Marketing

Race to where?

1 August 2021 Stuart Nimmo

As things get going again, it seems that some of the basics of marketing are getting tossed aside for Arnold Schwarzenegger and his famous “Oozy nine-millimetre” approach. Or being politely put, the scattergun hitting as many as possible with as much low impact marketing collateral.

Everyone likes being treated as an individual, personable, being given time, the basic respect of being treated as a human. So why in the rush to get going again are so many making the mistake of misfiring the marketing gun?

Just some examples being:

• YouTube zoom video links via WhatsApp, so why would I give up my time, when you haven’t got to know me? Conversational basics would identify whether I am prime for your product or not.

• Email invitations, to an event which I haven’t yet justified whether it’s for me. A prime case of jumping the gun.

• Illicit harvesting of data through Linkedin profiles from prolific business networkers and bombarding inboxes with un-requested “I’m wonderful, I’m doing these seminars which you should attend”

In the examples above, understanding the customer journey is key. Hoping to speed up the process by jumping stages, actually sets these individuals back to a negative point on the journey before commencing under normal circumstances. Ultimate end-user perception of these products/services is key. The advent of digital media in the customer journey has increased the number of touchpoints in the conversion process from prospect to customer. The key is looking at the longevity of the touchpoint. Digital media is notoriously renowned for having a short lifespan, such as Facebook or LinkedIn people struggle to remember what they saw the previous day. Email marketing only works once the originator has gained trust from the recipient, especially as it is the original spoof electronic scam platform, we all remember Princes from Nigeria claiming they needed release money. So the perception of email marketing has an interesting positioning in the mix.

So how do you overcome it?

There’s the challenge, originality, creativity and timing are all at play in making an awesome campaign, which smartly tied elements come together, not to act as a barrage of content, but a carefully crafted progression of building trust.

Old school marketing talks about the marketing mix, a toolbox of touchpoints that enable the prospect to build trust through carefully crafted discovery. (Or omnichannel campaign) This relies on you knowing your customers and most significantly their traits and personality, or their customer persona.

In building an omnichannel campaign, progression is key. Understanding how prospects need to relate to your offering is at the heart of building progressively connected touchpoints on your customer journey.

So how does a mixture of touchpoints work?

Marketing is educating your customer about your product or service. Educators work on people learning on Visual Auditory Kinesthetic basis. You need to ensure that the mixture of touchpoints use all of the three learning receptors to ensure you capture every potential opportunity. So a solely digital platform-based campaign will only feed the visual and auditory receptors. Adding physical marketing like print helps you to enable another touchpoint feeding the Kinesthetic engagement with your prospects.

So utilising a printed piece with a sure-fired call for action to engage onto a digital platform can provide progression. This is getting so much smarter with the advent of clever digital back ends. Using managed short links allow you to build a profile of recipients through the use of Personalised URLs underneath QR codes, which is great for 1-1 print mailers. This can allow for the recording of future actions in the journey by utilising a CRM system to record engagements. A good CRM can be set to trigger further physical print engagement, which aids the customer journey towards a successful closure of a sale.

So back to the race, progression is building trust. The underlying principle of “know, like, trust” is at the heart of the customer journey. Somethings you can’t rush, it’s subject to the product or service, yes a low-value product will have a shorter journey, however, one with a higher entry point will need a bespoke approach.

The innovators are the ones doing some disruptive marketing coming out of the pandemic. Disruptive, innovative, different whatever you call it, is challenging the norm. With so much digital communications used during the pandemic, there is a desire to cut through the noise which a saturated digital environment has created. Physical is the key to innovating in this space. Being tactile, challenging and surprising, Royal Mail Marketreach showcases some of the most outstanding pieces and data around the responses, which when used carefully can outperform just digital alone.

In an age where everything evolves so quickly, it is fair to say no one individual is an all-around expert. They don’t exist. The ability to listen and absorb is essential, equally when dovetailing elements together to form a true progressive mixed fulfilling media delivery of your product or service.

Here at HAD-Print, we have acknowledged this from the start. The buzz words of collaboration which seem to be on the rise post-pandemic, were already within our principles well before. So we happily work with strategists, digital providers, fixed media advertising to seamlessly work together.

Print is a valuable tool in the marketing mix, the limits are your imagination.

Marketing – Back to basics

6 June 2021 Stuart Nimmo

Marketing is all about educating your customer about a product or service.

Ask any educational professional about key learning styles or methods and they will talk about Visual Auditory and Kinaesthetic (or VAK).

Over the last decade, we have seen a rush to engage digital technologies for the ease and convenience they bring. However, the rush has made us forget the key premise of how we learn. The engagement from touch, reality, which builds trust, through physically being there is missing.

The need throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to be still connected heightened the advancement of digital meetings, through zoom, teams and other platforms. We all read each other’s non-verbal language without even realising it, which has been devoid from digital platforms due to only seeing bust upwards of most participants. However, are we missing other communication receptors in this digital advancement? I know from people I have had conversations with, some have experienced zoom-burn-out, with back to back meetings, taxing the individual’s concentration to the max, through constantly staring at a small screen.

Working only with visual and auditory senses, it’s challenged us. When you think that sight is more than a small screen, hearing is more than the immediate speaker on a call. It leaves touch, which when we pick up something, a book, a pen or even a digital device, they are all crafted to evoke reactions. When we meet people we are aroused by the smell from perfume or aftershave or even fabric conditioner, the typical business meeting we’d meet for coffee or something else and we’d remember the taste and flavour of the coffee or the environment we were in. We build a picture of that moment and automatically attach it to the individual, this forming a mental picture and memories, whether favourable or not.

So are we missing a trick? Is now the time to return to being physical, leading the waive in positively creating memories? Of course, I am biased, I feed of tactile engagements, through my own experiences in print and design. Is it time to arouse the senses?

I am fortunate that I can do things differently, that I am accountable to myself. We have even before the pandemic did engagements via traditional mail, which evoked the senses. Our 2nd birthday being one example, where we partnered with CHIPP Coffee to deliver a cupping experience for our guests. The invitations featured physical real coffee beans inside a tactile (Linen textured board) gatefold (opening out from the centre) invitation. This raised a significant level of interest. Plus, once Royal Mail had processed the mail, they had also gently ground the beans to release some coffee aromas. Over the years we’ve inserted enveloped tea bags, chocolate bars and many other things to play on the wealth of sensory receptors of your audience.

The thinking overall is to think about the total experience, not just the design or the visual. In a world where marketing messages swamp us, the need to be different and pronounced and clear is paramount to achieving better results.

Cutting corners doesn’t pay…

18 April 2021 Stuart Nimmo

I know I’ve written blogs around the topics of design, useful tips and quality of reproduction before. But this seems to raise its head frequently and needless to say, things don’t change. The adage of what goes in is what comes out. Whether it be mail merge data, which hasn’t been prepared correctly, or the consistency is random; flyers that are produced without any thought to the target audience or how they will be engaged with are just a few of the many challenges to great results. The small nuances are the finer detail which is all part of what we do. Some might say it’s the 80/20 rule, but of course, it’s the last 20% that makes the difference.

So here are a few thoughts regardless of what your project is…

Planning

Failing to plan is planning to fail as the adage goes. Print is a pivotal point in a marketing cycle, being scattergun with it doesn’t help you. Having a production plan, including textual copy reviews, branding coherence, ensuring imagery is spot on, now’t worse than text saying one thing and your imagery speaking the opposite.

Know your audience

Absolutely critical, mapping this out will provide you with the key approaches to ensuring you successfully engage your decision-makers. This pen portrait will ensure you know who you are “talking to”

Use your budget wisely

This is where your 80/20 rule shows the most. Cutting corners can do more damage than the difference in the saving. Good design artwork doesn’t have to cost the earth. Good printers have experienced designers in-house. If part of something more critical, a graphic designer will add more flair to a larger project. Rule of thumb, design/artwork studio time within a print house will be £25-£35 p/hr whereas creative designers will be £40-£75 p/hr. Getting your design/artwork right will drive the results, so this is money well spent.

Ensure great reproduction

When a printer has been involved with a job from the start, if they have a good background with traditional “repro” as it was called, they will optimise images to ensure great reproduction. Or as one client called it “Sows Ear into Silk Purse”. See the blog on the Lost Art o f Repro

Print has never been as affordable

True fact, print comparatively is more affordable than it was 10-20 years ago. So don’t try haggling, you just rub the printer up the wrong way. The advent of digital print has reduced the cost of entry. However, set up fees; disk/file handling charges still apply, as it still requires someone to get your file ready for print. The downside of short-run print (small quantities) is that finishing set up costs for lamination, foiling, creasing, folding and other bindery work.

Working with a good print provider will help you to control your project costs, they will suggest ways to ensure you can measure the performance of your printed item. Printers are real-world people, with significant experience of working across media to ensure integration. Yes, you can ship your file to a big internet shed, have it squirted through a machine, and we know the chances of total satisfaction won’t be as high, a local printer does a lot more than you probably realise, above all they are human, and love engaging with people like you.