Tips Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Marketing Ideas For Printers, Are You Sure Your Software Is Up-To-Date?, Direct Mail

Recently, a customer contacted us looking for help with customizing their direct mail content. They had experienced a series of weird hiccups while trying to open their Adobe InDesign file with no clear indication of what to do next. After some digging, we discovered that their version of Adobe InDesign was outdated and had been corrupted. Thankfully, they subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud, and a simple update to their software fixed the problem and got them back on track! What You Should Know If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber, the newest updates for your current software platform are available to you at any time. Additionally, you have access to the freshest software releases as soon as they become available from Adobe. If that’s news to you, keep on reading! Every Adobe Creative Cloud subscription includes the Creative Cloud app which manages your Adobe software and notifies you of any updates available. This app also gives you front row access to the newest versions of the software available. You can check out the “What’s New?” section to find out exactly what you’re getting with the update. To access the “What’s New?” section within any Adobe application on either Mac or PC,

What turns customers away from a website, advertisement, or company? Perhaps it’s the message itself or the way a brand is presented. Sometimes the information is just too scattered, time-consuming, or confusing! Today’s consumers face a barrage of competing messages, so helping your customers learn to evaluate and understand each intersection between a customer and their business is critical. A Critical Crossroad These intersections, or touch points, are the focus of the latest marketing tip added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers. Touch points are anything your customers come in “touch” with before, during, or after a sale. These can include such things as a company’s advertisements, flyers, business cards, blogs, tradeshow presence, or even their customer service and voicemail manners. Each touch point represents an entry into the sales funnel where a visitor either continues forward or turns away. Every Touch Point Matters In this new tip, your customers will learn that simply having a touch point in place is no longer an option. Rather, each touch point must perfectly represent their brand, offering a cohesive, captivating message. To help with this, there’s a simple three-step formula to consider: LIST: List all current touch

One of my favorite times of each week is when coworkers share their weekly Highs and Lows with me. It’s a pretty simple ritual: I send out an email to all of the Marketing Ideas For Printers coworkers on Friday morning sharing one of the high points of the week, and a low point. I then ask the coworkers to do the same and share their highs and lows with me. The topics could be anything! The topics are often work-related, but they don’t have to be. In fact, it’s often the personal stuff that provides the greatest insight into each team member’s “mental energy” for the week. Send Publicly, Receive Privately My highs and lows go out publicly for everyone on the team to see, but the replies from my team come back privately to me. This, of course, helps encourage more open and honest feedback from the team. I also make a habit of including at least one additional “High” … I want to make sure that “High” always wins in the battle of High and Low! Don’t Forget to Add This There’s one more important step to do to make the most out of this weekly ritual. When I

At the last printing conference I attended, I heard over and over again the printing industry referred to as a mature industry. It wasn’t always said in words as clear as that, but if you listened close enough, that’s what you heard. That can be pretty scary. It sounds so dead-end, and frankly, discouraging. On the other hand, if you switch your thoughts for a moment and think about sporting events, when the camera is panning the crowd, who gets the attention and ends up on the big screen? It’s the guys with no shirts in the freezing cold weather. It’s the fans with the crazy clothes that your Mom would never let you wear in public. It’s the kid dancing as if there was no one one watching. Who’s getting the attention? Not people you would think of as mature. No, it’s the fans that are acting immature! So, if printing is considered a mature industry, how should you act? Should you accept things as they’ve always been and stay where things are comfortable? Or, should you show up to work and start a new dance craze like the kid on the big screen? No, let’s not go there…please!

Have you adapted your sales cycle to accommodate the Digital Dialog? It used to be that your customers ordered printing from you either by a voice-to-voice conversation on the phone or a face-to-face conversation at your front counter. That still happens, of course, but with the Internet being at everyone’s fingertips, the conversations about ordering printing often start with social media, email, and the use of your website’s order forms. The Online Version of You Is the online version of you able to sell printing as effectively as the real you? It’s worth taking some time to study the answer to that question, considering how often the print ordering process starts online in the digital world. You need to think about the Digital Dialog when you’re ready to answer that question. The Digital Dialog is, very simply, conversation facilitated online. The Digital Dialog is the online version of you that starts conversations, builds trust, and develops relationships online, so you can sell more printing. The Dialog of a Printing Order Before we get into the details of the Digital Dialog, let’s pull back the focus and look at the dialog of a printing order. To sell printing effectively you have to manage this dialog, whether it happens voice-to-voice,

Do you send emails to prospects, customers, and colleagues in time zones other than your own? Here’s a simple tip that will help prevent timing mistakes and misunderstandings. A Simple Way to Present Time It’s so simple you might be overlooking it. Ready? Here it is: Whenever you send an email to someone in a different time zone, and you mention a specific time, make sure you reference the time in both time zones. Let’s start with this simple message: It would be an easy improvement to provide a time zone for a common point of reference, like this: However, if you’re the one in the Central time zone, that’s lazy. You’ve made it clear what time you’ll be calling in your time zone, but you’re still leaving it up to the recipient to have to figure out the time conversion to their time zone. If they don’t do time conversions regularly, there’s always a chance that they’ll make a mistake and convert in the wrong direction. You don’t want that happening! A Better Way to Present Time You can do better. Here’s how the message might look when both time zones are mentioned. It’s that simple! When you present both time zones no one has to guess

Think back to a time before the Internet. (My kids always give me a puzzled look when I tell them that such a time actually existed!) Print buyers ordered printing face-to-face over a front counter or voice-to-voice over a phone. That still happens, but today’s print buyers order printing from your website, too! It’s easy to be friendly face-to-face, but are you being friendly online? Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression. That’s why your online communication has to be clear, accurate, and friendly. Your online conversation, whether human or automated, is your digital dialog. Here are some tips to make your digital dialog as effective as possible. Say Goodbye to The Geek Your digital dialog shouldn’t be too geeky. Instead, it should be friendly … just like the face-to-face conversations you had before the Internet. Tips For Humans: Just because the conversation is happening online is enough to get some people talking geeky. Don’t. Imagine the conversation as if it was happening face-to-face, and then transfer that conversation into the digital dialog. Tips For Computers: This is where the geek-talk can really show up. Just because the message is automated doesn’t mean it can’t be warm and friendly. Use normal talk with real words. Put

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