Printing cold hard cash is the preserve of governments or central banks, but what’s the next best way to “print” money?
Why, with a printing company, of course.
But that wasn’t the case with our client just over a year ago. They were established for many years and had a stable base of customers, but in a market where pricing is the number one thing that customers look at, it was hard for them to expand their revenue or customer base without triggering another price war with their competitors.
Let’s take a quick look at the printing business, and how we managed to help them increase their revenue by 5 figures a month without increasing their marketing budget at all.
There’s two methods of printing, essentially. One is digital printing, the other is called offset printing. Think of digital printing as your office or home laser printer, and when you send a document to the printer, the little print nozzle will shoot ink onto the paper. Seconds of clicking the print button on your computer screen, a copy of your screen shows up on a piece of paper. It’s fast if you want to print just one piece.
Offset printing is another beast all together. You don’t print onto paper immediately, but rather, you cut out a mold on a thin sheet of metal, and dip it in ink and stamp it onto a piece of paper. To print one single copy, or print a thousand copies, you’ll use the same mould. Thus, while a digital print may be faster if you just want to print a single copy, offset printing is faster if you want to print large quantities. Not to mention cheaper.
Now that you understand the difference between the types of printing, let’s delve into how this affects the buyers. Perhaps you’ve seen this before:
It’s a simple Venn diagram with 3 words: “Good”, “Fast” and “Cheap”.
You can have a combination of any two, but never “Good, Fast and Cheap”. So, as a business, you’ll need to know which of your products or services appeal to which type of customers.
The customers who want stuff “Cheap and Good” or “Cheap and Fast” are your bulk order customers, whereby the primary concern for them is the price. They’ll usually go for the Offset Print, as they want to print in bulk, and don’t care about the turnaround time.
The customers who will go for the “Good and Fast” are your Premium Customers. Usually they will utilise the digital print to get the cards fast, unless it’s for special types of cards.
To appeal to your bulk order customers, pricing and perceived value is important. These customers are also not the most brand loyal type of customers. So, advertising to them would have a primary focus on the cost, and giving the customers a good deal.
By switching up the marketing for your premium customers, you’ll have to find out what their pain points are, and why they have abandoned their previous vendors.
In the printing industry, premium products could refer to high quality name card, usually made for a company’s directors or executives. For premium offerings, the buyers would be looking for a wider range of materials and print types, like thick textured paper cards or plastic cards to embossed / engraved metal cards with a variety of hot stamps. Turnaround time is also important for these clients.
So, how did we help our printing client to increase their revenue?
Simple, we target different audiences for different products with different copy.
Where previously, our client was just advertising “Cheap Business Name Cards”, we went with a different route. For F&B businesses or marketing type business cards, the business owners were more concerned with price, so we lead with that. “$5 for 100 Name Cards!” or “From 5 cents per Name Card”. These tended to be bulk orders.
To target the premium customers, we lead with “Same Day Name Card Printing” or “Exclusive Metal Name Cards for CEOs”.
And we didn’t have to increase the ad budget of our client. We helped them to generate an additional 5 figure revenue with just a little understanding of their clientele, and tweaking their ad copies and audience targeting.
Best of all, these customers will continually return to our client, increasing our client’s bottomline for a long time to come.
Now, how can you benefit from a similar deep dive of your business and some small tweaks to your marketing to increase your revenue and profits? Drop us a message to find out more.
