Simple SEO for Your Print Shop Website

Too many small print shop owners miss the point about search engine optimization (SEO) for their websites. It may be because they have forgotten their real target audience or the purpose of SEO. Whatever the reason, it's relatively easy to fix. Here's how…

The first step is to understand your print shop's target audience. For smaller print shops, the target audience is generally constrained by geography: those people wanting print services within a radius of 10, 25 or some number of miles. If your shop is in Daytona, you probably aren't trying to attract customers from Detroit, Denver or Des Moines. So…develop a list of cities and towns where your audience lives and works.

The second step is to consider how your target audience expresses what they want. Many customers, these days, aren't very familiar with printing or the printing process. They won't understand or use terms like "offset", "NCOA", "#10 window" or "duplex". Instead, they look for letterhead, postcards, brochures, etc. and expect you to handle all the details to give them what they want. So…develop a list of the more general terms for your products and services customers want. 

Now, take your two lists, put combinations of your places and products into your favorite search engine and see how your website ranks. For example, if you search for "printing Daytona", how does your website rank? How do "printer port orange" or "letterhead new Smyrna" rank (Port Orange and New Smyrna border Daytona Beach)? Do this "product + location" search enough and you will see exactly how manage your SEO.

Make sure your business location appears on every page and can be indexed. Use simple keywords plus locations in your website text. If you remember you aren't doing SEO for 4over or Vistaprint, your job will be much easier and effective.

Awesome Conference – NPOA 2015

We're back from the 2015 National Print Owners Association Conference in Orlando, April 16 - 18, 2015. Following are our thoughts and comments on the adventure:

Great attendees – engaged, knowledgeable, successful and inspiring

Well organized – efficient, productive and interesting things to do all the time

Delighted – our expectations were totally exceeded

Growing – NPOA formula clearly resonates with small/quick print segment

Impressive – the industry experts at the conference

Overarching messages:

• Value, solutions & unique services equal profitability
• Differentiation of communication solutions is critical
• Data management, personalization & marketing analytics key tools

 We'll be back – San Antonio, TX in April, 2016 - can't wait!

Printers: Stop the Insanity!

STOP THE INSANITY! Motivational speaker, Susan Powter, with her trademark buzz-cut screamed that across the TV airwaves in the mid-90s to educate people on weight loss.

Too many print shop owners, today, display all the classic symptoms of insanity: doing the same thing over-and-over and expecting a different outcome. They repeatedly try selling exactly the same products and services all their competitors sell to all the same customers. Rather than the success they hope for, they most often find other printers get the jobs at a low, low prices

The laws of supply and demand tell us that when demand is stagnant but the supply increases that prices will fall. There has never been so much competition (supply) in the print industry as there is today and the demand for printed material is certainly not growing rapidly. This creates the perfect condition for prices to be pushed lower-and lower until something changes (fewer suppliers or more demand).

The way to escape printers' insanity is very clear: offer products and services different from those everyone else offers. This is much easier to do when you see your product as communications solutions rather pounds of paper. As a communications solutions provider, you look for ways to add more value, such as efficiency and effectiveness, to a print job. Look for ways to get more response or better response while minimizing non-productive communications. Such efforts often require little more than some thought and creativity. 

To stop the insanity…find the best ways to add some extra value for each of your customers.

Stop Sending Monthly Newsletters

If you print and mail a monthly newsletter…Stop it! That's our suggestion. Read on to see why we think monthly newsletters are a waste of time and money and aren't the best way to market your print business.

Before we do, however, you should determine if your newsletter delivers real value to your customers. Or, is it simply a monthly annoyance that immediately goes in the trash? Consider what kind of message that delivers.

If you're like many print shop owners, your customer base is increasingly broad and less knowledgeable about printing and direct mail…perhaps even marketing. Your customer are less likely  to be interested in discussing envelope sizes, bleeds or the nuances of mailing. Newsletters that focus on such topics probably offer little value to most of your customers. This type of narrowly focused newsletter may tell customers that you don't really understand what they want and need.

They want you to make them look good and make their jobs easier and they look to you more-and-more to do what is right for them. For this reason, your newsletter should address broad, simple business communication and marketing ideas and solutions.

Even if you have the right newsletter content, we suggest not sending it monthly.

Mailing a monthly newsletter only demonstrates your capability to print and mail. Why not save money, show more of your capabilities and make customers happier? Consider changing your marketing-communication program to a monthly email and a quarterly printed newsletter.

A monthly email should be short but packed with value for customers. For example, include 4 to 6 very short but valuable/interesting communication and/or marketing tips, tricks, reminders (e.g. ordering Christmas material) and a monthly special offer of some type (buy this and get that, call for a free something, etc.). Short and valuable are the key concepts for the email. The goal is to make your monthly email easy to create yet something customers look forward to receiving.

When your newsletter comes only quarterly, customers will tend to view it as something more special than the monthly version. Since you have raised interest, give your customers something special… something that demonstrates why you are the knowledgeable, creative and talented professionals they want helping them. Make your newsletter such an interesting and valuable piece that they want to save it, share it and act on it. 

Stop sending monthly newsletters, save money, save time and make your customers happier and more confident in working with you. Consider the simple monthly email and a quarterly newsletter. While you're at it, see if your current newsletter provides interesting and valuable content to your customers…or something that might reflect poorly on you.

Print Shops Take Advantage of the Holidays

The Holiday (formerly known as Christmas) Season results in the purchase of some 1.6 billion Holiday cards. A large percentage these are purchased by businesses. Digital print shop owners are increasingly recognizing that this behavior offers a great marketing opportunity. That opportunity is for digital printers to show customers special products, services and skills and save time and money at a time when they are likely to be most receptive.

What Businesses Want

For many businesses, the Holidays are a time for reinforcing customer relationships with printed Holiday messages of thanks and seasonal greetings. However, unlike other direct mail, Holiday messages need to feel special and personal to be effective. Impersonal, bulk-mailed Holiday cards can generate negative impressions and Holiday emails can be taken as an insult.

Customized, personalized Holiday card-envelope sets, on the other hand, can be quite expensive and very time consuming to send out. This dilemma enables digital print shop owners to shine.

Holiday Postcards

With Holiday postcards, print shop owners can offer business customers a very easy and effective solution:

• Unique postcard designs and custom messages
• Branding (e.g. logos, tag lines, etc.)
• Personalized messages (e.g. including recipient and/or recipient company names)
• Pre-addressed & no envelope required
• Additional personalization and customization options

Businesses get personalization and customization not available with card-envelope sets. Moreover, the cost of Holiday postcards is about half that of non-personalized card-envelope sets that have to be addressed, inserted and sealed.

The Marketing Opportunity

Just the act of showing or sending Holiday postcards to business customers sets the digital print shop far apart from virtually all competitors. The Holiday postcard tells customers the digital print shop offers advanced solutions and services including personalization (variable data printing), direct mail services, data and mailing list support (cle

an up, merge, de-dupe, mail processing, etc.), custom and graphic design, marketing support, etc. Who else offers such services?

It’s Easy

What makes this so easy, convenient and cost-effective is that you can outsource the personalization (VDP print file creation), data, mailing list and address processing work to us. Send us your artwork and mailing list and we send you files for you to print personalized and pre-addressed Holiday postcards for your business customers

Learn all about Holiday postcards, print shop marketing, Greener Printing and more…

How’s Your Print Shop’s Brand?

Is your print shop’s brand like carbon paper? In 2013, there was one company with eight employees making carbon paper in Canada, one company in the U.K. and two in the U.S. Computers, modern printers, carbonless paper and other technologies have made carbon paper obsolete. Technologies change. Customers and markets also change. Has your brand changed to attract customers to your business or does it turn them away? Our review of hundreds of print shops indicates it’s more likely your brand’s value is closer to carbon paper than cross-media marketing.

If you’ve given little thought to your print shop’s brand lately (or ever), it’s time to start. If you plan to be in the printing and related businesses for the long term, your brand is critical to your success.

What Is a Brand?
 
The meaning of “brand” can be confusing. A dictionary definition is – “Brand: a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name.” In old-school marketing lingo, this was commonly called a “brand name”. Today, it’s is simply called a “brand” for short as in “iPhone is Apple’s brand [name] for its line of smartphones”. Used in this fashion, “brand” and “brand name” have the same meaning that might also be associated with a trademark. However, “brand” has developed another meaning in modern marketing usage.

Beginning in the early 20th century and accelerating after WWII, marketers became increasingly skilled at associating perceptions about a product’s attributes and qualities in the minds of consumers. Today’s marketers aim to manage perceptions about brand names such as Levi’s, for example. The brand name “Levi’s” usually elicits thoughts of blue jeans and casual wear. However, individuals may also have other positive or negative perceptions of the Levi’s “brand” such as comfortable, durable, traditional, old-fashioned, expensive, etc. In modern marketing terminology, these perceptions are called the “brand”. David Ogilvy, the so-called “Father of Advertising”, explained it this way: “A brand is the intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised.”

This means you will need to look to the context to determine if “brand” is simply shorthand for “brand name” or it means the sum of intangible attributes.

Branding and Rebranding Your Print Shop

Your print shop has a brand. You may not know what it is, but it has a brand. Your print shop’s brand equals the images, impressions and feelings within your customers’ minds. These perceptions will vary by individual and be positive, neutral, negative or none. Your brand is comes from all the interactions and experiences an individual has with you, your staff and your business. Two customers may have the same types feelings but for completely different reasons.

If the majority of customers are positive about your brand, you’re doing things right… congratulations! If your brand is negative, it’s time for a rebranding your print shop. Rebranding should also be considered when business volume is stagnant or declining. In both latter cases, you need to determine what will get your brand back on a positive note and how to accomplish that. A rebranding can cover everything you do or only a part of it. For example, print shops adding marketing services may do a partial rebranding to promote the new services. Print shops exiting printing to be in the marketing business would do a complete rebranding.

Don’t Ignore Your Brand
 
If you ignore your brand and your customers’ perceptions, your future will most likely parallel that of carbon paper. Your brand is an asset that can figure into the value of your printing business, positively or negatively. Successful print shop owners keep abreast of their customers’ perceptions about their brands in various ways such as in-person discussions, through surveys, via rating services, online reviews, etc.

Success starts with customers’ positive perception of your printing business. So…how’s your print shop’s brand?

 See more marketing topics for your print shop...