Direct Mail & Print

I want to tell you about four quick tips I recently shared with my clients. The first is a key take away from research produced by InfoTrends (Lisa Cross and Kate Dunn) that identified best practices from print providers that experienced double-digit sales growth in the past 12 months.'While engaging potential customers in person is essential, it is also important to support those efforts with printed and digital communications to create a productive sales force.' (Source link)

Here are 5 things to consider halfway through 2017. Summer is a great time to plan for growth! Millennials love direct mail, as do others. Are you using it as part of your marketing communications? Existing customers cost less and spend more.

My colleague, Matt Hunt, recently attended the Email Innovations Summit. It featured a number of dynamic speakers from well known companies to small startups talking about their experiences with email marketing and customer communications. Email marketing can be a powerful sales tools but only if done right.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on marketing your print and direct mail services. See Me, Trust Me, Like Me is your marketing objective. The customer's perception is your reality. 80% of the buying process is complete before a prospect makes contact with you.

Happy New Year! A very simple and extremely important message for the start of 2017!

When we focus on business and sales, it's easy to overlook small issues that seem insignificant. However, these small mistakes may be costing you more sales than you realize.

Even if you dismiss what marketers say about the need to market your print services, it's hard to ignore what printers themselves are saying. This printer's email about unsolicited praise for their marketing program shows the power of strategic advantage.

I've spent the last 21 years providing marketing tools to printers and mailers. In that time, I've been able to witness the common issues that seem to derail even the best-intentioned marketing efforts. Here are a few of the most common reasons why they fail.

1. Less than two years ago, Google's new Hummingbird algorithm shook the SEO world. As usual, there was no advance notice. The next big event will be 4/21. This time, Google has given notice. If your company website is not mobile friendly by this date, it will have an adverse effect on your search rankings. Not sure if your site is mobile friendly? Google provides this simple tool to let you know if it meets their mobile-friendly standards. Don't wait. Try it now here.

A client of mine has had a great deal of success utilizing the LinkedIn publisher platform as a sales tool. In the spirit of that, I wanted to share the following tips:

Take the challenge and be the catalyst for change in 2015. Try at least four of these ideas for six months and see what happens. I'd love to hear your results and get your feedback. We can help you implement several of these if you choose.

Do you have a LinkedIn strategy? If not, you should. To get the most out of your marketing content you can't stop at mailing, emailing, and posting to your website. Leverage LinkedIn both from a company standpoint and an individual standpoint. Do you use Slideshare to share content on LinkedIn?

In the last 2 weeks, I’ve witnessed and spoken with printers who are reporting fantastic results. Here is a summary of what four of them have done.

At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Most often, people will give the job to the company they feel has the greatest amount of competency and then come up with ways to justify not giving it to someone else. The most effective way to influence your brand is to produce content that reflects your expertise. This means content that is better, more relevant and more sophisticated than any of your competitors. Use this content for both inbound and outbound marketing efforts.

I firmly believe that if print providers want to grow their sales, the first order of business should be a greater focus on client retention efforts. A marketing strategy that places a greater emphasis on client retention than on new client acquisition will yield the greatest results. I've included my thoughts to accompany some interesting statistics below.

A well-executed email newsletter can be an easy and inexpensive way to help market your print services. However, email newsletters present more potential pitfalls than their print counterpart. With email newsletters, getting it right every time is critical because once someone opts out (or tags you as spam) they are gone forever!

There's no doubt that an informative company newsletter is one of the best ways a printer can help market their services. If you're thinking about utilizing a print newsletter to market your company, here are some things to consider.

Take the challenge and be the catalyst for change in 2014. Try at least four of these ideas for six months and see what happens. I'd love to hear your results and get your feedback. We can help you implement several of these if you choose.

These days content marketing is the big buzz. I've spent the last 18 years providing content marketing solutions to the print industry so this is an area of expertise for me. If you are currently utilizing or plan on utilizing content to help grow your business, here are 5 quick things to think about.

Why use customer communications? Customer communications CAN impact your bottom line. The case to use customer communications mirrors in many ways the case to invest in relationship marketing.