Creating Effective Presentations

Making presentations is a part of business life. Whether it is a presentation to staff or a sales meeting with a significant client or prospect, there is nothing that helps bring the point home more than a well-produced and rehearsed professional quality presentation. An effective presentation allows the audience to experience the power of words and pictures simultaneously, which increases comprehension and retention of the material.

There are some tools and tips for enhancing the power of presentations. This issue provides some information on preparing slides or overheads, on speaking, and on providing supporting material to your audience.

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Content is King… Engage Your Customers

Amid the ongoing debate about whether direct mail or e-mail or social media is the best method to market to customers and prospects, very little is being said about the one thing that is crucial to the success of each – the message. Unless the message is relevant to the audience and persuasively presented, it doesn’t matter how it is delivered. So while the discussion about the delivery method continues, focus on developing good content and honing your writing skills.

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Direct Mail Design… The Roles of Form & Function

If you are like most of our customers, you have a lot of questions about designing an effective direct mail marketing piece. Should you use a post card, a self-mailer, or an envelope?  Use lots of copy or lots of white space? Announce who the mail is from or build the reader’s curiosity? With so many variables to consider, where does one begin to seek the right answers?

To help sort through the maze of interlocking decisions, remember that there are two ways to judge how well a direct mail piece has been designed. One set of standards comes from the discipline of good graphic design; the other comes from what makes mail move efficiently through the mail stream. We believe both are important, and that a good strategy is to thoroughly understand each set.

Proven Marketing Practices for Businesses and Organizations

Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create, and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer.  — Dr. Paul Christ

For long term success, every business or organization must attract and retain customers. Most of us understand the term marketing as the discipline associated with such activities.

Marketing encompasses a broad range of activities, from product development and pricing, to promotion and distribution. As your printer, we play a role in helping you to effectively promote your business’s or organization’s products and services.

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Salesmanship in Print… Communications that Sell

The term marketing communications describes messages used to communicate with a market. Marketing communications focus on the products or services of a business or organization, rather than on the company or organization itself, and are used to create demand or position a company’s product or service.

The task of generating marketing communications often is the responsibility of the business owner, sales manager, or development professional. Once written, this information can be used to create a variety of sales collateral material – flyers and brochures, direct mail marketing packages, newsletters, press releases – and can also be used on company web pages and emails.

Think of marketing communications as salesmanship in print. And just as you carefully prepare and plan for a sales call, prepare and plan for salesmanship in print.

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Editing Copy Written by Others

It can be a tricky situation – editing copy written by others.  Whether your task is to compile and edit the company newsletter, review the boss’s PowerPoint presentation, or prepare the company marketing material, the job of copy editor requires diplomacy and discipline. The diplomacy is necessary to avoid alienating the writer (and losing your editorship); the discipline is required to impose standards and create consistency.

To help with this delicate balancing act, it is useful to have an editor’s toolkit – measuring devices that transform your editing from subjective to objective. Here are our favorites.

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Coated Paper… The Importance of the Surface

When deciding on the paper to use for marketing materials, such as a brochure or sell sheet, many of our customers tell us, “I’d like a shiny paper; it looks so professional.”

We’re not sure how this association with shiny paper – which we printers refer to as coated paper – got started, but we have a theory. Full color printing requires a smooth, uniform paper surface and therefore almost always uses a sheet that has had a coating applied during the manufacturing process. The purpose of the coating is to improve the way the surface of the sheet receives the ink, and it works! Full color printing on a coated sheet looks sharp and bright – in a word, professional.

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Targeted Marketing… Factors That Influence Success

Decades ago, when there were fewer products and fewer brands, mass marketing made sense. Often one company owned an entire category. When the only coffee sold in supermarkets was ground and in one-pound cans, marketing to all coffee drinkers as an undifferentiated group was easy. The choice was between brands, each making taste claims.

Think how this has changed! Not only has the number of companies selling coffee increased, there are now more brands offered by each company. And at the same time, coffee products have proliferated — regular, decaffeinated, blends, flavored, ground, whole bean, instant, cans, packages, pouches, even individual portions. Clearly mass marketing is not the most effective way to advertise all these choices.

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