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In this series on effective marketing for printing companies, we’ve covered many topics, including developing a company vision, finding likely customers, using effective content marketing, and leveraging marketing technology.  Now, let’s turn to the element that pulls all these and more into a successful whole: the people who make up your marketing operations (MO) team. Who are the folks who can manage or implement the key marketing elements to sustain and grow your business? While major corporations have immense marketing operations org charts, much of it could be boiled down to three essentials: 1) those people who create and test ideas and tactics; 2) those who can analyze key customer data to better inform marketing and customer acquisition efforts; and 3) those who handle the essential digital technology you need for effective demand generation.  Here’s how your MO org chart might be organized.   Compelling Ideas and Effective Tactics Marketing operations might be said to combine …

Bill has three daughters, Kate, Emma, and Madeline.  When Kate graduated from high school, she stepped into college in Boston. That expensive mistake was also Bill’s first experience with the college admissions process. Kate’s criteria for a school was fairly simple: Is the school far away from her parents? Her college of choice welcomed Kate with open arms, the check cleared, and her college career was off and running. Two years later, Emma started looking at schools. One of them was UVM, the University of Vermont. To Bill, it was a perfect match. Emma was interested in Psychology, playing softball, skiing, and theater. UVM has the top Psych department amongst all other public schools in New England, had just built an indoor softball facility, receives 200+ inches of snow a year, and boasts an amazing drama program.  In the end, Emma chose the University of Massachusetts, saving her father $20,000 a year. But if UVM was such a perfect fit, why didn’t she go there? Looking back, her …

The term, “Vertical Market” is used to define categories of prospects, such as banks, hospitals, colleges, restaurants, construction, and so on. The thinking is, if you can learn to sell to one, you can merrily crusade to another and find a similar situation, offer a similar solution, and make a second sale. Then another. And another. That’s how it works on paper, anyway. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to sell to verticals. Here it is in short: “It’s not about what they buy. It’s about why they buy it.” There. Does that make sense? No? Okay, then consider these two scenarios: Approach #1: You know that banks do posters. You look up the name of the buyer at a local bank using LinkedIn, connect, gain an appointment, have that appointment, offer to quote, quote, and then get the “Your price is too high” result you’ve been getting a lot of lately. Or... Approach #2: You drive by your bank. In the window is a big sign that reads, “Refinance your car loan with us at 3.99%” and …

In this series about the marketing basics for printing companies, we’ve covered a lot of ground, including developing your value proposition and vision, finding and cultivating new customers, and in particular developing a content marketing plan to draw the interest of prospects. What we haven’t covered up to this point is using one of the best marketing methods at your disposal: your own expertise in print and direct mail, combined with the intelligence you can gain from digital sources. With today’s enormous advances in digital technology, artificial intelligence, and Big Data, print is better placed than ever to be a critical part of the entire media mix, especially with digital-to-print marketing campaigns driven by interest and intent data. An excellent example of this in action is the technology created by PebblePost , a direct mail technology company that takes the information that drives digital advertising—things like analyzing a person’s web-browsing activities, content …

Email is one of the oldest of internet technologies and still one of the most effective as a marketing tool. The reasons are many, but perhaps the most important is that virtually everyone a marketer would like to reach already is an email user: According to a report by technology marketing research firm Radicati Group, by the end of 2019 there will be 2.9 billion email users across the globe—more than one-third of the world’s entire population. Content marketing is all about communicating with customers in ways that establish you as a thought leader. You can do this via blog posts, social media, or newsletters, but it’s the power of email that is so effective in alerting your audiences to your content’s existence in the first place. Let’s think first about email list-building. You should already know the email addresses of your current customers, of course. Now, leverage the power of your website to add more addresses. You can ask readers to register with their email addresses to …