4 Intelligent Ways to Combine Print and Digital Marketing

Imagine a college campus on a warm fall day, as freshmen are moving into the dorms for the first time.

There are loads of students buzzing around and getting settled. As they unpack and get their bearings in a new community, many realize they’ve forgotten a lamp or shelf to make their dorm room a bit cozier. No problem! A strategic, targeted digital ad whisks across their screen on move-in day.

Two days later, a mailed piece is sent featuring lamps, rugs, and closet accessories. This venue's campaign (a combination of digital and print marketing) snags interest in a fleeting moment then follows this digital hook with a more robust mailed piece.

The Successful Marriage of Digital and Print

Print marketing is powerful. Digital marketing is powerful. When you combine them... well, the result is dynamic.  

Want to create a more strategic relationship between your print and digital marketing efforts? Here are four strategies to build momentum:

1. Create Distinct Online Landing Pages

Online landing pages can be created specifically for promotion through your print ad (for example, see Uber’s landing page targeting new riders here).

While your website homepage typically offers an introduction to your business, a promotional landing page is slightly different. A landing page:

--Is designed to receive traffic from specific sources

--Prompts visitors to take one well-defined action

--Stays focused on a single topic or offer

--Omits or downplays site navigation options

Beyond using narrow landing pages to evaluate your print marketing, you can also record general web traffic during a campaign to note whether a spike in visits may indicate a particular ad’s effectiveness.

2. Use Digital Opt-ins for Direct Mail

Instead of asking someone to sign up for your email campaign the next time they visit your website, why not ask them to sign up for a direct mail newsletter?

Unlike email (which can easily go straight to a junk folder), a direct mail campaign engages people through tactile, memorable, physical marketing pieces. There’s something special about receiving a thoughtful newsletter or meandering through a well-designed catalog.

Instead of opting toward email, build stronger connections with your customers outside the screen.

3. Combine In-Store and Social Displays

Live events provide great opportunities to build strong relationships with customers – particularly in our experience-driven culture.

At your next event, distribute valuable coupons or great giveaway items after advertising through social media ahead of time. Post fun selfie displays (like clever photobooths or imaginative backgrounds) that people can post using event-specific hashtags. Or give gift cards and freebies to those who check in at your kiosk and follow you on social media.

4. Add QR Codes to Your Direct Mail, Brochures, and Displays

Today QR Codes (those funny-looking square boxes that look like over-sized bar codes) have many uses, including marketing, product labeling, ticketing, and more.

QR codes can be used as a compact way to deliver loads of information, and you can use one in any situation where you want to send people to a specific website. Add QR codes to your brochures, direct mail, business cards, in-store displays, or even to customized client birthday cards.

This lead generator can be used to push a new promotion, link to an instructional video, solicit reviews, incentivize subscription renewals, or prompt people to download your app. 

Customers on the Move

As people hop between on- and offline worlds, businesses must provide an increasingly cohesive, personalized experience.

Combining your print and digital marketing can build momentum while providing users a streamlined customer experience. Employ this customer-oriented strategy to ensure your brand receives a multi-fold return on your marketing investment.

 

Stand Tall with 6 Sharp Embossing Techniques

Have you ever run your hand over an antique, textured wallpaper?

With its authentic sense of depth and detail, you almost can’t help but touch it. The raised relief is as appealing to your imagination as it is to your fingertips.

Embossing has a similar effect. Embossing and debossing are two print techniques used to add texture to a design. An embossed pattern is raised against the background, while a debossed pattern is sunken into the material's surface (but might protrude somewhat on the reverse side). These popular finishing techniques – used for business cards, menus, invitations, foil stickers, notepads, and more – are ideal for bringing a fresh, contemporary look.

Take Center Stage

Embossing elevates your design from the background and can be used to create geometric patterns, add borders, or produce a custom seal for product packaging.

The texture and sculptural quality that embossing creates makes for a memorable user experience. Add elegance and stateliness to your next project with one of these beautiful techniques:

1. Blind Embossing

Blind embossing uses custom-made dies to create a raised surface according to the design.

Blind embossing refers to a stamped design without metallic leaf or ink (like plain textured letters with a page), giving a base-relief effect. One way to make blind embossing stand out even more is to use textured paper. Since the area around the embossing will be pressed smooth, this creates more of a contrast.

2. Combination Embossing

As its name suggests, this type of die combines multiple effects (like embossing and foil stamping) into one process.

The combination die has a cutting edge around the perimeter to cleanly break the excess foil away from the embossed area. Given the unbeatable finish and fine detail of this element, it is a natural choice when printing elegant crests, fancy logos, or intricate type for business cards, letterheads,

3. Single-Level Embossing

This process uses a die that changes the surface of the paper at only one level.

Since the die needed for this kind of embossing is simple, it is the most affordable embossing option.

4. Multi-Level Embossing

This process uses a die with several distinct levels to create a sculptured impression or a more detailed texture.

Multi-level embossing kicks things up a notch by changing the surface of the paper at several planes. This makes the technique popular for multi-dimensional shapes, landscapes, or images with unique details (such as leaves or feathers).

5. Sculptured Die

This kind of die requires custom hand tooling to create levels and details for an emboss that resembles a bas-relief sculpture, a figure that is raised a few inches from a flat background to give a three-dimensional effect.

Like a piece of metal leaping off the paper, the effect is striking and lifelike. While sculptured embossing is more expensive, it is absolutely gorgeous for creating custom pictures, shapes, 3D logos, faces, animals, or landscapes.  

Because this die requires someone to create it by hand – usually based on an image provided – this method is more expensive.

6. Bevel-Edge Dies

Want to add sophistication to your project?

Beveled dies bring a softened, refined look to your shapes and letters, adding a curve or edge to each character (typically at 30 to 60 degrees). The broader the angle, the greater the illusion of depth.

Create a Timeless Treasure

New trends take shape every day, and you can make a bold statement with existing techniques that give your print materials a sleek twist.

While embossing was originally found mostly in personalized stationery, today, raised elements can be used in envelope flaps, business cards, packaging, hang tags, and more. Great designs mix the old and the new to create timeless print pieces your clients will love!

5 Strategies to Overcome Nerves in Public Speaking

From Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill, some of the world’s greatest leaders had one thing in common: the fear of public speaking.

Glossophobia, or speech anxiety, affects 77 percent of the population at some level. This can range from sweating and an accelerated heart rate to dizziness, nausea, or a “fight or flight” response.

As a shift to remote working has become more prevalent, more communication is taking place online rather than in-person. And video chatting can make many people (who aren’t normally nervous) more anxious whenever they speak up.

Want to conquer your butterflies or gain confidence when you’re on the big stage? Here are five tips from the public speaking experts:

1. Practice Aloud in Advance

The best way to reduce your anxiety is to rehearse until you feel comfortable, and you will really settle into your message if you share it aloud several times before the big day.

Practice by yourself, before a mirror, in front of a video camera, or even with a friend, colleague, or coach who will give you constructive feedback.

2. Be at Your Best Physically and Mentally

In the turmoil of speaking preparation, this key to optimal performance can get lost in the noise.

Get enough rest. Avoid too much caffeine or alcohol. And give yourself quiet time if you need it (i.e., if you're an introvert), or mix-and-mingle time to get your juices flowing (if you're an extrovert). Look out for yourself BEFORE you speak to ensure the best outcome when you do.

3. Breathe

Breathing from your stomach muscles, not your chest, naturally calms the nervous system.

When you want to reset yourself internally, take a few deep breaths before and even during your presentation. As you inhale, say to yourself, “I am . . .” As you exhale, say, “relaaaaaaaaaxed.” 

4. Don’t Be Nervous About Your Nervousness

Singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, who was legendary for his live concert performances, once observed that if he felt completely relaxed before a show, he wouldn’t perform as well.

Speakers who lack confidence often feel nervous. Then they feel anxious about the fact that they’re nervous, which compounds the anxiety.  Remember, nervousness is just your adrenaline flowing. It’s a form of energy. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t get nervous about his nerves – instead, he channels this into excitement and power on stage. Successful speakers know how to make adrenaline work for them and turn nervousness into enthusiasm, engagement, and charisma.

It’s okay to have butterflies.  Make the energy work for you! 

5. Practice an “Others First” Mindset

During public speaking, you feel “all eyes” watching you.

This can be painfully vulnerable, like a caveman exposed in daylight. While you may want to shrink back, calm your anxiety by focusing on your desire to encourage others. Sarah Gershman, President of Green Room Speakers, says this:

“The key to disarming our organic panic button is to turn the focus away from ourselves — away from whether we will mess up or whether the audience will like us — and toward helping the audience. Studies have shown that . . . showing kindness and generosity to others has been shown to activate the vagus nerve, which has the power to calm the fight-or-flight response. When we are kind to others, we feel calmer and less stressed. The same principle applies in public speaking. When we approach speaking with a spirit of generosity, we counteract the sensation of being under attack and start to feel less nervous.”

Build Customer Confidence: 4 Brand Identity Essentials

Trust builds confidence.

That is why a strong corporate brand identity can make or break a business. Brand identity is more than key values or approved color palettes; it is the collection of all elements that a company creates to portray the right image to its consumer. Here is one helpful way to describe it:

Brand identity is the image or character of your business as people relate to it. For example, the BMW image of elite luxury has grown naturally from customers’ repeated exposure to BMW’s ads, endorsements, and products.

Brand imagery is the aesthetic appearance of your brand’s core identity and messaging. This results from all the visuals (from billboards, print ads, or product packaging) that represent your brand’s identity.

When a company has a strong brand, it is easily recognized, which grows people’s trust. Trust builds confidence, and confidence begets loyalty. When a business has built superiority in a particular niche, repeat customers are more willing to buy in other areas. When you have loyalty from your base, you have space to increase prices or ask for bigger commitments. 

Breaking Down the Brand Experience

When building a brand, think of an iceberg in which only the tip is visible.

The substance exists below the waterline. The brand elements that are most seen and celebrated (like brand imagery) are not always the most important. The brand experience – the mosaic of customer interactions people have with your business – is part of a greater journey.

Here are four dimensions of this mosaic:

1. Brand Voice

If your brand was a person, what would they sound like?

Are they loud and animated or reserved and refined? An organization’s name, tagline, and editorial style comprise an overall projection of its voice. As these elements are developed, consider how the words would sound in the mouth of a brand spokesperson or its founder.

Also, try to contrast the voice of your competitors. If your rival brand has a highly polished voice, you might consider adopting a friendly, down-to-earth style.

2. Consistency in Core Elements

Building the foundation of your identity starts with identifying core elements.

Strong brands create a style guide that anchors them to brand colors, key fonts, a logo projected across different backgrounds, and a style they hope to express (e.g., “elegant, clean, scalable, approachable yet excellent”).

Once you’ve nailed these keys, you can embellish with design tweaks, humor, or variations on patterns (of ads, print layouts, customer stories, and more). Like music, good design balances order and variation to make a beautiful composition.

3. Total Time

People want to feel like they are in control.

The total time invested in transactions is an essential consideration for today’s consumers. Don’t want to wait in a massive drive-through line? Order ahead in the app. Hate the grocery store line? Use the self-checkout. Perhaps you need to focus less on saving them money and more on saving them time.

Small tweaks you make to the customer experience can assure clients that their time is valuable.

4. Framing Customer Choices

Brand building is about affecting customer choice.

While prospects initially engage with emotional triggers like color, shape, image, or tone, eventually, they’ll ask deeper questions about their spending or time commitments. This involves both upfront expenses and opportunity costs; if customers buy from you, they implicitly say no to another brand.

Think strategically about speaking to buyer emotions regarding loss aversion, short-term sacrifices (vs. long-term gains), or sunk costs (how people don’t want to lose what has already been invested).

Brand identity goes beyond simple appearance. Decisions you make about voice, consistency, time, and customer choices can create strong feelings that prompt a profitable response!

Show-Stopping Print Ideas to Compliment Your Digital Marketing

Does your brain ever feel tired?

Some days, that’s probably due to information overload. Today, researchers estimate we are exposed to over 5,000 brands per day or around 600-625 ads per person. If you add in pop-ups and YouTube ads, who knows how high the number may soar!

But amidst the explosion of digital advertising, industry reports remind us that print holds steady. 70% of Americans prefer to read on paper, and 67% prefer printed materials over digital. Additionally, 55% of consumers say they trust print marketing more than any other advertising messages.

Want to evoke emotions with your next masterpiece? Draw from three creative examples of print ads that recently stole the show.

C&A: The Real “Like” Leaderboard

Nothing builds excitement like a little competition!

In a partnership with Microsoft and Tim (one of Brazil's biggest fashion retailers), C&A created an interactive print advertising campaign to engage clients and collect feedback on designs pitted against one another. Customers who registered to receive the special 'Like Ads' on Facebook were given a print magazine with a personalized Tim chip installed. These print pieces are integrated with an interactive thumbs-up icon from Facebook. When viewers approved of a fashion design by pressing the physical thumbs up button, their vote was also tabulated online (without the need to connect any additional devices).

Beyond recording user preferences on influencer Facebook pages, the most popular "liked" looks from these print ads were displayed on a giant leaderboard in the Morumbi Shopping store. What a tremendous way to build engagement and momentum!

Motorola: Where Customization is King

Moto X customization was one of the big selling features of this mobile phone.

To wow potential purchasers, Motorola released interactive ads in New York and Chicago that reached around 150,000 readers of the “Wired” magazine. Phone ads featured super-slim batteries, LED lights, and buttons people could press to modify the phone's color on the page. Prefer blue? Maybe red, pink, or green? Viewers could try any color as the phone in the ad transformed before their eyes.

Virtual Test Drives

If you find it hard to get customers through your doors, why not bring the product right to them?

Volkswagen is a brand that strives to be a leader in new technology, so it launched an interactive print ad to drive this point home. Using a three-page print ad, readers could unfold a map of a curvy road and then download a corresponding app that would transform their phone into a mini-vehicle. As drivers steered their “car” (mobile phone) along the “road” (print ad), they had a memorable, hands-on experience with vehicle innovations like the Adaptive Lights or Lane Assist modes. Leave it to Volkswagon to create the first-ever “test drive in a print ad.”

Not to be outdone, Lexus followed suit shortly afterward. Readers of Sports Illustrated could take the Lexus print ad, place it over a Lexus webpage on their iPad screen, and watch the ad come to life with sight, sound, and motion that displayed the car in action (with spinning wheels and different backgrounds and music).

Tactile, Memorable Print

Print is nothing if not tactile. And now, static media options have become more interactive than ever.

Use this to your advantage by creating ads that are memorable, relatable, and fun!

Use Customer Lifetime Value to Plan Your Direct Mail Marketing

What is the value of a customer?

What profit can they bring this week? This year? Over a lifetime? It may seem like a simple concept, but many small businesses have no idea what a regular customer is worth to their business. This creates two problems:

1. Ambivalence about customer retention. Many businesses are uncertain about how much to spend on customer retention. With a metric for measuring customer values, you can navigate appropriate parameters for retaining these people or expanding their business. Research shows that increasing customer retention rates by merely 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%!

2. Uncertainty about effective marketing. What is the number of new customers you’d like to attract, and what is an appropriate budget to do that? Defining customer value will guide your marketing strategies.

When acquiring new customers, estimating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) provides a way to estimate their future revenue contribution to your company and how to use direct marketing to your advantage.

Take the Long View

Need an example? Here’s a sample:

In this scenario, a CLV of $150 estimates what one customer will spend after one year. When you send out a direct marketing campaign and $150 CLV customers respond, it’s important to remember that a client’s $50 initial purchase during this campaign may not seem profitable (due to the extensive mailing costs).

But rather than looking only at the figures for this initial campaign, you must consider the $150 these clients are going to spend over their lifetime.

Here’s the breakdown of those stats:

Mailed/Cost       Orders Received          Initial Loss           CLV Over 3 Yrs

10K @ $5K           100                              ($2,500)                $10,000

25K @ $15K         300                               ($7,500)                $30,000

45K @ $25K         675                               ($8,125)                $76,250

In the first mailing, was the loss of $2,500 worth the time and expense of one campaign?

Not upfront, but viewing this investment as a loss is shortsighted. With an understanding of Customer Lifetime Value, smart entrepreneurs can see that each mailing produced a response of customers who had a CLV that would bring net profits in the long run. In other words, investing $5,000 in a 10,000-person mailing (to eventually earn $10,000) brought a return of 100%.

Keep Them Coming Back

One thing smart marketers know is that, by increasing a customer’s CLV, they can earn more profits faster.

Here are just a few ways to do this:

• Keep customers engaged through value-packed content (e.g., educational newsletters, social media chats, personalized ad campaigns, or direct mailings that promote the tangible value of your latest products)


• Offer loyalty rewards programs or “special status” sales events targeted to the niche markets within your base


• Upsell more luxurious versions of your customers’ current products or packages


• Cross-sell similar (or complementary) products or services


• Incentivize annual billing cycle payments to reduce the churn rate of customers lost month to month


• Increase sales by bundling products and selling them at a lower price than what they would cost separately


• Increase pricing over time; or offer to “grandfather” current clients by keeping them at the existing rate as you raise prices for new customers

Your Customers Are Your Future

A customer represents the future of your success and your livelihood, and it will be difficult to thrive if you aren’t willing to risk or invest to attract new business.

Has the uncertainty of direct mail marketing kept your business from growing? Rely on our expertise! We offer simple ways to reach a mass audience for a price point that works with your budget.

Contact us today for options!

Psychographics Sell: Finding the "Why" Behind the "Buy"

In 2011, Matt Salzberg was a restless associate at a Silicon Valley investment firm. He and his friend Ilia Papas wanted to create a business and were intrigued by food.

"We both loved food," Salzberg said. "We liked trying new ingredients, new recipes, new techniques, but we found it really inaccessible to cook at home. It was expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to find recipes that we trusted."

The duo tried a few ideas before landing on the one that became Blue Apron: give people an easy way to make dinner using chef-recommended recipes and the fresh, precisely measured ingredients they'd need. By August 2012, the team was shipping recipes to early testers. Three years later, Blue Apron delivered millions of meals to monthly subscribers, the company valued at a whopping $2 billion!

Why Niche Markets Are More Than Skin Deep

Initially, some scoffed at the thought of paying restaurant prices for something you labored to cook at home.

But they overlooked Blue Apron’s unique advantage: appealing to a unique, target group of “foodies” who loved high-end meals but relished the opportunity to cook them at home. Blue Apron found a niche in the market that catapulted them to exponential growth and national exposure.

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a broader market in which specialized products or services can be sold. Establishing a niche market helps businesses gain competitive advantages. One way to succeed in connecting with your niche market is to examine your target customers' psychographics.

Psycho WHAT? Finding the “Why” Behind the “Buy”

Psychographics refers to people’s qualitative characteristics.

While demographics analyze quantitative traits like age, gender, or income status, psychographics focuses on personality, opinions, attitudes, values, activities, and lifestyle. While demographics addresses the “who,” psychographics targets the “why.” What prompts people to purchase, and how do their values, beliefs, or worldviews drive these choices?

Here’s a car sales example. While BMW and Mercedes might sell a very similar product, each is constructed and marketed to the persona of two different niche markets. BMW often seeks to connect with customers who are fearless, young-minded, and successful. The company even sponsored some James Bond movies to “cast” BMW into a sexy, sophisticated starring role. On the other hand, Mercedes tends to target high-minded customers with an interest in wealth (specifically those with a more classic, conservative style) using taglines like “The Best – Or Nothing.”

Research shows that highly targeted marketing campaigns that speak directly to customer wants, needs, and beliefs can increase conversion rates by 40 percent. If this is true, the most important step in your next marketing campaign is to gather this data on your audience!

Sound challenging? It doesn’t have to be! Information on demographics is pretty easy to obtain. Here are a few areas you can probe for this information:

• Client interviews
• Customer surveys (included printed options or JotForm-style digital tools)
• Market research firms
• Feedback from your service team to provide (like key phrases, FAQs, and the language they hear customers use during daily interactions)
• Facebook Analytics (set up a Business Manager account and install Facebook Pixel on your website to collect free data from the “Measure & Report” section)
• Google Analytics (for a soft start, access the “demographics overview” by selecting “reporting” from the drop-down menu in the top left of the Analytics interface; then select “Demographics > Overview” under USER in the left navigation bar)

By segmenting your audience and tailoring content for specific groups, you can convert prospects into customers in a compelling, cost-effective way.