At the core of every customer-centric business is the drive to provide solutions to consumer problems by offering a product or service. Through a purchase, a customer trusts that their investment in your business will provide them with the advertised solutions, services, or products that will do as advertised. The responsibility is on the company to ensure that these expectations are met.
Quality control is a fundamental business concept. Quality levels have to be consistent because each customer needs to be satisfied with their purchase. Repeat customers then know what kind of service and quality they will receive from you. This makes them more likely to buy again instead of looking for another company to work with. Your particular branding and style also influence if shoppers will become dedicated repeat customers and brand advocates.
From the first webpage a customer lands on to your social media presence, you want your brand voice to be clearly communicated. This same expectation should also extend to your printed marketing materials. You want each piece of information that customers receive from your business to be branded well and completed to a high-quality standard. Poorly printed materials can reflect badly on your brand and turn customers away.
What exactly are the possible negative consequences of poorly made printed marketing materials? How can you make better marketing materials? These questions, and more, will be answered in the following article.
So often, the first impression that a new customer will get of your business is off of a printed marketing tool, not a digital one. This can be a business card or a catalog they flip through at a friend's house. Flyers may be put up in a favorite local establishment, or you pay to supply brochures that would also provide information about your company. Each of these tools is that person's entry point into your company.
What if that customer picks up that business card and its floppy, or the printing of the letters is inconsistent? What if the catalog is boring, filled with dull photos, and made from cheap-feeling paper? Or, what if the text on your brochure is crooked, making it next to impossible to read? The positive first impression you could have made with this customer is ruined.
That customer may think you don't care about the impact these materials can create and will walk away with a negative perception of your business. If this is a private individual or a business owner, these small details can be what helps them decide whether or not to work with your business for small or large projects.
After all, if the only piece of information a customer has about your business is a floppy poorly-done business card. They'll think of your entire business as a reflection of that card.
Everything that represents your business should deliver a constant brand message. If you value quality and want to show customers that you're invested in every detail of your business, investing in quality printing materials is essential. There have been many examples of these mistakes preventing profitable business moves. Yet, you don't have to learn this lesson the hard way when you know your printing materials are printed to the highest quality.
You might be asking yourself, why invest in print anymore? Doesn't everyone advertise online nowadays? Despite what you might think about the boom of social media, printed marketing materials are still highly effective modes of delivering information to customers.
Recent research has been completed investigating this matter. It turns out that even younger generations are starting to consume more physical marketing material than they were a year ago. Overall, people are more likely to remember printed messaging than digital messaging, and print is still more trusted than social media campaigns.
The rising power of high-impact printing materials has enticed companies like Airbnb to make a physical magazine called the airbnbmag. Even Facebook has created a brand-new publication called, Grow. Last Christmas, Amazon sent out a physical toy catalog to certain members for their Christmas campaign for the first time ever.
While you might have expected the strength of direct mailing campaigns to fade, in fact, 90% of direct mail marketing is actually opened and seen by customers. Comparatively, only 20-30% of marketing emails get opened and seen. Using the right kind of mailers, like over-sized formats that stand out from other pieces of mail, can garner even more attention. New customers are 15% more likely to actually respond to these materials.
Alongside ensuring high-quality materials, you need to deploy the right kinds of marketing tools that get your point across. You need to use the correct formats for the best impact with incidental and on-the-field marketing activities. For example, brochures are a great way of displaying essential data to resellers and B2B clients. Flyers are an easy way to notify customers of big sales coming up.
Along with these, you can use materials like:
The very first thing that many customers see that represents your entire company is a business card. A business card is a deceptively simple tool, but these little rectangles can say a lot. According to Statistic Brain, 72% of working professionals will base their judgments of a company on the look, feel, and design of their business cards. That means, whether you use a traveling salesperson or an event marketer, your business card can define you in many ways.
Information to Include:
The best business card should include several things. It should clearly indicate the holder's or agent's name, job title, company name, and display the company logo. That's not all a business card can describe, though. A business card can also be a call to action. If you plan on handing the cards out at a specific event or time, have special cards that indicate short-time offers that may stand out in clients' minds.
Using Images:
If you decide to use images on a business card, and it is suggested you make them visually engaging, be wary about what kind of picture files you use. This depends on the original size of the file. While you can use a high-resolution JPEG or PNG file for small images on a business card, these can look blocky or blurry on printed. Another problem with using JPEGs is that it's much more difficult to guarantee the right colors will be printed out.
When choosing images, see if you can use vector files. These are scalable images that don't become pixelated when the size changes. Using vector images will ensure that your images are of the highest quality possible once printed. You can make a vector image by saving a photo or business card design in a vector-based PDF file.
Flyers are classic, eye-catching, easy to design, easy to distribute, and all-around great mediums for conveying marketing material to customers. While standard-sized 8.5" x 11" flyers are great, utilizing larger formats can also make a huge statement. To make the most use out of any flyer, there are a few simple design elements you should include, like:
Include a Clear Call to Action:
The most important part about your flyer is the call to action you're trying to get customers to follow. An easy-to-remember call to action will generate more interest in your event or sale. While a tagline that sounds cool is essential, it also has to contain all the vital information about the event you're holding. A flyer should include the date, time, information about any partners you're working with, and the event purpose.
A foldable pamphlet, also called a brochure, is a great way to deliver sales and marketing information, especially if you have a complex product or service that has many features and benefits. A brochure can make this information easy to digest by breaking it up into pieces that keep the client from getting overwhelmed. Make sure when you make a procurement you consider some of the following aspects:
Things to Consider When Building a Brochure:
Use templates and grid-based brochure template tools to make creating the perfect brochure a little easier. However, know that the more complex a fold type you go with, the more difficult it will be to design the information. During the design process, it's vital to ensure that your template stays within the boundaries of the paper you're using and won't be cut off during later trimming processes.
Need Help With Your Commercial Printing?
Catalogs and booklets are a great way to deliver a lot of content about your business to a customer or client. They can be about anything, from last year's sales numbers, new product lines, or new best practices that may bring value to a customer's life. Catalogs and booklets can also help customers use your product/service better. Catalogs are printed out uniquely, using a four-page system where the paper has to be cut and folded to create inner and outer pages.
When creating a catalog or booklet, be careful about what order you create these pages, and mind the margins. It is very easy for content to get cut off during the assembly process. Also, always ensure that you're using the highest-resolution images possible as you should in all your printed marketing materials. Out of all the materials listed here, catalogs feature the larges format pictures. These are most often the images that get blurry or blocky if low-res JPEGs or PNGs.
These are just some of the many printed marketing materials you can use to translate your intended message to customers or investors accurately. With whatever format you end up using, ensure the quality of the print truly reflects the care you put into the rest of your business. That includes ensuring that the brand messaging is consistent, brand colors are used, and that the material isn't too busy or difficult to read.
Quality control is always a crucial aspect of the business to keep track of. When you focus on net profits and aren't thinking about the quality of your products, services, or business operations, you won't achieve long-term success. Without reliable quality levels, you can't guarantee to your customers that your goods or service will be delivered consistently. That's a problem!
Suppose you're not focusing on delivering the highest quality on every level of your business, including when pursuing new printed marketing materials. In that case, you're not conveying the message that you care about quality to your customers. But this affects more than just your customers. A lack of quality can affect the morale of your entire business.
Quality affects every aspect of your business. If you don't offer quality products or services, you will lose customers at a higher rate than you can generate new ones. This also means that getting sales is more costly, as it takes more and more effort to get new clients interested in your business. When you're trying to sell something, you need to convince your shoppers that your product or service is worth their time and investment. This is true in B2B and B2C selling models.
It's not just the customers that are influenced by bad products or services. Employees and management also face moral issues if you're business isn't focused on providing quality. Personnel is less likely to put in the effort to be exceptional if your business does not embody the same values. Coupled with poor onboarding and training methods, you'll have higher levels of turnover, and the employees you do have will be less effective at their jobs. If they deal in customer service, this can also make your customers more frustrated, driving them away from your business.
Leadership can also suffer when quality is not at the center of your business. Management is what guides your business to success, helps ensure that employees understand and fulfill their roles, and coordinates daily operations. This is much harder when your business does not operate with quality control as a core principle.
What does this have to do with quality printed marketing materials? Keeping quality at the center of your business is a kind of mindset. That means every aspect of your business needs to be dedicated to crafting the best customer experience possible. If customers aren't getting a return from investing in the products or services offered by your company, this could affect your reputation.
With all these negative aspects taken in tandem, you will be creating a feedback loop of losses. Employees aren't motivated to create a valuable customer experience, and customers are unhappy with both product and service. This leads to higher return rates, fewer customers, and higher operational expenses. Even the best management solutions can't solve these problems, and bad management makes them worse.
If you do have quality assurance at the core of your business, then every aspect of operations, from the logo to final delivery, needs to embody this. That includes ensuring that your marketing materials are printed perfectly.
Printed marketing materials are not obsolete. In fact, they can make a huge impact on clients and customers alike. While some people may take good-quality printed materials for granted, bad print jobs can make a horrible first impression. That's why you must work with a trustworthy service that can take care of all your printing needs.
More than that, you should work with a company that makes crafting those marketing materials easy. If you need envelopes, letterhead, business cards, flyers, brochures, custom boxes, magazines, booklets, and even specialty items like pocket folders, FuseBox One can create them with your company branding.
Learn More About FuseBox One's Commercial Printing Services
Branding is essential to standing out from your competition. Ensuring that each element of your business, even your envelopes, are branded can make your company stand out. With the marketing management systems FuseBox One utilizes, you can create and order your printing materials 24 hours a day and seven days a week. This enables you to stay on top of your marketing materials at all times. Trust that all your offset printing needs will be done when you need them at the professional quality level you expect.
With these tools, you can even track your project through all the stages of development, so you can be sure that all your marketing efforts are coordinated. FuseBox One can even facilitate the delivery of marketing materials to residential or business addresses of clients. Any information you store with FuseBox One is always kept secure. All programs conform to top-of-the-line security protocols like PII, PHI, PCI and are HIPPA compliant.
There used to be a time when it was clear that digital marketing techniques were becoming more effective than direct mailing. However, as email marketing has become more common and spam efforts have gotten increasingly aggressive, people are more likely to delete an email that they weren't expecting to receive. Most won't even open those emails, let alone consider what you're offering them!
With printed marketing tools that you can send to customers, you are much more likely to get your ad in front of other people and get that material seen than you are through an email. That's why so many companies are not returning to direct mail, which worked for decades and continues to be an effective marketing method.
FuseBox One is a multilevel platform that supports marketing and sales enablement programs. High-quality printing services are just one of the many solutions FuseBox One offers, but they can help ensure that all your printing needs are completed to brand-compliant standards. From the most significant printing projects to the smallest ones, get the materials you need when you need them. From template creation to delivery, you can track the process and create the marketing coordination you need to make successful marketing strategies.
To be the best in your industry, stand out, and strive for new levels of success, you need to embody a quality customer experience. This includes ensuring your branding and marketing deliver this message to customers and that your product, employees, and management can deliver on these products. Creating this message takes consistent effort, but the possible rewards are well worth the energy.
Make crafting the perfect brand image a little easier when you work with FuseBox One services, which offer sales enablement, marketing, distributing, and printing capabilities. Each one of these services works to provide you with all the information you need to operate more effectively and make the best business strategies.
Craft high-quality printing materials that target your key demographics with the wording and imagery to inspire them. This is done with ease when you use FuseBox One's printing services, which make crafting and delivering printed marketing materials a breeze. Always ensure that your marketing materials are brand compliant, clear images, on a high-quality paper stock that fits your needs perfectly. Even track the progress of your projects with built-in project management tools.
To make the most of your printing marketing materials and find out how FuseBox One can help you solve your marketing dilemmas. Reach out to one of our experts and schedule a demo to see if these solutions are right for you.
Sources:
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/four-ways-quality-can-affect-company-2254.html
https://www.magicinkjet.com/print-quality-issues/
https://modernlitho.com/2012/10/6-reasons-why-print-is-an-important-part-of-your-marketing-efforts/
https://www.kmslitho.co.uk/the-importance-of-quality-printed-marketing-materials/
https://www.mimeo.com/blog/design-print-marketing/