Planning to make your life easier

Christmas is almost upon us. Soon it will be the time of year where we relax and take some time off. In fact you could say that the country pretty much shuts down for almost a month over the Christmas & New Year period. That includes printers like us and all the companies that supply us. You might be asking why this should matter to you, you’ll be off during that time too. Then again you might be off and suddenly realising that if you need printing done you won’t be able to do it because everyone will be closed. This is why you should be planning just for this situation.
If you have a look at the blog we have talked several times about planning your marketing in advance. In a nutshell, you should be planning your marketing at least several months ahead if not a full year. You are no doubt asking ‘why,’ when in this high tech age you should be able to respond as the market dictates. I’ll tell you why.

Cost

Naturally you want to get the most from every dollar you spend getting marketing printed. Every printing company, including Copy Express, offers a price structure built around a base production time. If you need it done sooner, then you pay a premium as they have shift other clients back in the queue to get your job done. Some places may go as high as double or triple the price depending what being done and how fast it’s needed (we’re much more reasonable.) Also worth noting is for many large printing jobs a printer will offer a ‘stand by’ option that add many more days to the time it takes to print something but gives you a reasonable saving, with the chance that it could be done sooner.

Availability

There are times when a printer is fully booked and just can’t take on any more work, so if you pick the wrong time you are just out of luck. This gets particularly common for the period of October to Christmas as this is the busy time for most printers with calendars and greeting cards, and lots-and-lots of flyers being printed at this time. We pride ourselves here at Copy Express at trying to fit everyone in and get their jobs printed when they need it, but even we have a limits and I’ve had to say no occasionally. If you plan your marketing in advance then your printer can commit to giving your job priority and have it ready for you when you need it.

Time

We all only have so many hours in a day, and when you are a small business you find that things like marketing get pushed aside for the day to day matters right in front of you. If you plan everything well in advance you give yourself the space to find 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there to work on your marketing, before you know it you will have it finished in plenty of time before you need to send it to us to print.

Flexibility

Following on from the matter of ‘Time’ by planning when how and what you going to do, it gives you the flexibility to adjust your marketing as situations change. A competitor just rolled out a big special? Then you might roll forward a planned special of your own to show you offer just as good a deal. Alternatively you might rework a promotion to run at the original planned date but do something that gives you a point of difference from your competitor and what they promoted. Planning your marketing now means that you only have to take a little time out at a future point to keep it fresh and responsive to the marketplace.

There’s four good reasons why you should be planning your marketing well in advance. We practice what we preach at Copy Express as we have already built our plan for 2015 and included a great deal of flexibility for the changing marketplace. We have some really unique things planned for the new year, so stay subscribed to our newsletter, or join if you aren’t and find out yourself what we can do for you.