PODI Auckland a Hit

This inaugural event in Auckland on 24th Sept boasted a room full of attendees, being an even mix of representatives from key suppliers, mailshops and digital printing companies. They came as far away as Christchurch, plus several from Wellington.

Summary of presentations

Guest speaker Simon Rowles from Carlson Marketing was the clear highlight of the morning session, providing amazing insights into loyalty systems and how they work. Some intriguing data and stories. One graph showed the results of an online-only marketing campaign. It gave heart to all. Print marketing was still giving good results. Those retail or service companies who had suddenly dropped print entirely in favour of [supposedly cheaper] online promotions were often paying a big cost at the cash register.

It seems expertly personalised, targeted marketing that included print (VDP) has a very bright future.

Of course spirited keynote speaker Kate Dunn wowed us with some great material, stories and practical tips all day. Her afternoon 2-hour session on solution selling was the highlight, providing loads of takeaways. The core message being that the selling new services like VDP means learning new sales methods.

With the net and social media uppermost in most companies minds, many don’t even understand what can now be done, or the huge business benefits of well targeted, personalised print marketing. This is where Kate’s wisdom and strategies passed on at this workshop will help attendees re-invigorate sales and fast-track their VDP offerings. We’ll drip feed some of her golden sales tips in future articles…

The popular Ben Goodale of JustONE introduced us what it takes to do good personalised campaigns with some superb examples and background from major and specialty brands. His expertise in this arena was clear – A really nice guy too. Printers would do well to partner with companies like this.

My own presentation, (view a summary version here), looked at the big changes going on in the market and how digital can open up opportunities. There was a special focus on recent breakthroughs with VDP combined with low cost PURL technologies and how they’re becoming a winning combination for sales lead generation. It’s direct marketing/mail on steroids. All this quickly brings print into the internet realm as well as raising prints credibility. A good, positive story for digital print salespeople to take to market.

It all ended too soon. A great day and thanks go to Kate and to chief organisor Garry Knespal (left) of PODI Australia/NZ.