Resources for Printers & Mailers

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.

Here are some things I would absolutely do. I would make sure that my website was better than any of my competitors. I'd obsess about this, plan quarterly meetings to discuss improvements, and make sure new content was being added at least monthly.

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.

If you haven't already, now is the time to set up a G+ page for your business. It's not just about social media effectiveness it's about SEO. As mentioned in several of my previous articles, SEO represents a great opportunity for print providers to extend their marketing reach and cultivate new business.

Sorting through old files, I recently came across a copy of my January 2004 Marketing Briefs newsletter to printers. I was struck by how different (simpler) things were then. No mention of SEO, social media, content marketing or even email (we launched that in the Spring of 2004). At the same time, I was struck by how much things had not changed. These are the same fundamental ideas that need to be at the core of your marketing strategy today. Planning and commitment to execution have always been the keys to marketing success.

This is a copy of the end-of-year letter I recently sent to all of my clients at Great Reach Communications. I wanted to share this with everyone because I think it contains valuable, actionable advice that can be utilized regardless of whether you are a client or not.