Looking at marketing for 2017

It’s been a interesting year for all of us, especially in November when windy welly got shaken up a bit and we are still feeling the after effects four months on. As everyone has got over the summer break / back to school and uni madness I thought it would be a great time to do some thinking about what you as a business owner should be considering when it comes to marketing now and in the future.

The changing printing market

No way of hiding the fact, the industry as a whole has gone under some major changes over the last few years. It’s a natural progression, as people’s lives have moved to tablets and smartphones, the need for printed material has shrunk. It doesn’t mean that it has stopped just that its’ nature has changed. Where once it was the medium of cheap throw away advertising, now it’s a format of prestige and impact. So now it’s something you should look at when you want to wow customers or show that you value them that much that you spend money having it printed on paper. 

Cost of home printing has got ‘cheaper than ever’

When people do need print out they often do it on a home printer or multifunction before sending it to companies like us. Now when it’s just the odd photo print or a couple of copies of documents, then the cost over convenance is worth it. If you start doing more than that though you quickly realise that the equipment is cheap but the ‘inks’ are not and you are paying a lot more per page than emailing it to Copy Express to have us print it. Another factor to remember is that we can do things with print your home equipment can’t, art to the edge, using heavy card or unusual material, folding and punching.  Plus, your home printer doesn’t smile like we do!

It’s simpler than ever to get great looking printing

All the office suites have basic desktop publishing abilities these days, and can output the results as a pdf that can be great for emailing to client or sending to us to print. There are also several online tools that are built from the ground up to make it easy to design printed material. We have such a system at Copy Express just ready and waiting for you to make your next business card or flyer.

Good marketing is more important than ever

Now it’s so easy to generate email marketing material, design and print flyers, and fill your social media accounts with posts. The risk is that you pump stuff out as you think of it, instead of making it part of a larger plan to promote and develop both your customer base and your company’s reputation. It takes some planning, but it will simplify the workload over all as you know what things you will put up, how they are to be set up, and what to do to respond to unexpected actions of your competition. If you don’t plan ahead then you run the risk of either boring or annoying your customers to the point where they hit the unsubscribe / unfollow button then get another post or email from you. I talk more about how to avoid this in many blog articles on the site. If you still need guidance you can book a meeting with us directly and we can come up with a plan to make it easier for you to put your name out there in fun and impactful ways.

Go for quality over quantity

As the cost to ‘make and deliver’ marketing has grown cheap with its move to electronic format, this means that it is far too easy to over advertise. We all know businesses who constantly fill our inboxes with advertising, and if you’re like me you quickly get into the habit of ignoring it and end up missing deals that are actually what you would want. 4 or 5 well designed and wide ranging promotions spread over the year is going to have a higher response rate than advertising some throw away special every week. Only the major companies like The Warehouse group can do that because they rely on the ‘scatter shot’ approach where 99.9% of customers not buying from each promo doesn’t matter when you are targeting hundreds of thousands of households. If you are small business there is no way you can afford to get so little return for each ‘dollar’ you spend on a promotion. 
Of course this is just a taster of what is happening in the changing marketing landscape. For more information why not look a the many other articles on this website. If you need help in focusing on what will be the right tools to help promote your business, then book a meeting with us at Copy Express and we can help you find the right tools for the job and build a plan to make it work as quickly and simply as you need it to be.