Marketing plays an essential role in today’s businesses.
From directly engaging with customers via social media and blogs to building strong brand awareness through print advertising and PR activities, both digital marketing and traditional marketing, especially when combined, are considered useful.
Moreover, the use of the term “content marketing” is no longer restricted to the online medium. It has taken over every aspect of the marketing function in business.
Content is now a tool that is extremely useful in earning customer trust, generating site traffic, nurturing qualified leads and more. No wonder, the content marketing industry will be worth $400bn by 2021!
How fascinating is that?
Marketing is evolving and how which shows there’s a lot for businesses to learn and implement in the New Year. If you run a printing company, you are no exception either.
With the New Year fast approaching, now is a good time for printing companies to evaluate how their marketing initiatives performed in 2018 and more importantly, what they should focus on in 2019.
Have a look:
The strategy is now an integral part of marketing.
Gone are those days when a business would be marketed on a whim. Today, having a strategy is essential to assess the effectiveness of initiatives and audience engagement as marketing has become an expensive function.
A CMI study reveals that 65% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy. Your printing company should develop one so that you know what your quarterly or bi-annual priorities are, what tools you need to do your job, and how much revenue your business should ideally generate.
A strategy also helps in narrowing down day-to-day tasks for the respective team for increased efficiency. This way, your marketing team will steer their energies into focusing on those activities that support business growth.
But before you make a new strategy for 2019, assess your plans of 2018 and analyze your performance as this will help you identify loopholes and areas of improvement in the Next Year.
Successful ads should add value to customers.
30% of all internet users are expected to use ad blockers by the end of 2018 and early 2019. The statistic is alarming given how fast Google or Bing ads are mushrooming the internet space. Does that mean your printing company should not use this marketing tactic at all?
No, but they should create an ad strategy first and focus on writing a good, converting copy that addresses to the pain-points of the target audience.
Besides running ads, you should explore referral partnerships, email marketing and influencer engagement programs that help in driving organic traffic to your website and make way for a two-way conversation with your customers.
Measuring customer success is a key growth driver.
“Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is”, said Jason Lemkin, the managing director of Storm Ventures in 2015. Years later, the statement is still seen as a fact.
Defined as the way in which businesses help their customers get maximum value from products and services, customer success is suddenly an unavoidable metric.
Since marketing addresses to many departments in any business, such as sales, branding, recruitment, etc., it is essential to understand how customers are benefiting from it.
If the sales team in your printing company uses marketing support, identify how beneficial that is for them to add value to your customers.
If your HR team works closely with the marketing team to run referral campaigns or LinkedIn ads, measure the ROI of such activities and understand if that’s helpful in engaging with the right audience.
If none of the activities are adding to the customer success metric, it is best to go back and revise the strategy for better results. What are your views on this?
Content needs to be adequately distributed
Generating content is useless if it isn’t distributed. Since both online and offline mediums have become crowded, it is all the more necessary for businesses to syndicate content, smartly.
Let’s take the example of sending mails, via the internet and through the offline medium:
A. Emails
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not dead. However, it doesn’t work for all kinds of industries. Printing businesses, on the other hand, can use the platform to promote sales-oriented emails for better engagement and faster conversions.
B. Direct mails
October and November perhaps offer the best time in the US for printing businesses like yours to promote their services owing to the increased demand for Christmas postcards, New Year calendars, and Holiday Season cards.
While emails are relevant, sending a physical copy of the content isn’t a bad idea. It’s all about getting creative and thinking out-of-the-box to distribute content that sticks in the minds of the audience for an extended period.
The key is to adapt to different marketing requirements and add a personal touch to your activities for more positive results.
Marketing automation can’t surpass personal touch.
Marketing automation is a boon for those businesses or marketers that don’t find the time for advanced marketing.Scheduling social media posts or email campaigns saves time and allows you to focus on other revenue-generating activities, but it also deprives your audience of any personal touch.
To avoid this problem, your printing company can do two things:
1. Write content that is personal to read in nature.
2. Meet customers in person once every year to see how they were doing and how your business can add more value to their existing setup.
By opting for option 2, your customers will stay longer and won’t hesitate to invest more money in your business.
Over to you
2019 is going to be an exciting year in marketing – filled with challenges, learnings and growth.
If your printing company is looking to boost its website traffic, customer engagement and brand awareness, contact us at [email protected] and a member of our staff will reach out to you to understand your requirements.
