Case Studies

It’s out of your hands now—your brochure, that is. Whether you’ve just handed it to a curious prospect, mailed it to your target audience, or shipped a hundred stacks to be displayed near and far, that simple fold of paper is off to reel in a boatload of shiny new clients—or turn them away entirely. Good news: You don’t have to leave your fate to chance. Creating an excellent brochure doesn’t have to be daunting or difficult. These tips are sure to help shake those brochure blues and instill the confidence you need (and deserve!) each time a prospect picks up that special little leaflet. Know Your Business A brochure is a perfect way to efficiently and strategically communicate the features, values, and successes of your business. Make the most of your print space by prioritizing key information. What’s imperative for your prospects to know? What distinguishes you from your competitors? How can your product, service, or event positively impact that set of brochure-reading eyes? A well-defined purpose is the difference between a good and poor brochure. Your message must be concise, captivating, and clear. On the flip side, you’ll also need a thorough understanding of your target market. What is your ideal customer looking for, and how will your business fulfill that want or need? Strategic planning and client profiling are classic approaches to answering these questions. If you’re struggling with marketing solutions, we’ll help you focus your efforts and define your target market; from there, the perfect brochure begins taking form! Less Is More No need to suffocate your brochure and stuff every last corner with information. In fact, doing so could cause more harm than good. Your brochure’s appearance is as equally important as its contents. Skip the clutter: white space is your friend. Don’t run the risk of distracting your reader from the bread and butter of your brochure; instead, visually guide them to the good stuff with a comprehensive yet compelling design. Align the existing aesthetics of your brand with the design of your brochure. This includes your business’s favored font, color schemes, logos, and imagery. Find creative ways to draw attention with your brochure without straying too far from your core look. Everybody loves neon bubble letters and emojis… But if they’re not typical for your brand, scrap the gaudy elements. Like it or not, people are going to judge your business by its brochure cover. Give them a taste of what you’ve got to offer and entice them to read on. Use a stellar image or captivating quote to hammer home your message and purpose. Struggling to visualize your cover? Have a look at our portfolio for some inspiration. Premier Printing Convenience shouldn’t take precedence over quality, especially when you’re dealing with an impactful component of your print marketing strategy. Translation: Please don’t print your brochures on the office copier. Leave the printing process to the experts (hint: that’s us!). We’ll start by choosing the right paper. From there, we offer a multitude of design enhancements, including trimming, lamination, die-cutting, and foiling. Your brochures will be printed just the way you dreamed: no inconsistencies, and no shortcuts—just exceptional print products that you’ll be proud to distribute to your prospects. Beware: Your flawless design can be sabotaged by a lousy print job. You can’t afford to settle for sloppy folds, patchy ink, or lousy paper that crumples in your client’s hands. Consider how your marketing materials reflect your business. Strive to make these small experiences exceptional—you’ll be sure to reap the rewards. Ready, Set, Go You now have the keys to unlock that perfect brochure template. You know your target market and your company’s message like the back of your hand. You’ve got a sleek, succinct design that encompasses the best of what you’ve got to share. Your beautiful brochure has been printed to perfection and is ready to head out into the great unknown. It’s out of your hands. But following these tips will make parting with your brochure a lot easier. Contact Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing company today to learn more about how Advertisers Printing can help you accomplish all of your marketing material print needs.

We’ve talked before about how to track the success of your direct mail, but tracking success assumes you’re setting yourself up for success. How do you ensure you’re sending out the best material to your prospects? As a follow-up to our Direct Mail guide, today we’re distilling many years of industry experience into five principles of great direct mail for you to incorporate into your next campaign. 1. Define Your Goal This may seem trivial, but nothing will help you more than defining the goal of your direct mail campaign. First, answer what this campaign is supposed to do: Do you want new customers in your store? Do you want more visits to your website? Do you want to set phone appointments? How many new leads/customers/signups do you look to gain from this campaign? Defining your goal also defines the other parameters of your campaign: Who do you want to attract? What messaging will resonate with your target audience? What is your call to action? Having a carefully crafted campaign goal will serve as an outline for the copy and design of your mailer. Don’t skimp out with loosely-defined goals or fuzzy numbers. Set some hard deadlines, some defined engagement numbers, a specific audience, and the foundation to a strong CTA. Remember: you can track direct mail! 2. Keep Copy Simple No one wants to read an essay condensed into the size of a postcard, unless it’s actually a postcard from a loved one. Keep your copy simple, to the point. Augment what little copy you have with the design, and be sure to highlight your call to action. Bonus: the less copy you have, the better your call to action needs to be. You’re looking to remove as many “reasons to say no” as possible. This means the action needs to be simple, quick, and most importantly, worth it. Put yourself in the place of your prospects and answer: “What’s in it for me?” 3. Personalize It Direct mail, just like email, can be personalized per delivery. Don’t shy away from tailoring your messaging to specific people or to subsections of your target audience. With variable data solutions, you can change anything and everything about your direct mail! So when crafting your messaging strategy, feel free to throw in some extra personalization that will speak to each prospect. 4. Invoke the Senses Direct mail, unlike digital marketing, has the added benefit of touch! This one requires some extra creativity and maybe a bit more budget, but it can really help your mailer stand out. Think crinkles, soft, fluffy, or metallic. Even consider the weight of paper you use. A pleasant touch sensation can make all the difference when it comes to interacting, reacting, and engaging with your direct mail. 5. Follow Up Just like any digital campaign, always follow up with prospects. One-and-done mailers just don’t cut it. Your numbers by the third or fourth follow-up will be drastically better than your first touch. You can also do your follow-ups online! With multi-channel direct mail, you can track when your mail goes out to prospects and follow up with an email or even social media accounts for retargeting or promotional offers. There’s no limit to the power of direct mail when you get creative. At Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing Company, we’re well versed with direct mail. If you need help with your campaign or aren’t sure where to start, let us know and we’ll be happy to help you take your direct mail from concept to execution.

Sometimes all a prospect needs is a gentle reminder of your product or service in order for them to convert. Maybe they visited your page yesterday or even a week ago, but with the hustle and bustle of busy lives, it’s easy to forget. Retargeting is a great way to give them that nudge they need. In fact, this recent report shows that 26% of customers will return to a company’s website after they see a retargeting ad. While we typically consider retargeting ads to be an online-only marketing tactic, you can actually send direct mail retargeting ads, too. When part of a more comprehensive marketing strategy, direct mail as retargeting becomes a powerful tool. Let’s take a closer look at how print retargeting works, as well as how it can help you more easily convert prospects into customers. How Retargeting Works On the digital side, retargeting is simple: companies place “cookies” on their website that track a user’s habits. If the user leaves without making a purchase, the company can then match that person to their social media or email account and deliver a relevant ad within minutes of them leaving the site. This process is similar for a print follow-up—the major difference is that the retargeting ad will arrive in the user’s mailbox about 24–48 hours later, not within minutes. Once the prospect leaves your website, a third-party resource can help you identify the correct mailing address for that person based on a network of other opt-in cookies. While you can try to manage this process on your own with analytics, many services exist to help take the hassle out of checking campaign results and then physically dropping the ad in the mail. One such company has reported that direct mail retargeting can lead to conversion rates of around 40%; this result is measured by the actions taken based on your mailer (e.g., visit the website, call the phone number, etc.). Why Direct Mail? Given how much technology has begun to run our daily lives, you might think that the age of print media is over. However, it’s not—not by a long shot. In fact, with an excess of emails in your inbox and digital ads vying for your attention on every website, we’re in an age of digital overload. Because of this, direct mail becomes a vital opportunity to make a positive impact on your prospects without being part of the everyday tech overload. After all, most people love getting mail—it’s a welcomed reprieve from their crowded digital inboxes. And since most people only receive a handful of direct mail pieces rather than hundreds of emails a day, you have a much better chance of getting your prospect’s attention with a postcard than an email. That said, designing the right eye-catching direct mail ad is an important part of your retargeting strategy. While you take yourself out of the digital overload, you still need to wow your prospects to easily convert them into customers. A Multi-Touch Strategy The truth is, your marketing strategy will work best using multiple levels of contact. To be most successful, you must develop an integrated, multi-touch strategy that reaches your prospects where they are: both online and in person. By sending reminders of your business in both print and online media, you significantly increase the chances that they will finish what they started on your website. All of this is easier said than done, though, so it helps to have a print marketing specialist in your pocket to ensure your success. At Advertisers Printing, we’re not just content with being a commercial printer—we can help you every step of the way. From idea conception to printing, we make sure you achieve your business goals. Contact Advertiser Printing, a St. Louis Printing company today for more information on how print-based retargeting ads can bolster your marketing strategy.

Every designer knows that each piece contains an equal amount of blood, sweat, and tears. Designs don’t come easy, regardless of their simplicity—you spend time contemplating them and testing a few options before you even come close to the finished product. And with all this hard work in place, the last thing you need is to discover that the printed version of your design falls flat. How could this be? The reality is that graphic design printing to match its digital original is no easy feat. It requires the digital version to be created in a certain format, as well as finding a printer who understands the limitations of the printing process. If you plan to print your design, you need to consider a few things before you even begin the creative process. A design made for solely digital purposes will be created in a different way than one meant for print. If your design isn’t printing the way you hoped it would, consider the design elements below to ensure that your design prints in the picture-perfect format you desire. Print Resolution Simply by the nature of how digital works, your design may look fantastic on your screen regardless of the resolution. Unfortunately, this is not the same for print, and it’s important to use the highest print resolution possible when printing your graphic design. For print, you need to make sure you are using the correct dots per inch, or DPI. This process basically tells the printer how many dots to create per square inch of paper. Setting your resolution to 300 DPI is usually the standard to ensure a high-quality printed product. You should consult with your printer to see if they recommend another resolution, but 300 DPI will most likely get you where you need to be. Print Colors When creating digital designs, you’re likely using the RGB color system. This provides a broad range of colors to choose from; however, printers use the CMYK system. You must set your print color preferences to CMYK before beginning your design—that way, you’re not scrambling to match colors once you realize the RGB ones you used aren’t supported by the printer. At Advertisers Printing, we’re able to help troubleshoot any color issues you may have. Simply put, print vs. digital can sometimes look different even when using the exact same color. You may have liked the dark hue of the blue on your computer screen, but it doesn’t come out exactly right on paper. To help ease this process, our printers can provide print examples to help match the print colors of your intended design to make sure all colors are accurate once printed. Print Bleed Each printing system will have its own requirements for the print bleed size of your design. It’s crucial that you begin your design with the correct bleed built into your file. Typically, having ⅛” of your image extend beyond the trim will do it. Your software should have bleed settings built-in to help if you’re unsure of where to start. Print Scale On your computer screen, it can be easy to create a design on a small scale and forget how much bigger it will turn out when printed. In whatever program you use, you want to be sure your original file size is large enough to fit the finished printed format. For example, creating a billboard image is a huge task, no pun intended. The design needs to reflect the final print scale so your image doesn’t become grossly pixelated when it gets printed. This advice also applies to smaller formats. Business cards are small and require lots of information. You want to make sure your fonts are not too thin or light in color but also fit the size of the card. This is where scaling the image digitally helps you know whether your font is readable and your designs look detailed enough in a small format. Final Thoughts One particularly crucial aspect of designing comes just before printing—proofreading! You never want to send in a design with type errors. At best, you’ll have to make corrections and go through another round of proofing. At worst, the mistakes are not caught and you either look bad or the job has to be reprinted. Printers may be able to help you proofread your work, but that could come with an extra cost. Making sure your design is perfect, text and all, saves you time and money in the long run, especially if your printer uses automation in production. Automation results in significantly reduced costs and time to produce but absolutely depends on a print-ready file. Contact Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing company today to learn more about the different aspects of printing graphic designs, and how Advertisers Printers experts can help you get the right picture the first time.

With advances in digital technology, creating physical business cards can seem like a dated practice that may not have the value it used to. The truth is that this “old-school” method of providing your business information is still alive today—and it’s still just as effective as ever. Business cards have long been a staple in personal marketing. Whether you run into a prospect by chance or at an event where you meet dozens at a time, handing over your business card is always an easy and effective way to hold a place in their memory. The quality of a business card can reflect the quality of your business. They are still a meaningful and more personal way to make a connection with a prospect. Let’s take a look at how well-designed business cards can help your networking efforts. Supplementing Your Digital Connections You can always have a prospect connect with you on LinkedIn, but what if they forget your name? Handing them your business card at the end of your interaction can be more beneficial than you think. Something tangible with your information on it is more likely to be kept and remembered. Most likely, your prospects don’t have many business cards, and if they flip through what they have, they’ll find you pretty quickly. This way, they can then find you on business networking sites like LinkedIn and get any extra information they need. Basically, your business card will act as a bridge between in-person interactions and your digital profile. Also, if you simply have a prospect add you on LinkedIn, they may not remember when or why they met you. Handing a prospect your business card makes it more likely that they will go back to the office and digitize that information, and possibly even create notes about when they received your info and why. This improves the chances that they will remember you and respond when you send follow-up emails or calls. Developing the Creative Connection No matter how hard you try to personalize your LinkedIn account, they all really look the same. Giving a prospect your business card helps them visualize your brand. There are thousands of ways to create a business card that reflects your personal and business style. The days of simple business cards are long gone, and the only way to get your card to really make a statement is to design it properly. Cards aren’t just hard card stock anymore; they can be soft with a velvet touch, shiny like metal, or matte black for a memorable effect. You can use a variety of typefaces to make your text pop, and there are over a million ways to place images or designs that complement your text. Partnering with your printer to create the perfect business card is a great way to get a professional opinion on how your card looks and reflects your business. As well, truly creative cards get passed around the office. If a prospect really enjoys your card, they may want to show it off to co-workers as a piece they find visually appealing, which can possibly get you more connections. However, steer clear of fancy card sizes. You want to be sure your card can be easily stored in a wallet, pocket, or purse and doesn’t stick out or bother the prospect, as they may throw it out if it gets in their way. Final Thoughts Designing the perfect business card is no easy feat—it takes time and the right team to come up with the perfect visualization of your business and the style you want to convey to prospects. We always recommend consulting with your printer on the variety of styles, paper options, and prints that they have available to you. This way, you can plan your design around the highest quality option for your budget. Advertisers Printing is a full-service, sustainable printing company that offers assistance from initial project planning to final distribution. We have decades of experience printing materials ranging from professional business cards to bound books, compelling posters, and even banners. Contact Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing Company today to begin the process of printing your new business cards and to learn more about our other services.

Why the resurgence of print media marketing vs Facebook ads. Building and launching Facebook ads has become increasingly pricey in the last year. With so many businesses hopping onto their ad program, newsfeeds have turned into a “skymall” like catalog that considerably overwhelms consumers. Facebook advertising is so easy that it’s become inundated with businesses trying to capitalize on the budget friendly platform. Ironically, this has driven up prices exponentially, forcing marketing budgets to set aside much more than expected for Facebook ads, usually resulting in little to no engagement. The competition is so fierce that many businesses are going back to more traditional advertising routes, in hopes they can break through the clutter and give themselves a unique advantage. Businesses Leaving Facebook When Facebook advertising began, businesses could choose how much they wanted to invest in their ads. They can create their own graphics, choose to bring people to their website or Facebook page, analyze the ads, and more. Especially for smaller companies, this was extremely tempting. You could target specific audiences and implement a budget that works for you. Why are businesses leaving Facebook? Everyone is competing for this small slice of space, and the more you budget, the higher chance you have of getting the impressions you desire. Now, those smaller companies are being bid out, unable to keep up with larger companies with larger budgets. In 2012, Facebook only had one million advertisers. Today, that number has jumped to a whopping six million advertisers. Due to this, companies are forced to look into new avenues for marketing and advertising that help them stand out from the clutter but can also keep within their budget. This has brought marketers to more traditional strategies, including print media. The Alternative: Print Media Advertising With Facebook phasing out, many are looking into other platforms, like Instagram, to continue their paid advertising strategies. However, prices are still pretty high and the feed is getting more cluttered every day. This is appealing to companies because it is still attached to Facebook’s ad manager allowing them to track and analyze how well the ads are doing. Because of this, print media has made a resurgence. With so many digital advertisements cluttering up customers daily feeds, having something presented to them in print becomes a breath a fresh air. For certain generations, having something in print makes it seem more official or important. As in, they are used to receiving important information on paper either through the mail or other. Some may be concerned with the ecological impact of using print media advertising. This is valid, but there are many ways to mediate this with the appropriate tools and an environmentally conscious company. Advertisers Printing prides itself in its sustainability practices, as one of the only 50 U.S. printing companies to have earned a Sustainability Green Partner (SGP) Certification. Click here to learn more about our Sustainable Management Policy. Using a company like Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing Company, is so much more than receiving printed marketing products. Advertisers Printing can provide marketing strategy, email campaigns, data analytics, and much more.

One of the greatest ways to keep your company successful is to create a loyal following. By investing in your brand, you work to create an image and lifestyle that your followers will crave. A brand may take a while to build—it won’t be achieved overnight; it takes time and effort to create the following that you desire. Naturally, you may be wondering how you can achieve this without million dollar branding budgets. Let’s take a look at a few steps you can follow to create a following and a successful brand image. Building Customer Awareness You won’t get your brand anywhere without first building customer awareness. Analyzing your strategy is crucial to understanding what works best for you to utilize data analytics wherever possible. For starters, you should look into gathering feedback from focus groups and your social media pages, as well as from customer comments on your website. Don’t be discouraged by harsh comments. Instead, consider how customers perceive your product and what they would like to see changed. The customer is (usually) always right because they’re the ones making the purchase. Even if you felt your brand image should have been leaning one way, that may not be what your customers want. By listening to customer feedback, you’ll have an easier time building strong customer awareness of your brand and guiding your business in the right direction. Boosting Product or Service Quality Every brand image will be different, but you should always strive for quality no matter what direction you take. In any case, you need to make sure the quality of your products or services reflects the brand image you have chosen. Every product or service should function properly, but beyond that, there are different rankings that range from affordable to premium. You don’t have to be costly unless you want to—in that case, you can create a brand image of affordability that will have its own following. Whether you’re affordable or come at a premium price, you’ll need to ensure that the quality of your products and services aligns with your brand image if you want to create a loyal following. Premium consumers won’t be interested in cheap products, and vice versa. Creating a Strong Marketing Strategy By utilizing data analytics, you can identify the most effective customer outreach channels and refocus your efforts. Maybe you shouldn’t be sending five emails a day with promotions and sales; maybe your social media paid advertisements are more successful. However, it’s important to note that digital marketing alone won’t guarantee success—you should also use print media as a way to change up your outreach and intrigue consumers in new, creative ways. Most importantly, know what works for your brand, and invest your time and money in those specific outlets. A combination of strategies is the best way to increase your outreach, but you shouldn’t bombard consumers with too much information, as that can make them uninterested or even frustrated. Nourishing the Customer Experience Creating your brand is much more than shipping a product or service—you want to create an experience that your customers will want to come back to again and again. You want to be sure that each customer interaction is congruent with your brand image and that you’re building lasting loyalty and confidence. Make the experience enjoyable! Word of mouth is one of the best ways to increase awareness, and creating a customer experience that consumers want to talk about will play directly into that. Remember that you need to be consistently analyzing how your customers are responding to your brand strategy. Without their input, you’re just blindly creating media that may or may not be providing the right influence. Your brand can be the key to your long-lasting success, so let your customers guide your next move. Final Thoughts Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing Company, is here to help you better understand your brand and build upon it for long-term success. We’re a full-service, sustainable printing company that offers assistance from initial project planning to final distribution, with onstaff graphic designers who can make your dream brand image come to life. We have decades of experience printing materials ranging from professional business cards to bound books, compelling posters, and even banners.

For a variety of reasons, an increasing number of people are choosing to unplug these days. That doesn’t mean they don’t use the Internet or aren’t interested in browsing websites, but it does mean that print media is far from dead. Print is still widely seen as a credible source—after all, if someone took the time to print an ad and mail it, it must be important! As a result, there are many ways your marketers can utilize print media to increase engagement with target consumers and produce higher conversion rates for your business. 1. Limiting Online Distractions It’s impossible to ignore online distractions these days—from flashing ads to loud, auto-played videos, it can be difficult to focus all your energy on the content of a website. Notably, recent neurological research has revealed that readers of print media have a much longer attention span than those reading on the web. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how much you’re bombarded by online distractions! In short, the act of “deep reading” with print—that is, reading actively and without distractions—allows users to become fully engrossed in your content rather than have their attention bounce back and forth from ads to text, which can limit their comprehension of the information. 2. Attracting Customers to Your Website Sure, print products sound great, but you may be concerned that print can’t include every aspect of your services. While that’s sometimes true (depending on the size of your service line), it can actually be beneficial to omit some information from your media. In that regard, using print is a great way to initially attract clients to your website, where you can then provide any and every detail of your services. The odds are they will be more interested in your website because they’ve already developed questions or other interests from viewing your print piece. 3. Standing Out from the Online Crowd It’s true that using the Internet has become one of the most common forms of marketing and advertising, but in reality, people are more interested in what others are NOT doing. The less print is seen, the more it becomes a bigger opportunity to grab your target audience’s attention. A well-designed, thought-out piece of print marketing (with relevant content, of course) can pique the interest of a reader much more than an overdone banner advertisement. It’s easy for prospects to tune online ads out, but they’ll take a few more moments to check out an intriguing piece of print. 4. Final Thoughts It’s important to remember that you can’t just throw out any type of print advertisement and hope that your prospects will be hooked—your audience is still looking for a fluid and innovative design, relevant and easy-to-read content, and a medium that suits their lifestyle. Advertisers Printing can help you find the best ways to take advantage of print media. We’re a full-service, sustainable printing company that offers start-to-finish assistance on any project you have. From initial planning to final distribution, we have decades of print experience with materials ranging from professional business cards to bound books, compelling posters, and even banners. Contact Advertisers Printing, a St. Louis Printing Company today for more tips on how to influence your target consumers with print media.