Using marketing tactics to differentiate – and grow – your business

Colin Sinclair McDermott – The Online Print Coach.

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As a print services provider (PSP), you know your craft – but how well do you know your customers? In addition to excellent product quality and customer service, you need to add marketing to your skills portfolio. Effective marketing will help you elevate your brand, connect with new and existing customers, build lasting relationships and grow your business.

Colin Sinclair McDermott is a fully certified business coach with the World Association of Business Coaches and one of the very few to focus specifically on the printing industry. He is also the creator of the industry online training platform and community, ‘Print Mastermind’. As a business coach, he has helped hundreds of print business owners – just like you – to grow and future-proof their businesses. In this press release, Kemtek will be sharing some of his insights and advice on marketing for PSPs.

In the same way that trying to compete only on price can be a mistake, marketing activities without an underlying strategy are unlikely to be successful. Instead, you need a plan.

Kemtek has engaged with McDermott so that the company can bring you advice on how to get better at this essential task; crucially, marketing success begins with knowing your customer. A useful tactic here is to create one or more customer avatars or buyer personas, and considering what they want or need from a PSP.

This exercise results in more precisely targeted marketing campaigns and messaging, rather than ‘one size fits all’ marketing. The disadvantages of generic marketing include wasted budget and an inability to assess its effectiveness.

Instead, decide what you are best at – what sets you apart – and then identify the customers most in need of what you offer. Each customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer and serves as a tool to help you align your marketing messaging with what your chosen audience wants to hear. Unless your business is particularly specialist or niche, you are unlikely to only have one type of customer. Instead, you will need to create a customer avatar for each type of client, to ensure that you are speaking to each of them.

These are the questions you need to be asking: who are your customers? What are their pain points? What do they want? What are their key motivations and deal breakers?

You can then get into the specifics of their requirements, in terms of budgets, turnaround times and level of quality. Knowing the answers to all these questions will help to guide your marketing efforts by enabling you to focus on communicating your ability to meet their key purchase drivers (for example, expertise, a streamlined process or timeous delivery).

You can then adjust or pivot your marketing messaging to position your PSP as providing the solutions that your customers need, and that they are willing to pay for. Ultimately, your marketing efforts will be judged on the returns they generate and whether they show results.

In addition to creating accurate customer avatars, you also need to consider the journey that each customer will undertake as a result of your marketing activities, from knowing about your brand and offering to – ultimately – advocating on your behalf; that is, word of mouth or peer-to-peer marketing. A systematic approach to this journey will help you convert prospects into long-term customers, as they move from awareness to consideration to conversion.

This is a particularly powerful way to differentiate your company and convince customers to engage with you. By posting or sharing an engaging mix of value-added content (original and shared, ideally in an 80:20 ratio) you can demonstrate expertise, engage in mutually beneficial conversations and inspire action.

Content marketing has the power to keep your company top of mind and, in a digital context (online and on social media), it can make your PSP easier to find. As with all marketing efforts, you should focus on transformation rather than transactions; be generous, share your expertise and build trust.

LinkedIn in particular can be a great way to reach new customers. Research suggests that the majority of the purchase decision is made before a customer actually engages with you, so choosing the right platform to post your content is vital. Once you are active on social media (and if you are not already there, you need to be), it’s important to actively manage your online community and to respond to all comments and reactions.

As with all marketing, social media works best when you make it about your customers rather than about you. Ultimately, the secret to elevating your brand and growing your business is targeting your marketing at the right customers, sharing valuable information and sticking to a clear content and messaging strategy that will differentiate your PSP from your competitors.

For more advice on marketing your PSP, contact Kitty Mhlongo on (+27) 011 624 8000 or by e-mail at kittym@kemtek.co.za.

You can learn more about The Online Print Coach here: https://www.theonlineprintcoach.com/.