Digital Print Management

Do you know who your target audience is?

Is it the same audience five years ago?

I have a frustrating relationship with social media.

Managing personal and business profiles, what to post and when?

How to keep the snippets of information useful and informative is time-consuming, coming up with new ideas harder.

The majority of our target audience is on a plethora of social media platforms. The challenge is finding them, especially on Facebook as this doesn’t have a tag for their employment position.

Digital Print Management’s target audience is HR, Payroll, Credit/Collection Managers, Linkedin is the right choice to find this professional tribe.

Many of them are also likely to be on Facebook keeping a personal page and updating it with status updates, but this doesn’t show their job status or title and where they work.

The key to generating leads is knowing and understanding where your audience is and that’s why I thought I’d share with you how Digital Print Management is re-thinking its market and making sure we go back to basics.

Sound easy?

Definitely not. Delivering your services to a big audience without knowing who they are and what they look like is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Who is our audience?
Where do we find them so our message gets heard?
Why would they consider using our services?
How will they benefit from our services?
And what can we do to make it easy to find us?

How do our customers benefit from our services and what problems do we solve for them?

Thinking about the range of services we deliver to our customers from Digital Print Management’s point of view I looked at our largest and smallest customers and came up with the following:-

What have they bought from us?
Why did they choose to work with us in the first place?
Why do they continue to work with us?
What problems did we solve for them which means they sleep easier at night?

This helped us then drill down and understand the type of customer that is looking for our services.

When that is done, where then, do we find prospective customers and how do we get the message out?

How did the customers that we currently serve, find us or hear about us?

This gave me the opportunity to sketch out an outline of a typical prospective customer that ‘feels the same pain’ our current customers experience prior to outsourcing their ‘problem’.

Which then led me to the type of customer that will gain from the value in our service offerings.

What problems are these Payroll/HR and Credit Managers having to deal with?

Do they perceive them as troublesome? Are they even aware they have problems?

What would the reputational damage be if the cost of not sorting out the problem is greater than the cost of leaving it?

Being niche means we provide a project management service in the payroll and accounts sector making it easier to identify our audience.

A big fish in a small pond means we can be heard and found above the rest of the internet noise and stand out from the crowd.

Our expert knowledge coupled with the knowledge from project managing many printing implementations helps us understand what the prospective customer wants and needs.

Understanding the sectors we have been successful in and why helps to maximise this opportunity further to create success in the future.

Digital Print Management is uniquely placed to solve the customer’s problems, and that helps us stand out from the crowd.

How have you found your audience?

How do you get your message heard?

How successful has it been?

I’ve been in the transactional print and mailing industry for (shoosh) 25 years and there have been many changes in that time.

When I first started, all transactional programming was done using cobol, (a computer programming language) large mainframes existed in datacentres and data was sent either via mag tapes, dial up and eventually ISDN.

Customer data was sent as raw data files or print files which meant that the code had to be stripped out. Using composition software, the form was designed, the variable data was coded onto the form before anything that remotely resembled a bill or payslip could be printed.

It was cutting edge stuff at the time.

Jump forward 20+ years and data can be sent in pretty much any format you can think of and document composition is done using sophisticated composition platforms which merges data and design layout whilst adding variable personalised data in one pass.

Traditional transactional print was produced by litho printing the base stock – invoice, statement, payslips and then the variable/personalised information was laser printed in black. It was more cost effective for the large corporate generators of bills and statements predominantly mobile, utility and service providers.

Fast forward to the late 1990’s and the industry saw the rapid development of colour laser digital printing technology this revolutionised transactional documents. Adding colour to the document by highlighting specific lines of text, colour reports highlighting an amount owed in red on an overdue reminder added value to the form.

Initially the use of colour laser personalisation was slow to be taken up by customers because of the cost per unit but as demand for colour increased so did the cost of colour laser printing reduce.

“Transpromo” as it became known had two main advantages – adding variable highlight colour to your documents meant you could dispense with the need for pre-printed stationery and produce your document in one pass. No capital tied up in stock.

The other advantage was the option to print highly personalised, bespoke documents in small volumes from 1 to many and within each pack you could have as many variable letters with different designs and logos as you wanted such was the versatility of digital colour laser printing.

The transactional document is perceived as an added cost factor to the business – every organisation needs to process and send invoices, statements, reminders whether it is in paper or electronic format and that represents a cost to the business.

Transpromo has evolved to being an opportunity to add value to client relationships and increase revenue through selective targeting of products and services and can be just as effective as direct mail.

Transpromo can be used as a communication opportunity to develop and add value that is not solely the domain of marketing.

Letters, bills and statements are integral to the customer experience, transpromo is still undervalued when it comes to targeting customers with specific messages.

Often the consideration to go paperless seems easier than the continued use of paper but organisations don’t do this objectively and ask WHY are we doing this and, WHO will benefit – the customer or us?

Transpromo integrates with online platforms – print, mobile and online content linked together – multi-channel online statement and billing delivery enables you to deliver your client documents differently but with a marketing edge.

Transpromo is part of a multichannel approach for customer communication in our multimedia and cross media driven world it is also a missed opportunity for getting closer to the customer.

Tag Archives: Transactional Printing

The changing face of transpromo