Simplify your marketing with standardization

When you think about it, the fact that companies like The Warehouse and Pack-n-Save can have multi page mailers in your mailbox week after week, all to the same high quality standard is pretty impressive. Granted they have dedicated marketing teams in their head offices whose job it is 40 hours week, but to have that volume of printed material week after week and only have the occasional rare error is something to aspire too for your marketing. Now as a small business, there is no way you could to that sort of volume of marketing design work, and why would you as it’s not your job. However if you do marketing on a regular basis, then you are no doubt spending hours of your time doing that when you could be using for growing your business. You may not be  pay for people to do all that for you, even though we at Copy Express offer very competitive rates. So what’s the solution? Standardisation, and I’m about to explain how it can make your marketing tasks easier.

I have already briefly touch on this matter with my article ‘ 5 marketing to-do’s for the summer holiday’ where I cover the ideas of ‘Set up a Marketing/Design ‘Bible’’ and ‘Create a set of Generic Flyers’. I am now going to look at this in more detail so you can understand why you should be doing this.

Take a look at the aforementioned Warehouse and Pack-n-Save mailers. Notice how they always use the same standard layout. Different pages in one edition of the might use different layouts, but of you look at them at over a couple of months you will see the same standard layout again and again. This is the key for them to be able to produce so many pages of ‘unique’ content week after week. The have standardized frames works where they simply fill in the blanks for the images, product details, stock codes, and prices. Speaking as someone who’s done a bit of this himself, this will save you so much time and avoids a lot of common mistakes.

The question is now how can you do it. I’ve actually covered it quite a bit in my previous blog posts, such as ‘ Designing to a Theme ’, ‘ What’s the most important part of the flyer ’ and ’ Six simple steps for small space design ’. However there is always more that I can talk about here to help you in the process.

Create a master design

This is the first thing you should do before anything else. Design a generic template. It doesn’t have to contain a promotion, it can be more of a sketch of one. Just layout your logos, artwork, standard text like contact details, and then put in blocks where you want to have information and artwork but leave them blank or put in filler images. When it comes time to make the flyer, you make a copy of the master, open that copy up and drop in the art and text you need.

Design to a grid

All desktop publisher programs support grid layouts, and come with a few generic sets to get you going. If you are using Word or Powerpoint, then use the table function to lay out a grid of cells over the page dividing it into smaller sections. Then place your text and art into each cell, using the cell merge where you need larger areas. There is no hard or fast rule on how you should set up your grid, but I’ve always found that you want a cell to be no smaller than 40mm wide x 30mm tall is a good rule of thumb.

Less is more

One of the big mistakes that everyone makes is to cram as much information on the flyer as they can. You really shouldn’t be doing that; it makes harder for your customer to read, and harder for you to set it up and check for mistakes. If you want a guide of how much you should be putting in read about my ‘ the 5/15/60 second rule for marketing ’ to learn more.

Have more than one template

Again harking back to examples of The Warehouse and Pack-n-Save, you’ll see that they have variations on their design. This allows them to pick the right format to match the promotion’s contents. Don’t be afraid to have more than one design for your marketing material, both in layout and in size. Sometimes a A6 postcard is ideal, other times you will need a A4 folded to a DL. As long as you keep the same consistent look through all of them, then it will still be easy to use and you won’t have to fight it trying to fit a A5’s worth of information into a A6.

Make use of Copy Express’s Web-2-Print and design services

One of the reasons why we have gone through the expence and labour of setting up our Web-2-Print is to give you our clients an easy to use system to do this sort of work. Not only can you setup your own marketing templates to use time and again, but we can tweak them for you but we can do full design work for you and leave you with a template where you just ‘fill in the blanks’. If you want to expore our web-2-print system, just visit www.copyexpress.co.nz and click the ‘order now’ button.
This covers the basics of standardization of your marketing but to learn more please do contact us about what Copy Express can do for you.