Multi-media Marketing – A Witches’ Brew

Printers have always been multi-media providers, no matter how you define media. For years, printers have been using a range of media—supplies, paper, consumables, etc.—and linking the processes of prepress (now pre-media), print, postpress, bindery, folding, and distribution into a mix based on a predefined success formula.

A key to the success some printers have had—the printer’s witches’ brew—has been the mixer’s ability to control the ingredients and provide a dimensional differentiation of your enterprise to the many different verticals you have planned to target.

A component of print’s past success and the key to its future success is it serving as part of the IMC mix, a mix over which printers often have little control. IMC—which can mean either integrated marketing communications or ingredient-based marketing communications—is the perfect byproduct of emerging technologies and media convergence, and the near perfect cauldron or mixing bowl.

Many printers, large and small and the balance in-between, have been successful because they have selected the ingredients that best supported their skill set and their clients’ requirements. This mixing of media and marketing colors into a new rainbow of services and is now more important than ever before. You need to determine what your end color (colors is more like it) is and what ingredients you have on hand or need to acquire to achieve this “colorful” goal. Your desired color or colors is your plan for profit advocacy, including your services, skills, reputation, longevity, user experience, and a few others that YOU must define.

Look at it this way—in a complex and ever-changing marketplace, clients/customers are looking to decouple and at the same time bundle services. The correct mixing of your list of services and how you can offer those services can gain you deep access to new work and help you enter the winner’s circle.