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.

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…

Do Print Shops Need Big Data?

Many print shop owners cringe at the mere mention of anything that includes the word or the concept of data. If you react the same way, you’d better get over it. Marketing and communications are now almost completely reliant upon and driven by data. As simple evidence, we now have what’s called “Big Data” and even “Little Data”. Business cards, letterhead and the like will always be part of the printing business, but opportunity and growth are in those products incorporating the use and management of data. Not convinced? Don’t care? Perhaps the following will change your view about data…

Collecting and applying data to find and cultivate buyers, members, donations, etc. for products and services has become its own industry. A groundbreaking 2013 study developed under the auspices of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) concludes that the data-driven marketing economy (DDME) in U.S. was worth $165 billion and involved some 675,000 jobs in 2012. It also suggests that small business and innovation are the biggest beneficiaries of the DDME:

“Thanks to data, startups and small businesses today face lower barriers to market entry than they have since the 1870s. The exchange of data enables small businesses to compete effectively with big players, allowing new market entrants to challenge mature players." 

You can download the study, “The Value of Data: Consequences for Insight, Innovation, and Efficiency in the U.S. Economy”. The summary (4 pp) is here… | The full study (105 pp) is here… 

You’ll see that data in the DDME isn’t financial, accounting or transactional data. It is data needed to communicate…seller to buyer…maker to user…marketer to consumer. It’s data businesses of all sizes use to reach and motivate their target audiences. Many of these businesses can be customers, if you are willing and able to help them use their data. The DDME study explains: 

“Today, data-driven marketers still spend more on the postal channel [direct mail] than all digital channels [online] combined. In the current DDME, data is equally vital “offline” where the cost of interaction with a customer is much higher. By acquiring data, and using it for segmentation, targeting and measurement, marketers aim to reduce expenditures on non-valuable interactions as close as possible to zero, while ensuring that the expenditures they do make maximize the number of valuable interactions. The efficiency derived from smart use of data makes the process of marketing significantly more efficient.” 

Translated into simple English:Small businesses want to use data intelligently to target high potential customers and avoid low potential customers to maximize the return on money spent on direct mail. Unfortunately, many print shop owners ignore this because they don’t know how to deal with customer data. 

So we don’t leave you hanging…Big Data is a general term referring to data sets too humongous to be stored and managed with conventional techniques. Big Data is, for example, Amazon’s 237 million active customer accounts or the more than1 million sales transactions Walmart processes every hour. Little Data is all about you…how many calories you had for breakfast…how many minutes you watched what TV program…how often you do this…when you do that. You may not want to know that much about yourself, but there plenty of people who will do just about anything to get (and use/sell) all that information about you.

You don’t need to worry about Big Data or Little Data, but you do need to understand why and how your customers use data (or want to). There's no need to staff up or gear up to do data work…don’t waste your time and money…simply outsource all your customer data work to specialists. Differentiate your business the fast, easy and effective way by learning how to get things done rather than learning how to do them yourself.

Confusing Customers

Do you confuse your customers? You might be. Better check.

Following are selected items from a very long list of products and services from a typical print shop website:

Color Copies
Digital Black and White Copies
Digital Color Printing
Digital Copies and Photo Black and White
Digital Output
Offset printing
Full-Color Printing
Color Copying
Color Duplicating
Color Output

Imagine you’re a customer looking to get some stuff printed and you see this. You’re not a printing expert, so what do you make of these things? What might be going through the customer’s mind?

Questions? Confusion? Felling insulted? What do you think?

“What’s the difference between digital color printing, digital output, full color printing and color output? Am I [the uneducated print customer] supposed to understand these things? Do I have to go research the differences? What do I ask for? What if I can’t answer the questions correctly?”

“What’s offset printing? Do I need that? Does it cost more? Is it better than digital? What’s the difference between printing, copying and duplicating? Is there something less than full color?”

“I just want some stuff in color. Maybe I should go to someone who regularly deals with dummies like me rather than these professional printing people. I don’t want to look like an idiot.”

“What’s the easiest way to get my printing job done without having to be an expert?”

What if you greatly simplified this list to something such as:

All types of color printing and copying…or… A full range of color printing and copying

Does that address the customer's needs? Will that make it easier for him/her to call you for help placing an order?

The point here is to question whether you might be making things more confusing for customers than need be.

Don't forget to check out the PrintShopMarketing.com website for more tips and ideas. Or, see our EZ-VDP.com for ideas about new print-related products and services.