Gimbel & Associates Blog

Printers are famous for executing marketing programs for their clients while neglecting efforts to promote their own businesses. Part of the problem is that marketing can seem time-consuming, complex, and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Marketing is based on a few fundamentals: know your clients, decide what you want to tell them, and choose the tactics that work best.

Are you focused solely on getting the “daily laundry” out the door each day?

Direct mail is staging a comeback! Instead of concentrating solely on saturated channels such as email and social media, marketers are once again embracing mail’s superior open and conversion rates. To produce the best results requires both creative designs and compliance with postal mail best practices. Designers who have spent little time with direct mail may need to get up to speed on the details that make a direct mail campaign successful.

The volume and complexity of the US Postal Service’s Domestic Mail Manual can be overwhelming, but creative people need to focus on only a few important areas to ensure their designs flow smoothly through the mail. Design missteps that affect mailability can be expensive. Errors discovered at production time increase costs and put deadlines in jeopardy. A bit of knowledge is all it takes to prevent last-minute disasters and get maximum value from direct mail campaigns.

Printers understand about the impact printed items can have on people. Interacting with print involves multiple human senses including smell, touch, and hearing-besides the visual aspect. Designers that concentrate mainly on digital mediums may not realize how to get the best results from their printed projects. They don’t know what they don’t know

Printing can involve complicated and exacting specifications that creative people must take into consideration during the design process. Informed designers working closely with printers will produce the most desirable outcome. Dialogs that begin with the questions below create favorable collaborations.

Nearly all printing companies have by now pondered the idea of adding digital inkjet devices to their production floors. Top performing companies have already made the move, and it’s paying off for them. Over 50% of the top 50 U.S. print providers on the Printing Impressions 400 list are running production inkjet presses. 75% of them are experiencing revenue growth. It’s no wonder that inkjet is so popular, but printers have lots of choices when they decide to invest in an inkjet press. How do you know which one is right?

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).

Your Mindset and Approach

You need a strategic mindset and approach to establish

• Making customers, rather than finding This means earning more time with the customer, with an open invitation to continue a dialogue, and with a sincere commitment on the customer’s part to take action.

Though people in the printing industry are in the communication business, they aren’t always personally skilled in the art of information exchange. A brush-up on communication skills can      make a big difference in how customers and others perceive company executives and other personnel, and how effective they are in their print business jobs.

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.