Are you positioning yourself as a marketing services provider? If so, you are putting yourself out in front of your customers as more than an output provider. You are positioning yourself as someone they can trust to handle the marketing—as well as production—aspect of their campaigns.In your self-promotion campaigns, this means that you need to be using industry-leading best practices.Here are four best practices from “Digital Printing: Transforming Business & Marketing Models.” How many of these were in your last self-promotion campaign?1. Don't think “technology.” Think “solutions.” In your marketing message, did you focus on digital output? 1:1 printing? personalized URLs? Or increased marketing effectiveness?2. Traditional marketing rules apply. How much expertise did you bring to key marketing elements of the campaign, such as the mailing list, segmentation, and understanding customer psychographics? Was the copy professionally written? Was it copy edited? What was the level of the graphic design?3. Go multi-channel. Digital and 1:1 printing can be powerful tools, but they don't work in a vacuum. Marketing is a complex world of multiple channels, including email, SMS text messaging, social media, and more. How much thought was given to these other channels and how the print portion of the campaign would fit within them?4. Make a long-term commitment. Was this a one-shot deal? Or have you made a long-term commitment to building relationships with your customers? How often do you send out communications? Regularly? Or just when you need to boost sales?We ask our clients to follow these best practices. If we are marketing services providers, we should be following them ourselves.For more on digital printing best practices, check out “Digital Printing: Transforming Business & Marketing Models.” Training and educational primers also available on 1:1, personalized URLs, and Web-to-print at www.digitalprintingreports.com.