer. And, it doesn’t take much.

Can you reach out to prospective business clients about private online ordering portals? Could you set up a demo to showcase your online design tool? Or, maybe even visit with them about how they can create an account, place an order, and view their order history on your website?

All of these are relatively minor tasks that can make a huge impact on your bottom line and increase your company’s focus on your print buyers’ success.

7. Invest in Your People

Lastly, your investment in the print buyers you serve will come from top-down leadership.

This means you can be an example yourself by investing in your team and treating them the same way you want them to treat your print buyers. As you create an environment in your print shop that is others first, it will spill over to the interactions with your print buyers and make your printing firm all the better for it.