Jun
28
2010
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Tuesday, 29 June 2010 |
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 The industry giant, Vistaprint is now in the internet game, providing slick website and email marketing services for its small business clients. Now, they not only make use of the net to sell print products, but sell online services as well.
It makes perfect sense and is yet another revenue-generating tactic. The question some printers will ask, is 'won't these services reduce their print volumes as customers move from print to online?'
Hardly. They simply realised that if they didn't offer it to their clients, someone else would, so they might as well keep it in the family.
As talked of in last weeks VDP article , they're on their way to becoming a marketing services provider. I suspect there's a lot of website/email providers in the US who now see Vistaprint as a threat and major competitor. It's a strange world...
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May
26
2010
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Thursday, 27 May 2010 |
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Several years back we wrote about the opportunities for digital in the photographic marketplace.
Back then I already knew of several significant, low key installations of Indigos in the US that ran night and day producing photos and especially high value photobooks, using the HP Indigo presses, not the traditional photographic technology. One of the biggest and most successful operations apparently sold up all his offset gear in 2003 and went 100% digital, and never looked back.
It seems it's become very popular now beyond HP. Reading the IPEX transcripts the first buyer of the new Xerox 1000 colour press is a photographic lab. Perhaps this confirms what I've thought a long time. It's a big, untapped market that most printers here overlook.
It likely requires a different sales strategy too. We know that the biggest driver of photographs is grandparents. And where do most reside and show off their photos these days? Facebook and Flicker. Enticing this generation to buy hard copy versions is easy.
Barb Pellow recently confirmed this trend with Facebook giving out good sales leads. This online stragegy isn't new, having worked well for print suppliers like www.Moo.com, who get the majority of their sales out of the social online networks where they feature highly. It makes sense. They're just appearing and building a profile where their customers congregate. Years back we went to chamber of commerce meetings. Now there's many more meetings online.
It's a new world and those that aren't tapping into the immense online market using Google, Facebook and email strategies miss out.
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May
24
2010
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Monday, 24 May 2010 |
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The other modern marketing trick is how well optimised your website is from a marketing perspective. One of the best tools for web developers that provides a 'grade' for a website is www.websitegrader.com
 Just put your business website address into this and you'll be given a number between 1 and 100 on your websites marketing effectiveness. The goal is to get at least 80.
You'll note there's a lot of emphasis on social media and links into twitter, Facebook etc. This is because of the large number of people that are now sent to websites, on the recommendations of others working the social media platforms. (In fact in some sectors, having a free Facebook page gives many more sales leads than the very expensive, more beautiful company website!)
The Fix?
It can take many months to improve a poor figure as there's never a single 'fix'. The other issue is that it's not actually a site 'design' problem unless you've lots of flash used. Your average web designer simply isn't trained on these aspects. All you'll often get are blank stares or have the issue dismissed as unimportant - Which naturally still doesn't solve your sales problem and lack of website leads.
However we know all the secret tricks and we've rejuvenated sites with grades as low as 6. For a quote on how I can solve your poor grade and traffic, email
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