Three Tips for Keeping an Active Blog

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In today’s digital age, a company’s blog could easily become one of its most successful marketing tools.  The next time you are out somewhere in public take a look around you.  How many people are passing time waiting in line, taking a walk, or simply sitting down with their noses and fingers buried in their cell phones or mobile devices?  These people could be consumers researching a product or service they are interested in buying.  Wouldn’t it be great if they were researching your product or service in their spare time?

What steps can you take to be sure your company’s blog stays active and helps you market your products or services?

  1. Schedule it:  Marketing your company’s products or services has the ability to make or break your business.  Blogging is a great way to get word of mouth about your products or services out there.  Make your blog a priority every single day.  Every aspect of your business can be an inspiration, from new products or services to money saving tips.  Keep your customers informed and intrigued.

  2. Maintain a Fresh Collection of Topic Ideas:  Here is where being in touch with your customer’s needs can put you light years ahead of your competition.  Your customer service representatives are your best to start.  Find out what questions and concerns are most popular with your customers.  Consider picking a few items and expand them on a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.  Monitoring similiar businesses is important too.  Considering reading other industry blogs or setting up Google Alerts to help you keep up with new industry trends.

  3. Consider Hiring a Writer:  Writing is not something that comes easy to everyone.  Yes, it is very important to be informative, but you also need to keep your audience’s attention.  If you find that you cannot keep people informed, yet entertained, perhaps it is time to consider hiring a professional writer.  An informative and professional looking website or blog can ensure repeat visitors, and perhaps even repeat customers.

Are Bindery Services Worth The Investment?

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Full-time staff at excellent bindery service companies are skilled at quickly performing graphic arts binding and print finishing solutions. You’ll actually find lower expenses when using professional bindery experts because your temporary employees often make errors and waste materials simply because of the learning curve for each custom project. Small companies literally do save money partnering with other companies for operations they need occasionally, rather than hiring another full-time staff member with all the benefits. Bindery outsourcing is not only a cost savings, but you have a guarantee the job will be ready when you need it, and the result is a perfect product.

A bindery specialist company provides professional finishing for any type of document or print media.

  • First-time perfect binding
  • Spiral and wire-O punch and binding
  • Crisp folding service when needed
  • Die cutting, perforations, and scoring
  • Hand-work, fulfillment, packet assembly
  • Saddle stitching, finish over-stitching on fine work
  • Perfect touch, clean gluing
  • Assembly like in pocket folders and professional packets
  • Precision laminating

Managing the bindery staff on a daily basis is a perfect method of operations control. We also take precautions when selecting a team for each project, they are screened and trained for specialized skills because our employees are the hands-on difference that insure your finished orders look exceptional every time.

Need Help Fast?

Give our friendly and professional marketing and customer care staff a call to discuss options like bound flip-books, homeschooling materials, any custom print work assembly, seminar workbooks, family tree booklets, bulk order reports, analysis or power point follow-along reports, custom cookbooks, or glossy print catalogs. We can service all of your multiple media bindery needs! Just get in touch with our team!

How Printers Can Improve Their Marketing Efforts

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Marketing materials, especially for franchised companies with a strong online presence, is important to the branding of your merchandise with your name and logo. An online store for your marketing materials is no longer a convenience for your clients but a necessity and expectation. There are plenty of companies that specialize in such sites to make management of your online store quick and simple without need to hire an in house employee specifically to fill that role.

Latka Communications is one such company with a proven track record of success with filling the needs of company marketing materials and the handling of their orders. They specialize in providing your custom printing solutions, with custom printed items from newsletters to books. Items can be published to your website, or mailed in physical form directly to a client or to a retail storefront. This service allows you to focus on your own job of running the company successfully while we take care of the daily chore of providing these solutions to your clients.

The solution should be simple to use and easy to explain, with affordable set up to get your online store up and running. Latka Communications makes your job easier by accounting for shipping logistics by incorporating shipping with confirmation, verifying placement of an order through email, and allowing for re-order and replenishment purchases based on your client’s use of the product. Billing is customizable according to your company’s needs.

Latka Communications offers the perfect service for your online site service of marketing materials. Visit the website to see these most commonly offered features along with more detailed descriptions of customization options. By incorporating and using their knowledge and experience you can help your company increase profits through online sales.

Improving Response Rates from Your Mailing Campaigns

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Mailing campaigns are an important marketing and advertising strategy, but it can become too costly when response rates are low.  To improve response rates for your mailing campaign, follow these easy tips.

Find Your Target Audience

Because mailers are not the cheapest form of marketing, it is crucial to find your target audience. When mailers are sent to the right people at the right time, they are highly effective at creating leads or sales. Sending out fewer mailers to highly targeted audience will often have better response results than sending out higher volumes of mailers to a poorly targeted audience.

Consider Using Postcards

Mail that has to be opened is often thrown away before the recipient has a chance to see what great offer awaits them. The advantage of using a postcard is that all the information you want to convey is readily available.

Make a Response Easy

People prefer to respond to mail offers in different ways so make every option available. Include a form for a mail response, a phone number, a web address for online responses and an invitation to any social media sites you use.

Use Easy-to-Understand Language

Because a mailer is a paper version of a sales person, the tone should be conversational. Avoid using technical terms or industry jargon in order to make the recipient feel comfortable with your offer.

Highlight the Benefits of Your Product

Emphasize what is most important to the potential customer. Make it very clear what solutions your product or offer have for the customer. People generally are not interested in anything that does not directly benefit them.

Track Your Efforts

To continually improve your response rates, make sure you are thoroughly tracking each mailing campaign. Use the data to find trends and learn what works and what doesn’t.

5 Simple Tips for Improving Landing Page Conversion Rates

Every small business needs a website, but it’s important to make sure that people who find your website use it to become your customers.  In most cases, great graphics aren’t going to make them make a purchase.  These five strategies, however, have been shown to increase conversion rates.

 

  1. Have an e-mail newsletter sign-up.  Signing up for the company newsletter means that your viewers will be reminded about your company on a regular basis.
  2. Offer a printable coupon.  Having a coupon that customers have to print out will get them to come into your physical location, and you’ll be able to keep track of your conversion rates manually.  If you sell online, give a coupon code.  Ideally, tailor each code to your different landing pages.
  3. Offer a flash or lightening deal.  If people think that a deal is going away, they’ll be a lot more likely to take a risk with a new product or business.  Of course, make sure that you can handle the quick surge in orders that these deals tend to produce.
  4. Make it easy to contact your business.  If your business relies on selling a new product or customization, you want to make sure that new customers can easily reach you.  Prominently display your phone number and e-mail address, and make sure that both are answered promptly.
  5. Keep it relevant to their search terms.  The most important aspect of a landing page is that the people who find it should be interested in your product or service.  Simply attracting everyone with a general interest will lead to a lot of people taking a quick look and leaving.

Targeted, Personalized, and Web-To-Print Expected to Grow Fastest

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In order to grow your business, targeting marketing practices is extremely important. The more personal the advertisement, the greater the chance of the information landing home with the potential customer. In order to do this, utilizing different forms of marketing is key. One of the fastest growing methods for performing this action, especially at the local level is through a Web to print (also known as Web 2 Print) format. This method of marketing uses both traditional, print based marketing and Internet based options in order to best reach a perspective client.

The fact of the matter is some people respond better to local advertisements they receive in the mail while others are more likely to interact with an ad they see on their social media account. Due to this, it is very important for any business to obtain and source their information and use variable data they receive in order to convert their Internet visitors and possible clients into print recipients of marketing material, which can help drive sales up through the roof.

With the help of Web to print marketing, a company can obtain all of the specific information they need o a key demographic, ranging from the products they are more likely to purchase to the kinds of services they like. From there, they can alter their print marketing campaign and send out the mailers, posters or other marketing material directly to the customers. This way, the company uses the benefits of the Internet while producing the close, personal material of a traditionally produced marketing campaign. With the utilization of both of these formats, it is possible to take advantage of all of the different benefits and services available and to also grow the company faster than ever thought possible.

Cross-Selling Your Marketing Campaigns

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When it comes to increasing the bottom line of your business, cross-selling is one of the first places to look. It’s commonly accepted that it’s far more expensive to win new customers than to retain existing ones – up to 7x more expensive, according to Kiss Metrics – and so getting your current customers to spend more becomes an attractive alternative.

To persuade people who already do business with you to buy more of what you sell, certain marketing considerations need to be taken into account to make the most of the opportunity.

Learn Where Cross-Selling Works: Not all of your products or services will be suitable to suggest associated items that the customer might also want. Take care to market only those that make sense as a combination, and be sure to test those assumptions against actual sales figures.

Pick Your Channels Carefully: Some marketing channels lend themselves more to cross-selling than others, depending on your brand and the industry you serve. Try them all, but only keep those that you can prove drive a bigger spend.

Target to the Correct Customers: There are some customers who simply aren’t a good fit for broader sales. Certain types of returning customer can actually cause you to lose money, so it’s important to target only the right ones, as this Harvard Business Review article explains.

Don’t Ignore the Data: If your sales figures say that certain campaigns aren’t working, don’t be afraid to pull the plug. Your efforts are better spent on those that spike your sales, and ineffective cross-selling runs the risk of alienating customers.

 

Done well, cross-selling can be the perfect antidote to a slow sales period. Just make sure you’ve targeted correctly and keep testing to prove your tactics are truly working.

Common Email Marketing Mistakes

An email marketing campaign should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. However, an email marketing campaign needs to be done right or you might as well have not bothered to do one at all.

The emails you send to your customers, and your potential customers, are the face of your business. In most cases, your emails are what your customers see the most because they will generally receive your emails more often then they will visit your facility or your website. Therefore, your emails must convey your message in a way that will grab your customers attention and keep them coming back for more.

There are several common mistakes that many email marketers make. Here are the most common email mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

1. Not Using Attention Grabbing Subject Lines

The first thing your customer will see when they receive an email from you will be the subject line. If the subject line doesn’t grab their attention, your customer will likely not even bother to open it. A great way to deliver attention grabbing subject lines is to scour the emails you’ve received, then make a swipe file to record the subject lines that you found most effective. You can then use that swipe file to help create the subject lines for your future email campaigns.

2. Unorganized Email Content

Not only do you need to provide your customers with high quality, engaging content, but you also need to include a hyper-linked table of contents at the top of all your emails. People are busy and many of them don’t have time to read a lengthy email. A hyper-linked table of contents will help your customers navigate directly to the part of your content they want to read. This will help keep you from losing readers due to them not wanting to read the entire email just to get the one piece of information they need.

Additionally, you should always use sub-headings, numbered lists and bullet points to make your emails easier to read. And always make sure your emails are optimized so they can be easily read on mobile devices.

3. Not Including A Strong Call-To-Action

You spent all that time researching an engaging topic for your email, writing out an attention grabbing subject line and the content you thought your customers would enjoy. Then you spent more time formatting your email in a way that would be visually appealing. So why did you do all that? Because you want to keep a customer and hopefully make a sale – right? If you want to make a sale or achieve a specific customer response, you must include an effective call-to-action. If you don’t tell your customers exactly what it is you want them to do, they won’t do it.

Do you want your customer to:

“CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR DISCOUNT”

or

“SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER TO RECEIVE YOUR COUPON”

Whatever action you want your customer to take, you have to tell them exactly what it is you want them to do – if you want them to do it.

Four Ways To Make Your Printed Colleteral Stand Out

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Even in the digital age mailboxes are flooded with flyers, trade shows are filled with brochures and desks are covered with business cards. In a sea of paper, is your print collateral getting noticed, or is it getting tossed into a recycling bin without being read?

 

Create a Visual Identity

 

Have you ever looked at someone and remembered their face but not their name? While it would be wonderful it every potential customer remembered your business the first time they “met” you, it doesn’t usually work that way. Most people need repeated exposure to your marketing materials before they act. Consistent branding is the memorable face of your business. Your printed collateral should work as a unit, along with your online presence, rather than as individual pieces. The most basic way to create a visual identity is to prominently display your logo on each piece of collateral. In addition, repeat the same color scheme, fonts and overall feel. While it seems counterintuitive to stand out by staying the same, a consistent brand helps consumers recognize you in the flood of information they see each day.

 

Less Is More

 

From your mission statement to your upcoming sale, there are dozens of things you want a potential customer to know. It’s tempting to try to squeeze them all in while you have the opportunity. But, no one wants to read a wall of text. Print collateral that is crowded, boring and text heavy will likely get overlooked. Decide on a clear message for each piece of print collateral and drill it down to it’s most basic. Make text easy to skim by using bullet points and simple, casual language. Then, use larger, bold fonts to emphasize the key words and ideas. Surround it all with ample white space and you have a message that people actually want to read.

 

Get Graphic

 

Words aren’t the only way to communicate; photos and graphics often speak louder. Charts and graphs are here to stay, but infographics are the trendiest way to both grab attention while also communicating large amounts of information. Photos are also an important way to command attention and highlight your message. But, skip the stock photography since it is instantly recognizable as being generic. Instead, use high quality, professional photographs taken at your business or of your products.

 

Consider the Paper

 

While what you say and how you say it is important, so is what you say it on. Basic paper and cardstock is fine, but not likely to capture attention. Make your printed materials feel special by using textured, recycled or glossy paper, vellum or even fabric. Think outside the box and go beyond basic square and rectangular shapes. Why not try and unexpected round poster or a die-cut brochure? Also, dark paper with white print is sure to garner attention in a stack of plain white mail.

Web Design 101: The Basics

Every successful business knows that a website is the gateway to making online sales happen. Yet few understand what is involved with the creation of a website. Understanding the basics allows you to know what to place on the web page that will appeal to your readership to entice them to become loyal customers.

Web design is broken down into 3 main categories: layout, written content, and graphics. Each part needs to complement each other and have a continuous flow so that visitors are engaged at every angle. Here are a few basic tips for each category.

Layout

The layout controls the flow of the entire website design. It will also control what graphics, advertising and written text is on the page. Before you choose a layout, you have to decide how the visitor will be viewing the page. What is the most important sections that you would like the visitor’s eyes to go to first? How do you want the visitor to interact with the page? Choose a simple layout and build onto it, leaving white space so visitors have an easier time viewing all of the content.

Written Content

Whether you will be writing in detail about all your services or providing snappy captions to a product page, the written content is what will entice the visitor to read more of what you have to offer. Engaging and original content focused on what the visitors want, not what topics you want to read about, is vital to have a successful web page according to TechRadar.

Also, avoid the common mistake of using multiple fonts for headers, subheaders and text. Too many fonts just hurts the eyes and makes the content confusing. Select 2 to 3 different fonts and stick to them — Sans-Serif and Serif are popular ones because they are easy to read on different size screens.

Graphics

Graphics help break up large blocks of text, making the content easier to read. Keep in mind that the larger the graphic size, the longer it will take for the page to load. This issue can affect people with slower broadband speeds. Stick with smaller graphics that fits in with the content of your page.