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Finishing solutions in your shop can be a necessary piece of infrastructure or a differentiator that brings you new business. How you treat finishing in your production often depends on the type of business you operate. For transaction print and mail operations, finishing may revolve around slit/merge, perf/punch, fold and insert operations, while for direct mail print shops there may be a wider range of options for folding, scoring, creasing, and tabbing. Book printers often focus on book block assembly, binding, and cover-based workflows. Then, commercial printers produce everything from posters to point of sale collateral requiring folding, scoring and cutting. No matter where you fall in the print provider world, finishing can add value to the products you have to offer. For every printer there is value in walking the production shop floor to see how the current finishing options are being used. Whether near line or inline, finishing is often sited as a bottleneck. How efficient …

Whether you have just finished training and are getting started in your sales career or you’ve been selling for decades, finding new business can be daunting. So, we’re gonna try to make this as easy on you as possible. Before you do anything else, you must know who you are going to call on. We’ll lay this out for you in, say, 12 easy steps.   Figure out what you do and who you do it for – Think of this as your mission statement. Here’s a great example from a fellow thINK member, HighNote “We’ll help deliver your brand in ways that inspire and excite your audience.” NICE! Give some thought to what your punchy, concise mission might sound like.  Work it over ‘til you are thrilled with it.   Survey your colleagues —  Ask a trusted associate, maybe someone on the shop floor or in accounting “If you were me, who would YOU call on?”   Look for success from within your company – We would do this one of two ways, or both.  Get a list of the top ten accounts in your company, and then make a …

In our previous post we established why content marketing is an effective tool for building your brand’s reputation and broadcasting it more widely to give your printing business a big boost. Content marketing is all about communicating with customers in a variety of ways that establishes you as a thought leader through a variety of channels, including blog posts, email, direct mail, social media, and more. However, none of these tactics will work to your advantage if you’re not organized and consistent. Putting together a content marketing calendar will help establish a regular cadence for your content and ensure you reap the benefits of having a cohesive, consistent message across platforms. Just like an ad campaign of one or two spots followed by long stretches of silence, content that’s delivered sporadically will not be memorable, nor build your reputation as a credible and helpful resource. In this post we’ll consider how the various content marketing components can work …

Printing is a competitive business. Although buyers are always seeking a good price, they are also looking for ways to add value to the messages they communicate. Transactional print buyers are working to differentiate themselves with more colors, better papers, and even unique envelopes and self-mailers. Purchasers of direct mail marketing collateral are interested in these same differentiators, but they are also exploring other options—the addition of interesting folds and cuts, embossing, lamination, and spot varnishes. Creators of non-mailed marketing collateral (e.g., books, magazines, catalogs, and point-of-sale materials) are also interested in developing eye-catching products. If you’re interested in differentiating yourself with unique finishing capabilities, there are a number of options to uncover opportunities you might be missing. Here are some steps for getting started. Assess Your Equipment and its Capabilities Start by making a list of all of the equipment you have. …

You can’t sell your print services if you’re not clear on the folks you want to sell to. If getting to know your target market sounds pretty obvious, it’s amazing how few companies take the time to really do it. Yes, they may have determined their services and advantages in the marketplace, (as described in our previous blog) , but they often don’t have a clear idea of how their unique value proposition can solve problems for each of their ideal customers. Here’s a hint: It’s not about you. The Target Marketing article, “ PVC: The 3 Secrets of Storytelling for Brand Marketing Success ,” lays this out clearly: “One of the most common mistakes of content marketing is to focus on yourself and your company. That is just not that compelling to most consumers.” In this blog, we’ll look at how you can shift your attention to the “types” of people you’re marketing to—called “personas” in marketing-speak—and develop a way to tell stories specific to each of them. Honing in on the right …