Print Shop Survival Tips

Here's a summary of a piece we created based on our interaction with many struggling print shops. See all 10 tips...
 

Small and Quick Print Shop Survival Tips

Live in the digital age – There’s no future living in the past. The printing process, market, customers and competition...

Know the competition – Digital technology enables your competition. Electronic media competes...

Be careful about commodities – Products are commodities when only price and delivery drive the buying decision. Competing for low-price...

Forget the “magic bullet” – There’s no software, hardware, gadget or gizmo that will miraculously improve your business. If there were a magic bullet...

Use small & quick to your advantage – Large competitors are limited to offering cookie-cutter products and solutions. Leverage your knowledge...

Head for your blue ocean – A thousand print shops go out of business each year because they were swimming in a red ocean. Understand why...

Break the rules for products & services – You’re in the communications solutions business: printing is just one of your tools. Skip convention...

Embrace data (information) – Data is crucial for your customers: communicating, analyzing audiences, spotting trends, etc. Simply talking...

Market your print shop – Customers can't buy anything from you if they don't know you exist. Market your print shop to make it easy for potential...

Make selling fun – Selling commodity print work is painful. Selling communication solutions like a consultant, however, can be fun. Learn...

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Talk Data to Me

Don’t get this confused with the 1980 adult comedy, “Talk Dirty to Me”. 

You should consider talking “data” to your customers. The industry experts have finally started to address an issue we’ve identified for years…data and communications are inseparable.

Your customers can’t communicate with or keep track of their customers, donors, supporters, etc. without data. Customer data can be simple such as mailing, email and contact lists or more sophisticated such as CRMs, donor software or custom datasets.

Moreover, data tends to be dynamic. Contacts come and go. People make purchases, donations, inquiries, etc. At some point, all data needs to be cleansed, merged, de-duped, sorted, formatted, appended, enhanced or some or all of these.

Where do your customers go when they need help with their data? Many don’t go anywhere. They muddle along with poor data…with inefficient data…with some data they can’t use. You have customers wanting help with their data or ideas to use their data more effectively. Why don’t you help them?

Learn some basic data-related terminology and you’re ready to start talking about data with your customers. What type of data (e.g. mailing lists, CRMs, etc.) are they using? How do they expand and maintain their data? Who does that? How do they do it? Do they have any problems with their data? Are there things they want do but can’t? You get the idea.

What makes this so simple is that you let experts do the actual data work for you. Send the data and the customers’ requirements to the experts who use their expertise and software and send the improved data back to you. Have any questions about data, they have the answers. What’s more, there’s no software to buy or learn.

You’ll be surprised by some of the reactions you get when you starting talking about data with your customers. Some of your customers will have been waiting a long time to have that discussion. They’ll start by telling you all of the problems they have and what they want to do (or can’t do) with their data. In reality, what they are doing is explaining all of the opportunities they have for you. Don’t worry. You don’t have to answer any questions on the spot and you always have your experts backing you up.

Being a data solutions provider (DSP) immediately sets you apart from the competition. Customers will never again look at you as simply a print vendor. Data is integral to both print and electronic communications – broadening your business opportunities. Few, if any, of your competitors will offer data solutions because the vast majority of them can’t. 

When you’re ready to start talking data, give us a call…we’re your data experts.

www.printshopmarketing.com

www.ez-vdp.com

Talking Data

Print Shop Rescue

If you haven’t seen it, Bar Rescue on the Spike channel provides a great business lesson for print shop owners. All the rescued bars are hemorrhaging huge amounts of cash and are within months of failure because the owners did one thing…they forgot to provide value and satisfaction to their customers.

Value and satisfaction are ever-changing qualities. They change because customers change, products change, technologies change, expectations change…lots of things change. To be successful, businesses must change. Bars and print shops must change in order to continue delivering the value and satisfaction customers demand

In Bar Rescue, you’ll see that regardless how cheap the liquor may be (value), few customers want to frequent a bar that smells like a urinal and is full of jerks and morons (satisfaction)…especially if those jerks and morons are running the bar. We aren’t suggesting print shop owners might be jerks or morons or smell like a… no, we would say anything like that.

We suggest, however, print shop owners assess whether they are providing value and satisfaction to their customers. If the business bank account isn’t full, that might be a sign it’s time for self-assessment. Many small and quick printers are struggling these days…and in need of a “print shop” rescue.

National and online competitors (e.g. Staples, Vistaprint and UPS Stores) have redefined the print market by substantially raising the bar for value and satisfaction. Prices for print jobs look like paper being sold by the pound. Tons of free templates, 24/7 online ordering, convenient store locations and printing-while-you-wait provide extremely satisfying experiences that are hard for small and quick printers to replicate.

Just as in Bar Rescue, print shop owners need to look at their customers and competitors and decide how to provide value and satisfaction to customers better than the competition. This frequently means having a slightly different focus to avoid head-to-head competition that would be costly or impossible to win. Customers have varying views and expectations of value and satisfaction…one likes beers and burgers while another likes martini’s and gourmet stuff. Some print customers want cheap, cheap printing while others want advice, ideas and solutions.

In the fantasy Print Shop Rescue, the star of the program yells at the print shop owner to start offering valuable, print-related products and services that the competitors don’t offer. The print

shop owner ends up being pounded verbally into a compliant, quivering mass. At this point, the star brings in all the professionals to train the print shop owner and the staff how to have a winning business.

We’re professionals and we don't yell (most of the time)…Print Shop Marketing & EZ-VDP services