Page 60 - Print21 July-August 2022

Marketing
Why don’t print businesses
employ marketing managers?
Marketing guru Malcom Auld says print businesses will benefit f om using a well resourced marketing arm, and warns of the dangers of misusing LinkedIn.
This question has concerned me for a couple of decades. I’ve never understood
why so many printers and mailhouses don’t employ
marketing managers. Or, if they
do hire a marketing manager, why they don’t give them a workable marketing budget. The marketers are somehow supposed to do marketing without any funds.
And even a fewer number of printers hire marketing agencies to help them with marketing. Curiously, the print industry is one of the
few B2B categories that doesn’t actively use marketing executives or marketing tactics to grow business. Printers rely on salespeople to generate business, or hope existing clients continue to provide a stream of profitable orders.
Yet my anecdotal research indicates frustration within management levels at the quality of lead generation by their sales teams. Many believe the salespeople are more often just order-takers than new business generators. The sales executives wait for the clients to contact them to ask for a quote.
This combination of minimal investment in marketing, and reliance on order-takers, makes it difficult to grow a business because:
• The brand is unknown so doesn’t
automatically attract quality new
business inquiries
• The salespeople don’t add any
value to the organisation
• Inquiries are usually cost-focused,
so the process becomes a race to
the bottom on price
Marketing creates the need, while sales fulfill the need.
In other words, your marketing activities create awareness and desire for your brand, positioning it in the mind of your customers and prospects, resulting in leads, so the salespeople can close the sale. If your brand doesn’t stand for anything,
or position you differently in the market, you end up competing as a commodity. And commodities are
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traded on price – the worst reason for which to do business.
But printers have a unique advantage over other businesses. It costs printers less to produce direct mail and print samples, so their marketing can be done more cheaply than other B2B marketers. This begs the question: if direct mail is the best tactic to promote print services and it is cheaper for printers, why aren’t printers doing more of it? Why aren’t printers using printed materials to generate leads?
“If your brand doesn’t stand for anything, or position you differently in the market, you end up competing as a commodity.”
As I’ve said before, your marketing communications should focus on these three activities:
• Creating new
customers • Get those
customers
spending more
with you more often
• Keep those customers spending with you for as long as possible
There are two B2B contact strategies: • Prospect Contact Strategy
(acquisition) – to identify
prospects and generate leads. • Customer Contact Strategy
(retention) – to retain customers and get them spending more with you for as long as possible and provide referrals.
There are a number of tactics B2B marketers can use for both acquisition and retention:
• Personalised direct mail with
QR codes linked to customised
landing pages
• Printed newsletters or newspapers • Advertising in relevant media such
as trade press or third-party email
newsletters
• Online advertising in LinkedIn
• In-person educational events and
webinars
• Content creation through blogs, LinkedIn and other socials.
But what about LinkedIn you ask? Social selling on LinkedIn is the
new spam. Every day, inexperienced executives – I cannot call them salespeople – use marketing automation tools to unprofessionally harass whoever the software deems to be a prospect.
I have a business called The Content Brewery – it’s a content marketing brand. The stupid LinkedIn algorithm regularly sends me unsolicited messages from suppliers of beer brewing or coffee roasting equipment. The people sending me their messages have not bothered to read my profile nor even looked at my business. They are simply assuming the automation software will do the work for them. There is a reason it’s called “artificial” intelligence – it’s not very smart. And neither is anyone who uses LinkedIn’s tools to do their thinking for them.
The purpose of using LinkedIn should be to get off it as quickly
as possible.
Make a new connection,
ask them for their email and postal
address, then start to connect via direct mail, email and
eventually telephone and face- to-face. Don’t harass people via
messaging services or automation tools – it will damage your brand.
The lack of investment in marketing in the print industry offers a big opportunity for the
innovative printers to stand out from the crowd, by doing some
marketing. After
all, if most of
the industry does nothing, then most of the
industry will exist in the commodity end
of the category – and that is not good for anyone’s
business. 21