Here’s What Printers Need to Know to Create a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy

The printing industry is exploding alongside new technologies emerging in the digital world every single day.

In fact, 43% of local retailers still use direct mail and 76% of small businesses claim their ideal marketing strategy uses both print and digital media.

Reaching these people can be difficult, though, especially with big-name printing brands often taking the largest piece of pie.

To stand out and attract new customers in an inherently digital age, it’s vital that you’re moving with the times and creating an online presence that positions your brand in the industry and generates an audience outside of your specific geographic location.

Here’s how to do that.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Competition in the printing sector is getting fiercer by the day.

The whole industry is becoming incredibly price driven, meaning that it’s important for printers to venture outside their existing geographical boundaries.

Big-name brands like Vistaprint have taken the eCommerce route and are already hot on their digital marketing with an audience all around the globe, and they are already dominating the print world with their low batch prices and omnipresent online existence.

In order to get in on this action, smaller printers need to expand into the online world to reach and attract people who would not otherwise walk into their store.

This is why it’s important to have a digital marketing strategy.

But as well as helping to reach a global audience, online marketing boosts print company’s online presence which is vital when you consider that B2B brands (businesses that sell services and products to other businesses) find each other through the internet. In fact, 61% of all B2B decision-makers start their search process on the web.

Add to that the automated nature of online digital marketing, where you can essentially “set and forget” systems to attract customers, it’s easier than ever to consistently get new clients while you sleep.

So how do you get started?

What You need to Know to Create a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy

1. The Aim of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

First things first, do you know what you want to achieve with your online presence?

It’s easy to think, “I want to publish ten Tweets a day, host a Facebook group, and send out three emails a week to my ever-growing subscriber list”, but why do you want to do these activities?

Before you even begin drafting up your strategy, you need to have an end goal in mind. It could be something like:

• Boosting your authority in your industry
• Converting more potential prospects into customers
• Reaching an audience that’s outside of the specific geographic location you’re already operating in
• Building stronger relationships with existing customers

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When you have an end goal in mind, it becomes much easier to measure what’s working and what’s not, and you’ll have a reference point to come back to when you’re mapping out what digital marketing activities to do and when to do them.

2. Your Target Customer

Once you know what you plan to do with your strategy, you need to know who you’re doing it for. These are the people you want to reach with your online activities.

Why you need to know your target customer:

Knowing the kind of people, businesses, and organizations you want to reach will help you find them online so you know where to focus your energy on your digital marketing efforts.

On top of that, when you know your people, you can dig into their major pain points which will help you serve them engaging content that they can easily connect with.

Creating engaging content is the number one struggle B2B businesses face. Source.

How to figure out who your target customer is:

You know your business best, and you already have all the information you need at your fingertips.

Start by diving into analytics and data from past customers to learn more about them, and then expand out into general market research. If you have a small, loyal customer base, you can send out a survey as well to get specific answers to specific questions.

3. Your Positioning in the Industry

The printing world is rife with new eCommerce brands popping up and undercutting local traditional printing agencies, and fighting for a way to stand out can be difficult.

This is where your unique selling point comes into play, which is essentially the thing that makes you different from everyone else doing similar things out there.

Why you need to know your positioning:

Knowing where you sit amongst your competitors will help you create a unique positioning that gives you leverage over all those printing mega-corps.

When you know what differentiates you from others out there, you can then use this information to highlight why customers should choose you over anyone else.

How to figure out your positioning:

Start things off with a bit of competitor research; look at the ways your competitors describe themselves and sell their services and use that to refine your own unique selling point that highlights why your brand is different.

4. Your Distribution Networks and Channels

Once you know who you’re targeting and how you stand out in the printing world, it’s time to decide which platforms you’ll market on.

In 2018 alone, there are an overwhelming amount of digital marketing tactics that are set to take off, but trying to cover them all will leave you burnt out and disappointed with your results.

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Why you need to know your distribution networks and channels:

Instead of going all guns blazing and spreading yourself too thin across multiple different channels (which is incredibly time-consuming), you ideally want to focus on the platforms where your target customer is already hanging out.

How to figure out which distribution networks to use:

Start by researching key questions that your target customers have and consider what kind of content they need and what platforms are best for spreading that content on.

You can also dig into past analytics to determine which channels you’re using that are already performing well and which platforms your competitors are getting the most engagement on.

Ready to Create Your Winning Digital Marketing Strategy?

With the global expansion of the printing industry and the emergence of big-name eCommerce brands that are quickly dominating the sector, digital marketing is one way smaller print companies can boost their online presence and expand their audiences beyond specific geographical boundaries.

A winning digital marketing strategy is made up of four key parts: who your target customers are, what your positioning is in the printing world, and what channels are most likely to bring you success if you leverage them.

Are you in the process of creating a digital marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments what you’re biggest struggles are and what small wins you’ve had so far. And don’t forget to subscribe to Printer Success!