Top Ten Reasons to Print

In light of my previous blogs I wanted to go back to basics to run through the different benefits that print can bring to a business, often businesses produce business cards because they feel it is the thing to do or they produce a leaflet when they desperately need more business, however print can offer much more than this, here are my top ten reasons –

1) Help to win new business – of course this is the obvious one, print can be used in various guises to help win new clients - flyers, leaflets and brochures are the obvious examples. This is the main reason why most of my clients come to me ‘because they want more business’

2) Help to retain existing business – often a missed opportunity as it costs 7 times as much to win new business as it does to retain an existing client, print can help by keeping you in contact with your customers, why not send them a newsletter to keep the contact or offer them a loyalty card.

3) Help to maximise your existing clients – a combination of the first 2 points, you can use a variety of methods to up sell to your current clients, they are already hot leads so maximise these first with exclusive offers via a flyer or a voucher for another product or service.

4) Help to maintain your brand – by keeping a consistent image throughout your marketing you can increase the awareness of your brand, print plays a big part from your business cards to your letterheads and brochures your image needs to be one of consistency or you will cause confusion

5) Provide information – whether you just want to tell your clients you are moving premises or you have a brand new product to launch print can help in the communication process by updating your contacts either via a letter or by a leaflet.

6) Reduce missed appointments – this is more of an issue in certain sectors such as the medical and beauty industries, by using appointment cards and sending out reminders you can help reduce missed appointments – great for dentists, hair salons and beauty therapists.

7) Promote events – maybe you are having an open day or launching a new product, either way print is a great way of both promoting the initial event through brochures and leaflets and also staying in touch via letterheads.

8) Find out information – create a customer survey to see how you are viewed or maybe produce a market research document to test the market, these are both valid reasons to produce printed literature which can be filled in and returned for data capture.

9) Provide a point of contact – how will people know how to contact you after you have left the meeting? business cards have the primary purpose of providing contact details, if you have nothing to leave then the chances are you’ll be forgotten!

10) Because some people like it – Not everybody likes to receive information via email or to be pointed to websites, print is still popular as some people just like to hold something in their hands. Mmm matt laminated….

So print has a number of uses and they are not limited to the above, if you have a business and have a message to get out or a target to reach then let us know and we will be full of useful ideas.

Have you seen #BeMyGuest on Twitter? It's a great new idea via @EmilyCagle to help develop new relationships and create mutual Blogs, if anybody is interested in mutual blogging then please let me know. Full details are available at http://bit.ly/bemyguest

Design - a cost or an investment?

Here we are again, it's been a couple of weeks since my first attempt at blogging and I wanted to return with a connected subject matter. The subject of leaflets also happily sits alongside the half price offer we have this month (that was the only shameless plug!!).


If you have a tax problem you go to your accountant, if you have a legal issue you see a solicitor, so why if you want to produce some marketing do you do it yourselves?

Selling design is not easy, people often don't see the value in others time and for some reason (thanks to the easy accessibility of free 'design' programmes - if i had a pound for every 'designed' publisher doc I get asked to print...) everyone thinks they are a designer. But what is design? I don't have the exact answer but I know it is not the art of making things look pretty.

Like business cards I come across a high number of leaflets both in business and at home, unfortunately many of them make too many common mistakes that can be easily ironed out with a bit of professional advice. It is often the case that too many people see design as a cost and not as an investment, a couple of examples of recent stories below to highlight the fact -

- At home we received a locally based pizza menu, it had obviously had some level of design as it was not overly offensive to the eye but (and this is a big but) the content was just awful, actually scrap the word awful and replace with hilarious, it had no less than 11 spelling mistakes (some repeated a number of times) my favourite was 'See Food Pizza' (honestly you couldn't write this stuff!) they had also managed to spell the name of the village they were based in incorrectly! A simple bit of proof reading would have eliminated these errors and then maybe I would have considered eating there.

- Again at home (why is it always business to consumer people who don't believe in image?) I received a flyer (not actually sure it should be classified as a flyer), this time it was for home maintenance. It had obviously been done in word (not a good start), had a number of the generic clip art images and clearly it had started life as an A4 sheet but in a stroke of genius they had trimmed it down to a wonky A6 with what must have been a blunt pair of scissors! Again a grasp of basic English was lacking, of the 20 words that were on it there was 7 spelling mistakes including diging and cleanning (as you can see there wasn't even a consistency in spelling!).

Am I, or others, going to buy on the basis of what was received? I very much doubt it, the chances are they have either paid someone to distribute these or indeed done it themselves, so in essence they have wasted time / money. As I said in my previous post if you can’t be bothered with your own marketing then people will assume you won’t be bothered in providing a good product / service.

From these and other examples my thought is that some people don't see the real value in design, arguably a poorly designed piece of marketing can in fact do more harm than a well designed piece can do good! By just investing a bit of time and money you can take a simple leaflet to the next level without breaking the bank. My ethos is that we don't design to make things look pretty; we design things to make them actually work!