When marketing your print products or service, you need to have a firm understanding of your audience, the message you want to deliver, the offer you’re willing to make, and the optimal timing of your marketing campaign.
Too often, I see businesses make costly mistakes that result in poor performance of their marketing campaign. Common marketing mistakes can be avoided with adequate planning, attention to detail, and ongoing measurement and evaluation.
I’ve come up with a list of 7 things you want to avoid when considering a new marketing campaign.
1. Timing
You might have a great audience, a fantastic offer, and even a well-designed marketing piece, but if your timing is off, so too will be your results. If you have printed items that are seasonally sensitive, make sure you consider this when planning your marketing calendar.
2. Failure To Test Your Headline
As the first thing your audience usually reads, the headline is essential for luring people in to want to discover more about your marketing message and will influence them over what action you want them to take. Regardless of the platform you use, you should continually test your headlines by running split tests and evaluating responses. Doing this will ensure your marketing message attracts the largest number of potential customers.
3. Failure To Test Your Offer
In direct marketing, the offer is directly correlated to 40% of your response therefore if you have the right offer, people will respond. There are obviously other factors to consider as well, but providing a compelling offer is required in most instances. Offers can range from discounts or time-limited deals but the commonality remains. Test your offers for optimizing response and make sure it’s something people really do need and want.
4. Having A Good List
You can have the best offer and nest marketing design but if you’re not sending it to the right people, it’s simply not enough. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have good data. When building your list, we’re lucky enough to have tools like Linkedin nowadays that lets you target people specifically based on their product needs and wants, their location. You can also take a deeper dive into your existing customers and ensure that they are receiving offers specific to their current buying behaviors. Make sure you spend time creating a well-segmented marketing list.
5. Relying On Single Communication
You’ve possibly heard me mention the rule of seven before but one thing you need to remember is that your audience is likely being hit with hundreds of marketing messages each day. This is why you need to consider showing your message to the target audience at least seven times before they really start to take notice. With this in mind, you need to ensure you are communicating with your audience on a regular basis.
6. Not Measuring Campaign Effectiveness
Over time, your print company is going to do a lot of marketing, and no matter the size of the campaign, you need to track your results. The bottom line here is that you need to record what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve your results in the future.
7. Failure To Continue The Dialogue
I’m still amazed by the number of companies I speak with who fail to keep up regular communication with their current customers. The crazy thing is you likely worked very hard to onboard the majority of those customers and in the majority of cases, I can honestly say from experience, you will be leaving money on the table by not keeping in touch on a more regular ongoing basis.
I hope you find these 7 tips helpful and if you’d help implement any of these strategies or are keen to explore other ways to help grow your print business please check out the website for my Print Growth Academy or 121 Coaching.
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