Create Sales Literature That Sells

 

It’s not surprising that print has held its place as the leading communications medium for centuries. Here are just a few reasons why:

 

• Print is “real.” Paper and ink are reassuring, especially in difficult economic times. It says your company is credible and trustworthy. You are planning to be around for the long-term and you cared enough about your message to spend time and money putting it in writing.

 

• Print is durable. It simply stays around longer. Your desk might be cluttered, but you can still dig out a printed piece, use it for comparisons and share it with others. Print collateral maintains a physical connection with your customers even after they’ve powered down their computers.

 

• Print is focused. Prospects can read your information when and where they choose…and without temptation to click on the next flashy message that pops up.

 

Sales literature stands in for you when you’re not around, carrying your brand identity and reputation to the marketplace. Eye-catching design grabs attention, but a provocative headline and compelling text convinces the reader to consider what you have to say. It’s a personal interaction as the prospect holds, feels, and re-reads your message.

 

If you cut corners on printing or circulate out-of-date information, your prospects might subconsciously conclude that you produce cheap, outdated products too.

 

Tie each printed piece to a goal in your strategic marketing plan. Is the objective to drive new sales, cross-sell to existing customers or communicate better with your stakeholders? The appropriate format will naturally follow—a postcard, a circular, a product data sheet, a package insert, a newsletter. The layout must work not only aesthetically, but also from the perspective of creating a positive perception that is consistent with your company’s image. Combinations of different elements—paper types, colors, repetition—can produce powerful subliminal effects so it is important that you work with a professional designer. Another consideration is portability. An oversized piece might gain attention, but what will make someone pick up your piece and take it with them and then pass it along to others?

 

Communicate at lightning speed about who you are, what you are offering, what is in it for the reader and what action the reader should take. It’s tempting to overload your documents with every capability and feature you have to offer and to address every question before the reader asks, but this approach will overwhelm and disengage someone who is just learning about you. As you move through the sales process you can introduce more complex printed collateral for your sophisticated, high-probability clients, including specifications, statistics and comparative performance data. At this stage, the content should be intriguing enough and the call to action should be persuasive enough to inspire the reader to initiate a purchase.

 

Successful print marketing campaigns begin with a plan, a budget and an understanding that sales collateral isn’t going to close the sale by itself. What it will do is provide outstanding sales support, reinforcing your message and staying behind to inform and persuade your prospect.

    Stretch Your Print Dollars

 

       What goes up must come down. Like everything else, the economy is cyclical, but no matter what the current economic conditions might be, it's important to keep marketing your business. In fact, a little glimpse at history shows that even during the Great Depression, some companies thrived. While other companies were cutting spending, a few businesses, such as Camel and Chevrolet took the opportunity to use aggressive marketing tactics to grab market share from their competitors. It's proof that the key to long-term success in any economy is to get in front of your target audience and stay there.

Here are a few ways to keep your marketing on track and stay within your budget.

1. Use less expensive papers or opt for the "house" paper. Paper prices fluctuate often, so if you haven't standardized on a specific paper, ask about less expensive options. If your piece doesn't demand a specialty paper, opt to use the "house" paper. We purchase this paper in high volume, so it's almost always the least expensive option.

2. Use fewer inks. If you have a three-color project, consider dropping down to two colors. With creative use of screen tints, you can often create a similar look for a lower cost. If you have been printing generic business documents like forms in two colors, consider dropping back to using just black ink.

3. Use more inks. This idea might seem counter-intuitive, but if you have a three-color project, often it is more cost-effective to bump it up to four colors. In many cases, four-color process printing is less expensive than three-color spot printing because the press is already set up. Plus, you can ask about including your job in a "gang run" where it is on the press along with other four-color jobs and then trimmed down to size.

4. Avoid bleeds. If color needs to go to the edge of the page, you might be able to get a similar effect less expensively simply by using colored paper. If you don't include bleeds in your artwork, your project might require less paper or might be able to be run on a smaller press.

5. Prepare your artwork and proofread carefully. You can avoid many service charges by making sure you’ve prepared your artwork correctly and caught every last typo.

6. Clean up your mailing list. It's boring work, but it can drop your costs dramatically. With a clean list, you can print exactly what you need and avoid extra postage costs as well.

7. Consider different formats. Just because you have always done a brochure for a particular promotion doesn't mean it's the only option. Experiment with a postcard instead of a brochure and see whether you get a better response rate. Testing is the key to effective marketing. A little creativity can go a long way toward saving money.

We are experts at helping our customers succeed with their marketing projects. So talk to us about how we can help you meet your goals.

 

 

Print's Role in the Digital Revolution

 

Technology is cool. It opens up a whole new world of marketing opportunities—email blasts, URLs, PDA pushdowns, RSS feeds, Tweets. But what happens to your message when the BlackBerry battery is drained, or your format isn’t compatible with your prospect’s device?

What makes electronic media so captivating is that it presents a real-time marketing environment? Print adds a dimension to this experience that is warm, inviting and readers can’t ignore because they are literally holding your message in their hands. No need to boot up or power down. Overlooking the role of print can prove fatal to a marketing campaign. If your objective is to inform, teach, persuade or entertain, print marketing is a must.

Print remains relevant in the integrated marketing communications mix for many reasons. Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, many people just don’t go online. Certain demographics simply prefer print collateral over digital options. Consumers use a variety of sources to gather information about a product or service, but research shows that they seek print when it’s time to buy. Having words and images in a touchable format provides reassurance that bit-and-byte media can’t match. Web technologies provide quick answers, but the responses are often contradictory. Print shows that you found your message to be important enough to commit it to paper and you stand behind what you’re saying. If you’ve abandoned print in favor of e-media, you’re missing out on big sales numbers.

Digital marketing techniques work best when you introduce them in coordination with print. You could post a banner ad and hope those who find it among the 100 million other Web sites click through to yours. But think how much more powerful it would be to use direct mail to drive targeted prospects to a personalized Web site, after which they receive a follow-up “thank you” card with a special offer. By combining print and digital, you produce an educational, engaging experience that speaks more directly and pertinently to your target audience.

Just as you keep up with the latest technology, commit the time to educate yourself about advances in the printing industry. You can create dazzling special effects that make readers want to touch and feel your message thanks to a new generation of papers, inks, varnishes and coatings. It’s a tangible dimension that electronic media can’t impart. And throw away what you think you know about direct mail. The new direct mail uses technology to deliver customized messages that can link to a corresponding Web component. It’s all much less complicated and less costly than you might think.

Companies that utilize the full spectrum of marketing channels realize exponential increases in brand identity, prospects, sales and ROI, but this requires an upfront investment in sound strategic planning. You might replace one static message with many targeted variations delivered through multiple channels, all of which have to be consistent. Those who successfully bridge the digital and print marketing environments deliver a result that is greater than the sum of the individual marketing elements.

Design-Specific iPhone Apps Let You Go Mobile

 

The Apple iPhone and other smartphones have spawned an entire cottage industry of applications that are helping these devices move from being simple communication tools to becoming computing platforms all their own. Can’t identify a song playing on the radio or in a store? An app called Shazam uses the iPhone’s microphone to capture the audio, analyze it and tell you the song title and artist.  It’s quite accurate, though it has problems with jazz.

 

In a similar vein, for designers, there is an app called WhatTheFont that uses the iPhone’s camera to snap a picture of some text you might encounter, and it tells you what font it is and what foundry it is from. It’s also remarkably accurate, although not always 100% precise. Probably the biggest limitation is the iPhone camera, which has no flash and even in a bright room tends to take very dark pictures. This can make it tough for WhatTheFont to detect subtle nuances in letters, or even distinguish some letters at all. However, even when the choice is wrong, it still identifies fonts that are close, if not exact, matches, which is helpful for creative purposes, and best of all, it’s free.

 

Another major category of designer-centric apps lets you build, edit and share color palettes gleaned from colors one encounters in the real world. A good app is called Simply Palettes, which allows you capture and create collections of swatches from a variety of sources, such as a photo in your iPhone’s Camera Roll, from a picture taken on-the-fly, a Web site, or by dragging sliders. Once you have created a set of basic colors, you can make custom blends of two or more of the colors in a palette, as well as color schemes using contiguous or complementary colors. You can e-mail palettes to other Palettes users, or you can export palettes so you can use them in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more. Generating palettes from pre-existing photos is pretty easy but depends on the quality of the photo. As with the WhatTheFont app, the quality of the iPhone camera is the weak link in the chain. Another limiting factor to Palettes is that it does not support Pantone colors, although other apps, such as Color Expert and Pantone’s own MyPantone app, do.

 

All these apps and more are available from the Apple iPhone App Store, via iTunes or from one’s iPhone directly. Most are free or, at most, in the $9.99 to $19.99 range.