Office Hacks is the public interest blog from Inkjet Wholesale. Inkjet Wholesale’s business is providing extremely affordable cartridges to Australians. In this line, you can imagine that we get to know a lot about how our customers use their printers. One of the most common ways through which businesses, and sometimes even individuals, use their printers is to print marketing collateral. In other words, people like to use their printers for printing marketing material.
It’s a considerably bold move for a business. The reason is that by printing their own marketing material, these businesses are basically, saving a significant sum of money. Professional printing service providers can charge a pretty penny. So if you need a lot of marketing material, you can save a lot of money by avoiding such service providers. However, there are dangers of doing this too.
The main risk with printing marketing material yourself, of course, is that it won’t be as impactful as you want it to be. This, in turn, will affect how much leads or even sales your marketing material will bring for your business. Therefore, while you save money by printing marketing material yourself, you also need to make sure that it is up to the mark with respect to quality.
Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience before Printing Marketing Material
Do you know how the bigwig corporations and marketing geniuses go about their marketing efforts? The first thing they do is research their audience in order to determine their common traits. In other words, they understand their customers and prospective customers better by pinpointing demographics and psychographics. This group of individuals is dubbed as target audience or audience that the business needs to target because they’re most likely to become customers
The reason why determining target audience is important is that it allows for the marketing messages to be tailored. A focused marketing message will always perform better than a generalised one despite the fact that the latter reaches a larger audience. The reason why the former performs better is that it reaches an audience that is already predisposed to the product or service being marketed.
In addition to determining the target audience, it is also important to segment the targeted audience itself by creating specific personas. The purpose of creating personas is to give the marketing team stereotypical, imaginary individuals to target with their marketing material. This makes the marketing material not only well-aimed but also laser guided. Therefore, before printing marketing material, every business owner or marketing manager should sit down and determine what kind of audience they want to reach.
Learn About Different Types of Marketing Materials
There are different types of marketing materials that can be used by a business. These include brochures, business cards, catalogues, flyers, newsletters, postcards, product sheets, banners, and even a press kit or docket. In fact, you can even innovate with marketing material by printing messages on shirts, caps, cups, furniture, and vehicles.
As you can tell, all types of marketing materials are different. Each of them has its unique qualities and benefits. Similarly, every one of them has its limitations and restrictions. Recognising what these strengths and weaknesses are can make a huge difference to how effective a marketing campaign is. Moreover, printing marketing material cannot be taken lightly because it is done in bulk and the printed material cannot be changed if design or copywriting changes are required later.
Start Valuing the Content in the Marketing Material
Content is easily the most important aspect of the marketing material. You can just have basic images, a logo, and simple words in it. A lot of businesses just tack on a few words before printing marketing material that they think they need. The problem with this is that the content in the marketing material isn’t as good as it needs to be to have an impact on the viewer. You need something more nuanced.
You need to have a professional writer write your content and a professional photographer to create the images in it. To realise how important this aspect is, just imagine yourself receiving flyers in the mail or even in the market. How often do you read them? Once in ten, perhaps? Why do you read the one that you read? Initially, it’s because of its images. Furthermore, you carry on reading it because the written content has piqued your interest.
Get the Basics of Graphics and Design Pat
When you look at a brochure, you know in seconds whether it is good or not. Moreover, the brochure will only take a few seconds to have an impact on you. Regardless of how long the business has taken to create the brochure, it has to have an impact within a few seconds because that’s all the time that any viewer gives marketing material.
This is why it is important for a business to pay special attention to designing before printing marketing material for distribution. First of all, the designing needs to be done by a professional graphics artist. Just because an individual thinks he knows a thing or two about aesthetics doesn’t mean that he is qualified to make key design-centric calls.
There are certain basics of designing that most amateurs and business owners don’t understand. For example, one of the most common mistakes is to not leave any whitespace on the page. This directly results in a cluttered design where multiple elements start competing for the viewer’s attention. Whitespace is very important in a design because it gives what is important prominence. This could be anything from the logo and company name to a call to action for branding and conversion objectives, respectively.
Another common mistake that many amateur designers make is that they try to make the text look beautiful by going for elaborate typography when they should instead be focusing on readability. The purpose of any piece of text is to be read. If the text is too elaborate, then it is not conducive to reading and, hence, it loses its primary objective.
There are numerous other such basics of designing that a graphic artist will inherently know. This is why hiring a graphic artist is recommended before printing marketing material. However, if you don’t have the kind of funding to hire a graphic artist, then the onus falls on you to learn all the basics of design.
Understand Which Colour Portrays Which Emotion
Colour is something business owners take very lightly. Instead of trying to decipher the science of colour, they choose to go with the colours that appeal to you. Marketing experts and conversion specialists, on the other hand, understand the value of colour. Every colour can be associated with an emotion or personality trait. This association can actually be used in marketing material to improve its impact on the viewer.
For example, if a business wants to portray elegance and premium style, it can use the colour purple. Purple is seen as the most royal colour in the entire palette. In fact, most people naturally associate the dark purple shade with kings and queens. Moreover, purple is also associated with wisdom and age.
Red, on the other hand, is a colour that is young. It is a colour that excites and stimulates. This is one of the reasons that it works so well on Coca-Cola, the drink that specialises in stimulation (caffeine). Blue is another colour that stands out and is commonly used by businesses. Blue is a calming and soothing colour. It whispers rest, relaxation, and peace. Blue also means assurance.
Every colour has connotations and meaning like the colours described above. Knowing which colour is going to give which impression can help the marketing material have the right impact. Therefore, if you want to stimulate the right emotions in the viewer, then you need to study the science of colour before printing marketing material.
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