Streamline Your Print Marketing with these 6 Techniques
Streamline Your Print Marketing with these 6 Techniques
Print marketing is one of the most effective ways to get your business's name across to the targeted customers and ensure ample brand visibility.
It allows you to form effective marketing material, including promotional literature and product launch brochures, while also offering a useful platform to create employee guidebooks, HR handbooks, etc.
The importance of print is further emphasised by the fact that print media is making a comeback and is often observed to outperform digital media strategies.
Print media is more effective due to its ability to retain customer attention and engage them for a longer time period, making your brand more memorable and increasing the chances of gaining nurtured leads.
However, it's not all rainbows and butterflies when we look at print media.
While its benefits truly are worth the investment, it has its share of drawbacks too. Paper and ink increase your carbon footprint at quite a significant rate. It can also cost your company more in the long run due to poor printing practices and workflow inefficiencies.
Fortunately for you, TradePrintingUK have the perfect techniques to ensure your business enjoys the advantages of print marketing without having to deal with the drawbacks. Let's dive right in!
1. Integrate a Digital Management System
One of the easiest, lowest-investment ways of improving your print marketing workflow is through a digital management system.
These systems are built to streamline your printing processes and ensure a smooth marketing campaign without any roadblocks.
The digital asset management system will keep all of your documents, graphics, and other resources in one place. It organises them in accordance with your marketing goals and ensures that they can be filtered by file type and other metrics for quick data retrieval.
The ease of having all your marketing assets in one concise location ensures a streamlined process that makes finding and using individual documents and images more efficient. This also makes it easier to collaborate with external printing companies and solution providers.
2. Set Up Regular Schedules
When you initiate a marketing campaign that includes print, your business will need a large printing order to be carried out swiftly. Trying to manage this without a proper schedule can be disastrous and lead to numerous interruptions throughout the campaign. If deadlines are missed it could set you back for days, and a carefully curated marketing plan might even lose its effectiveness.
To prevent any such hiccups, you should ensure that a proper printing schedule is followed from the start ensuring everything runs smoothly and on time.
It will also offer your employees a strict deadline to maintain and allow you a way to keep a constant check on the progress of the marketing plan.
You should keep in mind to incorporate all your outsourced materials into this timeline and within the procedural flow of work.
3. Keep an Eye on the Inefficiencies
Throughout your campaign, you are bound to run into small inefficiencies and setbacks that hinder progress. While most of these can be handled quickly and don't have too big of an effect on your marketing strategy, they might just suck up valuable resources and wreck your schedules.
You need to identify and mitigate inefficiencies and due diligence in the initial phases to ensure they don't cause problems later on. Analyse which areas could or are causing you frequent problems and work through them effectively to streamline your print marketing.
Look over the printing costs and try to print similar projects at scheduled timings instead of randomly to create a smooth flow of work at every step of the way to limit wasted resources, time, and money.
4. Centralise Around Your Brand Values
Throughout the life of any marketing campaign, be it print or digital, you should place constant focus on your brand values.
All too often, campaigns lose the original message as they proceed through a long-term comms plan, which will backfire on its entire purpose and can often render them useless as your company doesn't get the desired sales results. Marketing drives sales, not the other way around.
Therefore, you should continue to focus back on your brand values at every step of your print marketing techniques.
Ensure that the message, goals, tone, language and themes of your marketing strategy align with your company's branding efforts.
You should also keep a copy of your brand guidelines at hand throughout the print project. They will ensure that you don't deviate too far from the core branding message and house-style. It is also a great way to produce creative, yet hard-hitting, streamlined print strategies that deliver a relevant message for your campaign.
5. Make Efforts to Reduce Waste
As we mentioned above, the nature of print marketing is such that creating waste and reducing the eco-friendliness of your brand are inevitable factors. However, that doesn't mean you can't make efforts to reduce this and ensure better use of your resources.
Having a centralised location for all your correspondence and data storage on digital management is a great way to reduce waste. It reduces the amount of redundant work you will require from your employees and can save you a significant amount of money on used resources and space.
Another great way to reduce waste is by ensuring that only the final versions of your marketing efforts are printed, and the rest is done in the digital space only. This saves printing costs and reduces the waste produced as a result of your print marketing campaign.
6. Outsource Your Printers
Many businesses believe the only way to run a successful print marketing campaign is to invest in an internal setup and do it themselves with their own personnel and machinery. Will you compete with the professionals within the print industry who will have invested much more and have vastly more experience overall?
Outsourcing your print marketing projects can make all the difference between a low ROI and an immensely profitable one.
Hiring an external trade printing team to handle your needs allows a stress-free, low-waste process to run your campaigns with better time and money efficiency. You will only need to plan the campaign and leave the rest to the external printing team.
We recommend partnering up with printing companies that specialise in corporate marketing solutions to ensure you get exactly what you're looking for. These companies often offer in-built digital management systems to further streamline the process and ensure a more effective partnership. They also offer graphic design services and other printing support for the success of your print marketing efforts.
Final Words
Contrary to popular belief, print marketing still has lots of benefits to offer your business. With most forms of marketing moving to the digital space, people tend to think print marketing has lost its touch and no longer serves much of a purpose.
Well, print is definitely not dead! In fact, it is thriving and is even reported to outperform numerous digital marketing strategies to this day. That's because print continues to be a sensory experience that has a longer-lasting effect than digital marketing can. It cements your brand to the right audience and ensures that they actually read and accept your message. These factors naturally improve performance and allow for a better customer experience.
By incorporating out tips to streamline your print marketing efforts, you can easily capitalise on all these benefits of print marketing to truly stand out in the market. All the best!