Suggestions for “quick” printers
I have always thought that our smallest shops, often referred to as “quick” or “instant” printers, get overlooked, despite the fact that small and medium-sized printers represent the majority of our industry in Canada.
I worked for about a year in one of these shops in downtown Toronto, doing all the advertising, marketing and artwork for customers. And while promotion was important, there were many other factors that shaped our business, the most important being location. Bottom line here: a high-traffic area with a good mix of businesses and residences is ideal.
For a quick printer starting out in any community, residential or commercial, it’s not enough to simply hang your shingle outside. Here are some strategies you might want to consider.
- Do everything you can to get known throughout your local community. Arranging postal drops of direct-marketing materials outlining your services is a good start. Offer discounts to local residents and tell local retailers how you can help their bottom line with your products, services and brilliant marketing ideas. Visit local businesses in person if you can find the time. If there are a lot of apartment buildings or condominiums in your area, make sure that you make friends with the superintendent or property manager. Signage and printed notices are almost always required on a regular basis by these two groups.
- If you are new to your area, visit your local federal Member of Parliament’s office and see if you can get on his or her newsletter. Most have a quarterly publication that goes out to constituents.
- Always consider community newspapers. Their advertising rates are affordable and, compared to the larger dailies, they are more thoroughly perused.
- Like it or not, your ethnic background is very important. Be highly visible in your own community. I recall customers traveling from as far away as Mississauga to come to our shop in downtown Toronto because the manager was well-known in his particular ethnic community. It also helped that he could speak their language.
- Similar to the previous idea, you must understand that Canada is hugely multi-cultural. Consider advertising in ethnic publications, especially if you want to build a good reputation in a specific community, or if you already have clients from a particular ethnic group.
- Work contra deals with local business. In contra deals, no money changes hands – you simply promote each other’s products and services through existing store traffic. Always remember that your store traffic is a powerful marketing tool.
- Check the printing capabilities of local businesses. Convince them that an ongoing relationship with you as their printer will help their bottom line. If they already have an in-house printing setup, either try to beat their corporate price, tell them you are available during peak periods, or best of all, show them new products (i.e. large format, samples on different substrates) that they simply cannot produce. But keep in their face because, as you know, one steady corporate client is much less labour-intensive and often more profitable and dependable that hundreds of walk-ins.
- Find a niche. In our shop, we specialized in low-cost, fast-turnaround, full-colour business cards by locating a trade printer who did only that type of work. Other ideas might be large format, premiums and incentives (calendars, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.), short-run digital or variable data. It depends, of course, on the type of equipment you have.
- Network with larger printers. If a big printer is located nearby, by all means visit them and let them know who you are and what you do. You may be surprised when they call asking you to do a smaller job just to keep a client happy – perhaps a job that simply makes no sense financially to run on their larger presses.
- Make friends with competitors. This may be difficult for a lot of small shops but consider this: if you don’t, you will almost certainly get involved in a cut-throat price war where margins simply disappear as you fight for local traffic. In our shop, we sat down with another local quick printer, learned what equipment they had and what they specialized in, then either referred our walk-ins to them (if we could not accommodate them) or actually got our customers’ printing done by our competitor and marked it up slightly. Our competitor reciprocated. Everybody won!
- Offer seasonal promotions. Be sure to check your calendar and be prepared to offer specials for holidays (religious and statutory) and other special events during the year. Our shop had no shortage of events, being located in downtown Toronto, and went to the various committees staging these events with quotes to print their programs, menus, magazines, etc.
- Showcase your products out front. We turned a lot of passers-by into walk-in business by simply putting printed samples near the sidewalk or in the store window. The best attention getters were samples printed on different substrates and colourful t-shirts with hilarious photos or wording.
- Finally, if you have a good website, promote it to passers-by and walk-in traffic. Something as simple as business card featuring a percentage discount on one side and your website and services on the other should do.