Category: Design, Marketing — Tags: brochures, direct mail, eco-friendly, Marketing, marketing materials — dave @ 9:06 am
Your printed materials are often the first impression someone has of your business or organization. So how do you make sure you’re starting off on the right foot and appeal to a wide-range of demographics?
The answer is you don’t appeal to every demographic collectively, you appeal to each individually.
Today’s targeted mailing lists and amazing printing technology, combined with decades of experience here at imPress, can ensure a high return on investment.
First off, what are the goals of your piece? If you’re looking to raise money, for example, you don’t want to look like you spent a ton of money on your printing design with flashy colors on fancy paper.
You really have to know your audience. If you are an environmental group, you should use real recycled paper, soy-based ink and possibly have the piece produced with wind technology.
Perhaps you’re doing printed pieces that need to go to consumers that speak several languages? Why not do the same piece in multiple languages?
Targeting your audience
Technology has dramatically changed the level of accuracy you can employ to target your audience. imPress can help you increase your ROI by hyper-targeting your audience, tailoring the message and making sure your product is appealing to each potential customer on their own terms.
Say you’re selling pools. Our mailing lists can target the proper income level and age and even put your materials in the mailboxes of families with a certain number of children.
If you’re a real estate company, why blanket the entire region when you can send materials to targets that are broken down by how many years someone has spent in their house? Maybe you want to target retirees looking to downsize. We can do that, too!
Talk to imPress and we’ll help you spend those coveted marketing dollars wisely.
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Category: Marketing, Print — Tags: brochures, hiring professionals, marketing materials, printed materials — Sarah @ 6:06 am
The following is a true story.
A friend of ours recently opened a piece of mail from her homeowners insurance company and was appalled. The envelope contained a letter and a brochure. And both of them would have been better left unsent.
The letter was a typical form letter recommending that our friend consider insuring her car with this company. The message was not out of the ordinary, but the mistakes were. Sentences within the letter ranged from poorly written to actually grammatically incorrect, and the letter concluded with the assertion that this insurance company would be “happy to suite your needs.”
The brochure, believe it or not, was worse.
Instead of hiring a printing company or even using a desktop publishing program, the geniuses running the operation opted to construct this brochure elementary school art project style. That’s right, folks, someone actually sat down with a gluestick and got busy gluing the graphics onto the brochure by hand. The sloppy edges were a dead giveaway that someone tried to save a few bucks.
What You Send Says a Lot About You
The well-meaning staff of this insurance company thought that they were sending out marketing materials, when in actuality, these pieces were the opposite of marketing. Instead of luring our friend in and getting her interested in a new service, the company made her question their credibility as an insurance company. She couldn’t help but wonder, If I ever actually need to make a claim, will they try to fix my house with a gluestick?
Don’t let your printed pieces send the wrong message. There may be some aspects of your business that can be handled with DIY jobs, but designing and constructing marketing materials probably isn’t one of them. Professional designers and printers will make sure that your printed pieces actually bolster your company’s image instead of bringing it down.
And if there are any holdouts out there who still want to make their own brochures, we beg you to avoid puffy paint, pipe cleaners, glitter, crayons, and gluesticks.
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Category: Marketing, Print — Tags: brochures, internet access, Marketing, postal mail, postcards — Sarah @ 8:06 am
Right now, you are reading our blog on a computer screen. So it stands to reason that you, like zillions of others, have internet access.
But there are actually people out there who still don’t.
And they aren’t even necessarily people who live in hollowed-out cacti in the middle of the Mojave Desert. (Although those folks are likely to experience difficulty connecting to the web, too.)
We actually know an actual regular person over in Duanesburg who can’t get high-speed internet access in her home unless she is interested in paying the internet company thousands of dollars to run a wire out to her area of town, which, needless to say, she is not.
So although the world wide web is growing nonstop, there is still a segment of the population who can’t access it. And then of course there’s another group that could access it but has no desire to do so. And another group that goes online only occasionally at the local public library. And another group that doesn’t know how to use a computer.
So, while your Facebook page and your website and other internet marketing are probably hooking you up with a lot of customers, if you put all your eggs in the internet basket, you are definitely going to miss some potential clients.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone gets postal mail. Whether you inhabit a frosty igloo or dwell in a dark cave, there’s a daring mailman somewhere out there who ensures that your mail gets delivered.
So don’t overlook traditional paper postcards and brochures for marketing purposes. Printed materials should actually be a key component of your marketing mix. Successful companies have been mailing out coupons and advertisements for years because they really work.
Give it a whirl – send out a mailing and see what long lost internetless potential customers you can reach.
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