In my last post I covered a few of the more common ways to easily add drama and interest to your marketing pieces.  In part two, I will touch on a few more printing techniques you may want to consider when designing your next marketing materials.  Again, these are simple ways to add that extra something that can help to grab your customer’s attention and give you a visual edge over your competitors.

• Pantone Inks- Pantone inks are commonly used to match specific colors and they can be used to create a dramatic look. Using a metallic Pantone can give you a more subtle option than metallic foils and comes in a large variety of colors.  You can also use Pantone colors to achieve results that cannot be reproduced in the CMYK color space, such as bright blues and oranges.  The cost of using Pantone ink varies depending on the number of Pantone colors used.
• Spot Varnish- This technique allows you to add contrast by applying a gloss varnish to a specific design element.  This is an appealing way to add a touch of shine to a specific component of the design and is particularly effective when combined with an uncoated or matte paper stock.
• Custom Folds- Changing the placement of a standard fold is an easy way to increase the overall effectiveness of your piece.  For example, creating a shorter front panel on a tri-fold brochure can create a sophisticated and unique look that will be more eye-catching to your customers.  The good news about custom folds is that in most cases the cost will be the same as a traditional fold.  They only challenge can be properly setting up your design to accurately represent the fold panels.  Your printer can assist you on where to place the fold lines to achieve the desired result.

I hope that some of these options have given you ideas for your next marketing piece.  Remember, your printed marketing materials may be the first way you represent your product or business, so don’t be afraid to experiment with these and other design elements.  By incorporating new and distinct features into your piece, you can grab that extra bit of attention that sets you apart from your competitors.

In today’s economy it’s all about getting more out of what you’ve got. Finding ways to stretch your hard earned dollars and making the business assets you already have work more efficiently is a key to ongoing success no matter what economy we’re in.

The people at SPRANQ think they have an answer. It’s Ecofont. This was forwarded to me and I thought it was a pretty intriguing idea. Toner and ink for office and home printers is insanely expensive and Ecofont purports to use up to 20% less ink when used because of the design of the font. They suggest using it for “daily use” printing where the quality of the print-out does not need to be the highest.

The name suggests a greening opportunity and their website offers a few suggestions for end users, designers, and offset printers as well. It’s a free download and in this economy don’t we all need a little bit of free?

The team asked me to do an occasional post on the Print Soup blog. I told them that as the president of PFL, I’m a generalist, not a specialist, and that others know more about design, printing technology, and even Montana recreation (nice assignment, Tim!) than I do. So they told me to write about things that interest me, figuring that I probably have some shared interests and perspectives with some of our tens of thousands of small business customers. As I left the room, I think I heard Chip mumble “we can always delete his posts…” So here goes. Thanks for reading.

Well known blogger Furqan Nazeeri raved about a piece of software called Flowchart.com. Which got me thinking. Once in a while someone comes up with a piece of software that is intuitive, useful, and priced right. I think great software should be usable with little or no instructions or training. Guessing as to how to do something should get you the right result most of the time. BaseCamp doesn’t quite meet that standard, but it is pretty good, and a heckuva lot better than MS Project for anything but the largest projects. And the price is right.

I started using SnagIt a year or 2 ago, and it absolutely rocks. A great use is including screenshots in emails about website changes, or even Excel snags when discussing numbers. I probably dump snags into 3 Word, ppt or emails a day. And no, I have nothing to do with the company, I just love their software. 90% of the time I use it instead of Photoshop or Illustrator. Before you flame me, I want to be clear that I’m a businessperson, not a design professional, and I realize SnagIt doesn’t replace Photoshop, AI, etc. It is just a handy tool for everyday business tasks.

Using a snag for quick, clear email communications.

These days everyone is looking for a way to make their marketing pieces stand out from the crowd. Adding custom elements to your next printed piece can give you the “wow factor” that will help to get your customers attention and distinguish you from your competitors. In my first few posts I’ll cover some of the more common custom printing techniques that you can use to add pizzazz to your next marketing piece.

• Die-Cuts- Using a die-cut is a great way to add interest to your piece and the possibilities are limitless. Think of a die-cut as cookie cutter that cuts your printed piece into a specific shape. Each die is made and ordered to your specifications so you can create a die to represent almost anything. Die-cuts are generally used for simple to semi-complex outlines and pieces with fine detail may require a different process such as laser cutting. Pricing varies based on the overall size of the die and your printer should assist you in creating a file to accurately represent the die cut shape.
• Foil Stamping- Adding foil to your design can help to draw attention to certain areas of your piece. Foils come in a myriad of colors and styles, but the most popular foils are the metallic colors which cover every shade from gold to green. There are also standard matte and gloss foils, and specialty foils that include options such as glitter and prismatic patterns. Again, the cost will vary based on the overall size of the piece and number of foil colors used.
• Embossing/Debossing- Using embossing or debossing to emphasize an area of your piece is a subtle and sophisticated way to add drama to a specific element. This technique is commonly used to emphasize a logo, company emblem, or important text. Embossing creates an imprint of a design into the paper itself and can be done alone or in combination with printed elements. Embossing impresses the design toward the viewer so that the element appears to rise from the paper. In contrast, debossing, impresses the design element into the paper so that the element appears to sink into the piece. The cost will vary based on the overall size of the embossed area and your printer will assist you in creating a file.

These are just a few of the custom elements that you can use to give your marketing materials a bigger impact. And don’t be afraid that you won’t be able to afford the extras. In many cases the additional cost is less than you might think.

Make sure you consult with your printer as you begin to design your piece so you can receive any set-up instructions as well as an accurate quote. Your printer should also be able to consult with you on which design elements may work best for your end use. See some samples of die-cutting, foil stamping, and embossing work here.

Next time I’ll cover several more custom printing elements that provide interest to any marketing piece.

5 Reasons Winter in Montana is a Good Thing

Having lived in Montana for about 26 years now, I have had the good fortune of experiencing a lot of winters here, ranging from fairly mild, to lots of snow, to tons of snow, and even, as we experienced last week, temperatures dropping to -25° below or colder. But, for all the snowbirds and those who find winter a reason to hole up inside, I say no way; winter is one of the best seasons in Montana, and below are 5 reasons why I can’t wait for the white stuff to start falling each year.

1. World-Class Skiing
Where I live in southwest Montana, I can be enjoying airy powder in an hour or less, at one of three fantastic mountains: Bridger Bowl, Big Sky and Moonlight Basin. Ranging from down-home friendliness and wild expert terrain to big open bowls, pure vertical and après nightlife, the skiing in southwest Montana is tough to beat. For a real test, hit the Ridge at Bridger Bowl (my favorite hill) and the all-expert terrain accessed only by foot and lung power, which requires an avalanche beacon, shovel and partner. Before you strap your skis to your pack and head up, up, up, be brutally honest with yourself and your skiing ability. Once on top, there is no “easy” way down. If in doubt, spend some time on the lower mountain, which is loaded with great runs, and grab a burger and cold one at the base lodge.

2. Snowshoe or Cross Country Ski Excursion
With a state of under one million residents, Montana is lean when it comes to population and elbow room. Want even more peace and quiet? Try a snowshoe or cross country ski trip in some of our millions of National Forest acres. Depending upon where my skis or snowshoes find me, I have admired massive frozen waterfalls, spotted lynx tracks across my trail, watched elk and moose and experienced some of the quietest time the outdoors can provide. But come prepared-winter in Montana can be harsh. Bring warm clothes, food, water, and a compass or GPS is recommended if you venture off the beaten track too far. And don’t forget the camera.

3. Sledding
I know this is not specific to Montana, but who didn’t like sledding as a kid? Growing up, we would spend the entire day regardless of how cold or windy it was hurling ourselves down dangerously steep slopes, hills and tracks, dodging trees, rocks and each other. But what fun it was. I will have to say as I have gotten older, my adult frame on pint-sized sleds, coupled with near Olympic quality bobsled hills and high speeds doesn’t always mix. I have had a few good wrecks when I feel compelled to head out with a group of other adults in denial about their sledding abilities. Which brings us to number four…

4. Horse-Drawn Sleigh Ride Dinner at Lone Mountain Ranch  
I have enjoyed this quintessential Montana experience three times over the years, each with different family members and friends around Christmas and New Year’s who come to visit. You and your group load up on large wooden sleighs with wool blankets over your laps, the big, friendly horses pacing, ready to whisk you up to the log cabin tucked into the trees. It is quite an experience just getting there-the horses’ bells jingle with each step, and the starry, cold night sky eases by as massive pines tower over you. Once inside the warm cabin and at your table, you are entertained by local “cowboy” singers, and enjoy a prime rib dinner cooked on a wood stove. So, don’t spend your time standing in lines or money on sweaters that don’t fit, or “stuff” no one needs during the holidays. Instead gather up the family, and make reservations for this memorable outing. You won’t regret it.

5. Winter “Camping” -In Style
When I can I like to book a Forest Service cabin over a weekend somewhere deep in the woods. It can be a bit of a chore getting there, but a little homework and effort will put you in a snug cabin during the prime wintertime, with miles of snowy forest outside the door. Some cabins are more rustic than others, with just a woodstove, while others have electric lights, stove, fridge and woodstove–none will have water in winter, so bring your own. After a day out, usually doing the first option on this list, I am bone-tired and ready to grill up a steak right on the woodstove with light coming from a gas lantern, and that great woodsmoke aroma. It is a great way to check out from the busy day to day, and there are few places as quiet and calm as a cabin in the woods in winter. And if you don’t want to brave the snow or cold, no worries-just stoke up the fire, break out a book or a chess game, and kick back.

The above is a short list of some of my favorite things to do during the winter, that are readily available. While nowhere near complete, it gives you an idea of what you can do when the snow piles up, the mercury heads south, and you happen to find yourself in Montana, ready to explore and get outside to enjoy it.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the economic crisis and announced PFL’s Economic Stimulus Contest. I don’t know why I was surprised, after all our customers are assertive go-getters, but we had almost 200 entries from customers across the country telling us their crisis-busting stories of how they are creatively marketing their businesses in these tough economic times. The winner of the contest for the month of October was a community theatre called the Cottage Theatre in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Their winning entry earned them $1000 in free printing from PrintingForLess.com. Following is their story:

As a community theatre, our organization tries to be as creative as possible when it comes to enticing new folks to purchase tickets to our productions. In a rough economy, being creative-at-a-bargain-price is even more essential. Our strategy is to wed our promotional tactics to the specific product (ie. play) we are selling. 

Here’s one recent example. This summer we produced a play called Harvey, a 1945 Pulitzer Prize winning drama that was made famous by Jimmy Stewart in a 1950 film by the same name. In the story, the lead character has an imaginary friend Harvey, who is a 6′1″ invisible rabbit. Harvey and his pal Elwood hop around the town, visiting local bars and businesses and making friends wherever they go. During much of the play, the rest of the characters are busy asking “Have you seen Harvey?” To market our show, we constructed three free-standing, wooden rabbit silhouettes (and affixed a play poster to each rabbit’s belly). We then sent an e-mail ad out to the local chamber of commerce members. The “Tall Rabbit Seeking Temporary Home” ad invited businesses to partner with us and display one of our 6′1″ Harvey silhouettes at their location for a couple of days. We went on to explain that we were expanding the drama of the play beyond our building and into the streets of our town. So, just like in the play, Harvey was spotted all over town, at banks, bakeries, video stores, bars, and even a local veterinarian’s office, never lingering in one place for more than 48 hours. We ran this promotion for three weeks, and we ended up having to turn down prospective business hosts, as we had such an overwhelming response to our simple e-mail invitation. When we picked up Harvey to move him to his next spot around town, he left behind a small bag of chocolate carrots as a thank-you present. . . . 

What was the result of all this? First of all, everyone in town had fun asking each other “Have you seen Harvey?” Secondly, we made a lot of new friends in the local business community. And thirdly, and most importantly, our production sold out! 

So our strategy for growing our business during a rough economy is to get creative and have fun! 

We were so excited about the stories and strategies used by our customers that PrintingForLess.com has decided to continue the contest in November and December. Enter the contest for your chance to win $1000 in free printing.

I don’t know about you, but when I started getting familiar with printing and the printing industry I was under the impression that there was a hotly developing turf war a la West Side Story between offset printers and digital printers–offset printers, clearly the Sharks, with their old world technology and traditions up against the modern, new world attitudes and technology of the Jets. I imagined weekly rumbles with chains, switchblades, and other improvised weapons in the seediest areas of cities across America. And, because I work for a commercial offset lithographer, the Jets had their butts handed to them every week!

The truth of the matter is, and any good printer will tell you, that there is room in the world for both offset printing and digital printing. The reason is because they serve different markets and provide different printing solutions. 

Digital printing is the reproduction of digital images to a physical surface, like paper. The most basic form of digital printing is the office printer. You have the ability to easily produce several reproductions of the same digital image or print different images one right after the other. It’s highly customizable because of the ability to use variable data and lends itself to short print runs or print-on-demand (POD).

Offset printing is the process by which inked images are transferred from an aluminum plate to a rubber press blanket then “pressed” onto the printing surface. This process produces very high quality imagery and text. Offset printing is ideal for the mass production of identical pieces like catalogs and other marketing collateral.

As a consumer, your job is understand your printers’ sweet spot. The sweet spot is where the printer can produce your piece with consistent high quality at the lowest price possible. In other words, everybody wins. The printer loves to print your kind of job because it’s perfect for the equipment she has and it’s easy to make some money and you win because you’re going to get a great result and get it for a very good price.

A very important aspect to the sweet spot is the quantity you need. At low quantities, digital printing will be better because of the price. Offset printers have a lot of set up at the beginning that makes printing low quantities more expensive. However, as the quantity gets higher there is a point at which, depending on the equipment of the offset printer, the price per piece begins to plummet and offset printing is the better choice. One of the best questions to ask yourself is “what is this piece going to used for?” If it’s a date-sensitive piece, for example, and you only need a hundred, then digital is the way to go. If it’s a sales slick or spec sheet that you’ll hand out to everyone at a trade show and you need 1500 pieces, then offset printing is for you.

Quality is a whole other issue. Those stinkin’ Jets know they got nothin’ on what us Sharks can do.

Last week I went to a workshop in Billings, MT featuring John DiJulius and his 10 Commandments of World Class Customer Service. As much as I would like to think that PFL does a great job in this area, the group I was with were pleasantly surprised to find out that we didn’t have all the answers and had something to learn. We had several take-aways that have turned in to action items in the areas of Service Recovery and Training and Development that should lead to an even better customer experience in the near future. I highly recommend John’s model and The DiJulius Group.

In my mind, especially when the economy is heading south, ensuring your customers have the best possible experience is a key survival tactic. Everybody is cutting back and the one way you can make sure your customers don’t jump ship is to provide a remarkable interaction that keeps you top of mind. More than the great goods and services you provide, it is the way the customer perceives her experience with you that will determine if she keeps coming back or not. And, once again, it comes back to very basic themes that we grew up with: fairness, honesty, trust, and integrity to name a few. Without these you can leave an interaction with a sour taste in your mouth.

Those themes cannot be developed without creating and maintaining a relationship with your customers. Even if you’re work is highly transactional, there are things that you can do to make it less so. Learning names, engaging your customers in conversation, and sincerely thanking them for their business are the no-brainers. There are tons of other ideas that can be used to guarantee a remarkable customer interaction and keep your customers coming back for more of what you have to offer.

No matter what segment of the business world you’re in, everybody is cutting back or renegotiating to save money. As John DiJulius and others have said, make price irrelevant by providing the kind of service that makes your customer think of no one else. In tough times, an investment in providing remarkable customer interactions is sound and may be a key factor to your survival.

Jackson’s comment from an earlier post brings up a good point. Who should you believe when it comes to all this chain-of-custody certification stuff? One thing that should be made clear is that, in my opinion, no responsible printer can claim to be totally green. The amount of power, water, and solvents needed just to keep the presses in good working order cancels out the concept of green printing. Since that’s the case, you have to look at a printer’s other operations, procedures, and supply chains. 

I can only speak to my experience as an employee of PrintingForLess.com. What I know to be true about us is that when it was time to build a new building we took a very holistic approach. Energy use, preserving sight lines (the mountains in my header can be seen from our deck), air quality in the building for the people and the paper, and what building and finishing materials to use. Everything was important to us so everything was considered in order to offset the fact that high quality commercial printing needs to use paper with virgin pulp in it.

The Forest Stewardship Council certification we possess allows us to confidently tell our customers that the choice of paper they use for their project is responsibly grown, harvested, processed, and printed on from tree to final marketing piece. If it’s important enough to our customers, but only after approval from our FSC representative, we are able to print the FSC logo on their marketing piece to indicate the choice they’ve made. It gives me the confidence that communities and ecologies from where the trees come from use sustainable practices and allow people to benefit from the work they do.

More to Jackson’s question, it looks to me, with only very little investigation, that the Sustainable Forestry Initiative maintains a North American focus while the FSC is very much internationally based. And, if you read their websites you can see that they aren’t handing out certifications like coasters at a pub. As far as lip service is concerned, you need to get back to basics and evaluate your relationship with your printer. Printing is a trust buy, especially if you’re working with an online printer. If you trust your printer to be responsive, responsible, and invested in your success, I would wager that you can trust them not give you any lip about sustainable practices.

Given recent developments, I would remiss if I didn’t lay down my thoughts on the current state of the economy. There is enough blame to go around, no matter where you fall within the political spectrum. The very real credit market connection between Wall Street and Main Street will affect Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But the things we need to concentrate on, as owners of businesses and members of the middle class, are what we can control–not on rending our garments and gnashing our teeth about the things we cannot.

There are  very real factors that can weigh in on what we can and cannot control–most of which are subjects for other posts on other blogs. Socioeconomic, education, and social-justice issues are just a few. However, when we go back to basics and follow simple principles they usually don’t let us down.

Keep costs down. Renegotiate with your vendors. They might be going through tough times too, but one thing you can count on is that they don’t want to lose your business. Save when you can: Having cash on hand during a credit crisis for home or business will make it easier to pay for the things you need going forward.

Invest in your employees. Numerous studies have proven that it is always more expensive to hire a replacement for an employee than it is to invest in the good ones you have. In the end, the ROI will be increased productivity, increased loyalty, and happier customers. Do right by your customers. We’re all feeling the squeeze, but I would wager that even the squeezed-iest among us would still rather pay a little more for a great product at a fair price that comes with great service than a mediocre product at a cheap price that comes with terrible service. Any joker can lower his price; don’t fall into that trap.

Invest wisely in a marketing plan that has a proven track record for you. Maybe that means going after loyal customers with a call to action that will encourage them to spend more or seeking out new customers that you can wow and retain for the long haul. 

When it comes to facing down the downturn, getting back to basics is all about what you can control.

How are you handling the economic crisis? Or, in the words of the new contest that PFL recently announced, “What recession-busting marketing tactics will you use to ensure your business comes out on top?” Share your ideas in comments, or enter the contest.