Gimbel & Associates Blog

Printing projects start with project design but marketers and designers aren’t always up to speed on printing industry developments. Lack of information can cause designers to miss out on exploiting new technologies or create unnecessary expense. Here are some trends and printing operation developments that can affect how creative people design print projects.

Color Choices and Specialty Inks

Printing presses can create only a portion of all possible colors by mixing their four basic inks; cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). When colors must be exact, such as in a corporate logo, printers purchase specialty inks or “spot colors” that ink companies pre-mix to exact specifications. Ink companies create the colors according to the Pantone Color Matching System (PMS).

The printing business is awash in advanced technology and automation. One can walk around the trade shows to observe software and equipment everywhere that handles many of the tasks formerly dependent on experienced printing professionals. Automation enables printing companies to produce more work in less time and at lower costs. But that doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled humans to envision solutions, monitor progress, and include new technology in efficient workflows. And legacy equipment still in use at most print facilities will require educated operators.

For quite some time this industry will need talented individuals dedicated to keeping print a viable and valuable means of communicating information-and that’s a problem.

The discussion on business growth for today's commercial printers is highly focused on technology considerations around such topics as inkjet, digital, workflow, and other process and production related concerns.  In our strategic work with commercial printers of all sizes we constantly face a wall that challenges their senior management team. How to focus "On the Business" versus focusing "In the Business?"   Day to day operations absorb the greatest amount of time for senior management.  Where we are going and how important is it if not more so than what happened on the shop floor that day or what order did not get filled?

If you ask print salespeople about the most important things they should bring to a meeting with prospective clients, they might mention items such as print samples, company brochures, or sales pitch slide decks.

Gimbel & Associates interviewed print buyers about their experiences with printing company sales representatives and discovered that many print service providers were using sales approaches anchored in objects like these. Unfortunately, the things that matter the most to the print buyers were often missing from conversations with print service providers courting them for their business.

In our eBook “From the Other Side of the Desk” we provide printing company executives and their sales teams a rare look at the how customers perceive interactions with the sales people who came calling.

Print service providers don’t always mail what they produce for their clients, but when they do, they must be clear about the rules and regulations administered by the US Postal Service. Generating mailings (or even designing mailings) without considering the mailing requirements can blow the client’s budget, cause delivery delays, or depress campaign results. In severe cases the postal service might even reject the mail. Help clients get the most from their investments in printed and mailed communications and generate worry-free mail by being informed about mailing requirements.

Customer journeys from awareness to purchase take place in a variety of communication channels. Multiple touchpoints provide opportunities to educate customers, transact business, or entice them to take the next step in the buying process. Some of those touchpoints involve print and others occur in digital environments. Familiarize yourself with your client’s customer journey maps to reveal new revenue opportunities and strengthen your client relationships.

Print service providers are not exposed to all the interactions clients have with their customers and prospects. You may be involved with only one small part of the relationship, such as direct marketing postcards or product brochures. To help your clients achieve their business objectives, you need to know more. Ask your clients to walk you through their buyer journeys to find out how the services you provide correspond with the client’s overall communication strategies.

There’s little doubt that printing companies are seeking opportunities to take the infrastructure, knowledge, and customer relationships they’ve cultivated over the years and apply them to new market areas. Surveys by organizations such as the Specialty Graphics and Image Association (SGIA) and Printing Industries of America (PIA) indicate such moves are key components of many print company strategic plans. A whole new industry conference, PRINTING United, has emerged to address this convergence of printing categories.

 Commercial printers are looking at packaging, sign printers are interested in textiles, and transactional printers are investigating wideformat (see the Gimbel & Associates blog Wide Format for Transactional Printers? Not as Crazy as it Sounds!).

Printers who create transactional documents rely on established workflows designed to generate millions of variable documents containing sensitive information like billing and payment amounts, purchases, insurance claim information, utility usage, or medical procedures. If that sounds like your business I can’t fault you for thinking your operation isn’t set up for low-volume wide format print applications like banners and signs.

These two print applications seem to have nothing in common. But is that really true?

Though the devices are different, printers produce wide format jobs on digital devices, just like transactional documents. Color and resolution is important in both cases, and both require strenuous quality control processes. Mistakes in each genre are expensive. In the high speed world of transactional documents, errors are

Successful customer events and open houses don’t happen by accident. To realize tangible results you will need alignment throughout your organization on event goals, event strategies, and project planning responsibilities.  Gimbel & Associates' new eBook, "Making Your Event a Success," is an end-to-end guide to plan, market, and execute events. You’ll be able to leverage global best practices to market your event at the local level. This guide provides detailed tactics, timetables, and tips organized in individual sections to help make each event a success.  Download your free copy now.

Mobile technology is revolutionizing entire industries. Sometimes it even creates something new, like ride-sharing services. Uber wouldn’t be possible without mobile phones. The printing business can take advantage of what mobile has to offer as well. Mobile  technology isn’t the only factor causing changes in the printing business, but it creates possibilities for printers to create new billable services and deepen relationships with clients.

Smart phones and tablets enable exciting developments happening in the printing business. Mobile barcodes (QR codes), near-field-communi-cations (NFC), and augmented reality (AR) all take individuals into the digital realm from a point that  starts with a printed document.

These technologies offer far-ranging possibilities. Printers have barely begun exploiting the capabilities and more importantly, to sell the concepts of mobile-enabled print to their customers.

When it comes to variable data, most printers just accept what they get from their customers. But should they attempt to improve on the data to increase campaign effectiveness? We think that is a good way to add value to the customer relationship. Simple data quality processes added to the workflow can make your client’s outbound communications more effective and add billable line items to your invoices.