For decades, the press check was a routine part of commercial printing. Work out a design, approve the proof, and drag yourself to the printer to spend hours checking press sheets before giving the green light. Prior to the high-tech color assessment tools of today, it was a necessary, yet tedious final step to ensuring a great run.
Thankfully for everyone involved, the days of the press check are, for the most part, over.
HOW Design Live is the largest gathering of creative professionals in the world, giving attendees just about everything they need to pursue a fulfilling and successful creative career all in a five-day event.
Many design professionals and hopefuls wait years for the opportunity to attend, which is why Christine, Erin and I were so grateful that Suttle-Straus was able to let us experience it firsthand.
The average consumer is exposed to hundreds of marketing messages each day in one form or another.
From radio commercials during the morning commute to the banner ads we see online, advertising clutter has created a big challenge for brands competing for our attention in an increasingly noisy world.
Sustaining a successful nonprofit takes smart fundraising. In today’s competitive environment, that means setting yourself apart from the competition by making your vision and purpose as clear as possible. Donors and sponsors are inundated with options, so naturally, they narrow their focus to find the handful of organizations that share their goals and vision best.
When searching for that perfect match, sponsors usually ask one simple but important question:
“Does this organization’s message and goal align with mine?”
Over the past decade, “being green” has gone from a popular catchphrase to a serious goal companies and consumers commit themselves to. Research from the Annual Tork Sustainability Study in 2013 found that 78 percent of people say they buy green products, and that number continues to rise today.
For many companies concerned with print’s impact on the environment, the obvious knee-jerk reaction has been simple: Stop using commercial printing and turn exclusively to digital.
Each year, over 4,000 franchise CEOs and marketing executives are surveyed to reveal the biggest trends happening in local franchise marketing across all industries.
The feedback is published in an annual report to give franchisors valuable insight into:
If you haven’t noticed, direct mail campaigns are getting smarter thanks to systems allowing mailers to finally track each piece being sent out. Now, direct mail marketers can see why a campaign either worked or fell short of expectations by analyzing this important data.
The USPS’s Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) tracking system is a way to encode mailing information for letters and flats.
Given all the ways we communicate digitally through text, email, social media just to name a few, many wonder why “physical” marketing like direct mail is still used extensively by marketers.
With statistically longer lead times than digital as well as the expenses that come with printing and delivery, why do companies continue to connect with us through the mailbox?
In short, because it works––when it’s done right, that is.
It’s hard to market a franchise these days. No matter how much time and effort you devote to crafting great campaigns, distributing them throughout a national network of franchisees can be an enormous task.
Whether it’s a bulky, inefficient marketing supply chain or campaigns that fall flat time and time again, it can seem next to impossible to find harmony between your corporate marketing team and store managers operating on the frontlines of the business.
But as many franchisors have already discovered, the solutions to distributed marketing problems have less to do with your messages and more to do with the system you’re using to plan, produce and deliver them.
