Margie Dana

Date It

When I search online for info on a topic that’s central to a piece I’m writing, I want to see a date on that article or blog post.

I need to see that date. If a post is too old, I pretty much discount it.

This is particularly true when I’m trying to make a point about trends (duh). Let’s say I’m writing a piece for a printer client about the resurgence of direct mail. I know that citing another article or two written by someone else, especially a well-respected authority, will support my post’s thesis.

Most of the time there’s a date associated with a post or article. It’s always somewhere up top. But sometimes there is NO date. Nada. Zippo. Why? Who knows?

Even if I respect the content in such a post, I can’t refer to it. It may be a decade old. (What if you’re the author? Are you kicking yourself now?)

That’s why I want a date.

Bonus tip: Add a date in the subject line of your enewsletter. This way, people who get it can instantly refer to it. Every post of mine has a date.

In the spirit of the season, keep in touch.

This is typically the time of year when I write a post about why I love print. I did it last year and the year before that.

But most of you are involved in the print industry – and we’re pretty much all on the same side with regards to print. Why state the obvious?

Instead, I choose another focus for this last post of 2015. One of the most important things about this season is keeping in touch. With holiday cards for friends and family. With visits to share meals and give gifts. With phone calls, texts, and emails to wish people well.

The holiday season gives us a built-in excuse to reach out to business people we count on…people who’ve stood by us in times of need, people without whom our jobs wouldn’t have been possible – or as much fun. I find it more and more meaningful as I get older.

Sending handwritten holiday cards means something to me. I am no fan of e-cards at the holidays. Where’s the personal touch in that? Where’s the heart?

If you keep in touch on a regular basis with your customers via an enewsletter or other communication, your year-end message will have special significance. It will be that icing on the cake. It’s the natural time to thank customers for their business and their loyalty.

I encourage you to reach out to customers this holiday season as you do with family and friends. Write something direct and sincere. It can be short and sweet, as long as it’s from your heart.

A holiday message that resonates with customers will strengthen the bond you have with them. They’ll appreciate it and look forward to your staying in touch year round. And there’s zero downside to it, because everyone likes to be acknowledged.

So thank you for reading these posts for however long you’ve been with me. That there are thousands of you means I can’t send you handwritten cards, but my appreciation is no less genuine. Enjoy your own holidays, and here’s to keeping in touch throughout 2016.

There’s a simple way to squeeze more use out of your existing content. Extract a slice of something that can stand on its own.

I noticed that within some of my blogs live juicy little nuggets that work very well on their own. These are typically paragraphs; sometimes, they’re single sentences.

Such short bits of content can be repurposed for other channels, like Twitter or Facebook. They can even inspire a totally new blog.

Good example: the 2-sentence intro to this post. Wouldn’t it make for a good social share?

Another example from an October blog: No matter what you’re selling, your customers are evaluating you by the perceived value you provide them.

And here’s a short paragraph from another blog of mine. It would work on its own as a LinkedIn post, as the basis of a PowerPoint presentation or a marketing video, or shared in my social channels:

“Your sales reps are not in charge of marketing. Somebody else has to be.”

Note: I don’t intentionally write posts so that pieces can be lifted and repurposed. After a blog is written, polished, and published, I often see content within that has legs of their own.

Do you feature your team in your marketing?

My Executive VP

I sat down with the 2015 Holiday Magazine published by Whole Foods Market last month. It was a perfect-bound guide to making your holidays perfectly delicious (right up my alley). Filled with recipes, articles and lots of cooking tips, it was a great read. Based on the content, I could tell that mine was the New England edition.

As interesting as the recipes were, one feature in this magazine stood out more than any other – the “Traditions We Love” section, spotlighting a handful of local Whole Foods team members.

The men and women featured here all work in different capacities at a New England Whole Foods store. In this “Traditions We Love” piece, each person profiled shared a favorite food tradition for the holidays. There were photos, recipes, and guess what? It was the only section I read from start to finish.

Giving your customers a peek inside the lives of your employees is smart marketing. (Not to mention, employees will be honored.)

Sharing information about the people who work for you is more interesting than the usual “here’s-more-new-equipment-and-hey-aren’t-we-just-great” copy. I’m not saying you should abandon all other marketing content, but why not make it more personal? Personal is more memorable.

There’s another benefit to featuring employees in your marketing campaigns or customer communications: they’re right there.

Do you ever feature your employees in your marketing?

Content Providers Are Never Content

We writers are hard to please. I can turn in a piece of content for a client that I just love, something over which I’ve labored for many hours or days.

And the next time I go back to it, I inevitably see things I’d change. It’s a curse: good writing can almost always be better.

Thankfully, the way we self-publish on our WordPress sites or blogs, it’s so simple to update a post or some site content. Now I can “improve” my own content whenever I get the itch to do so, and (of course) fix typos and other mistakes that somehow got by me the first time. You can, too.

Forgive yourself if you’ve let typos get by you. Nobody’s prefect.

Talking Turkey with 3 Veteran Print Buyers

I just moderated a 60-minute conversation with 3 seasoned buying professionals during an online event that was sponsored by Canon. Before I forget the best bits, here they are.

My guests were all highly experienced print buyers. Linda Basnik is with Rotary International; Melissa Carter is with DCRI (Duke Clinical Research Institute); Wendy Torchio is with Charming Shoppes, Inc., a subsidiary of Ascena Retail Group.

They graciously agreed to talk about what printers can (should) do to get their attention. It was fascinating. You can access this recorded webinar for the next 90 days.

The key takeaways for me are as follows:

Cold calling can work. As long as a printer does his or her homework on the prospect’s company and keeps the call or message short and sweet. The buyers noted that they have chosen to work with printers after a random cold call when they had a particular need and the printer was a perfect fit.

Equipment lists matter. At least to these 3 veteran print buyers. (I swear I didn’t discuss this ahead of time with them, but you know I’ve been advocating for equipment lists for years. See my last post.) Note: equipment lists probably have little if any value for people brand new to the field.

Print buyers are loyal to their reps. All 3 buyers agreed that they tend to follow a favorite rep if he or she leaves to work at another printer’s.

Print distributors (AKA ‘brokers’) are no longer “the bad guys.” This was, for me, the biggest eye opener. Five or 10 years ago, seasoned print buyers strongly preferred working with print manufacturers. Times and tastes have changed. One buyer added this warning, though: “Don’t call yourself a broker. Say ‘Print Service Provider.’”

Print buyers like getting out to meet printers. One said, “I love socializing with them.…meet & greets, print tours, whatever the event – they’re important.”

Direct mail from printers is not seen as effective or impactful. This was the consensus among the 3 guests, and it surprised me. Not having enough space in an office was a consideration. One speaker noted she’d received a piece that included a video that gave a plant tour. She watched a bit of it and then tossed it, noting how expensive that project must have been. I also heard a buyer say that she’d respond more quickly to a cold email.

Referrals are effective if they come from someone you already trust. I don’t see how anyone can argue with this. Enough said.

So, in the end, how should a printer approach a prospect?

One guest said it perfectly. “Slowly make yourself known to me.” A short telephone call, a short email, and so on. Keep in touch with a prospect so that, over time, you go from stranger to acquaintance to (hopefully) valued colleague.

I really enjoyed today’s live event. It’s so important to hear from the print buying community.

Print Buyers & Equipment Lists

Here’s a blog I wrote recently for Printing Impressions – and by all means, check it out on their site if only to read all of the comments I got from print customers. Each person makes an excellent point. I hope it convinces those of you who don’t list your equipment to rethink your position.

The question about print customers and a printer’s equipment list comes up often, as it did last week on the webinar I participated in.

During that event, I brought this up because it’s significant. In the recent study I did with John Zarwan, in which we collected data from 315 professional print buyers, 73% of those surveyed said that a printer’s equipment influences their selection of print partners – at least some of the time.

This was particularly true for more experienced print customers. The less experienced buyers are much less interested in what printers have ‘on the floor.’ This makes sense. Most of them don’t know manufacturing equipment. What they care about is your ability to deliver the goods – a combination of print quality and good service, at the price they agreed to pay, and delivered when promised.

In our study, we didn’t drill down to ask specifically whether customers pay attention to presses, primarily, or if they’re influenced by other equipment – like prepress, finishing, and mailing/fulfillment.

Here’s my take.

The veteran print customers are more likely to know what equipment is needed to handle their jobs. When considering a prospective printer, they’ll go to your web site and check out your list. If they need a provider who can do a ton of variable direct mail work, for example, they’ll see if you can handle it. They’ll look at your digital presses and your mailing capabilities.

Now, will they automatically discount you if they don’t see what they’re looking for? Maybe. It really depends on the person.

Keep in mind that many senior-level print customers have experience in print manufacturing. They are sophisticated and astute businesspeople. For this reason, I always recommend that printers post equipment on their site, and if it’s not the usual laundry list of make-and-model, at least it should be a decent description of what you can do – in terms that satisfy a senior buyer looking at your capabilities. Make sense?

Some printers have told me that they simply don’t want to post their equipment. Maybe it’s sharing too much information that their competition can see and use against them? Not sure.

At any rate, knowing that senior print customers are influenced by your equipment would suggest that you make it available.

I’d love to hear your comments on this.

My Favorite Writing Aids

What are my go-to resources when I’m writing content for myself or for a client? These guys:

http://www.dictionary.reference.com – well, duh. I suppose you thought I consulted that big, 3-inch-thick book sitting not 4 feet away. No, I go online like everyone else does.

http://www.thesaurus.com – which I consult more than the Dictionary. Actually, on the above link, you just need to toggle over to the Thesaurus. I get bored with the same old terms I have been writing or reading. The Thesaurus gets consulted a lot.

Sometimes I’m jonesing for a particular adjective to create an alliteration (you know, a phrase or group of words with the same first consonant sound, like “Kissing cousins” or “Manic Monday”). Then I just Google like so: “adjectives that start with a __,” and type in the letter.

Images for my blogs most often come from www.dollarphotoclub.com. I pay a low monthly fee of $10 for 10 downloads. I’ve been quite happy with their selection.

I must give a shout-out to my productivity tool, Pomodoro: an app on my iPhone in the shape of a little red tomato. It’s a timer I use to help me focus on writing (25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, repeat!). When I use it, I quit Outlook and refrain from surfing the ‘net. Silly but effective.

The only other writing aids are the two obvious ones: reading and writing. I’m always reading a novel, and I write all the time. Hopefully, I get better with age.

PS: Want to get my Everyday Content Tips emailed to you?

The Accidental Marketer

The Friday morning yoga class always felt like private instruction to me. For the 15 months I’ve been going, there were usually just 2 or 3 of us there, along with our instructor.

At 7:30, it was on the early side for the gym’s group classes, but I prefer to get up and go, before I begin work.

When another instructor took ill, our Friday yoga instructor subbed her early-week Pilates classes. These 9:30 and 10:30 Pilates classes had always been popular; the instructor was much beloved.

Within 2 weeks, the sub had established her reputation among the later class participants, even though she was tougher. And she’s very much a no-nonsense person. Totally different from the Pilates instructor for whom she subbed.

But slowly, people asked when else and what else she taught. They’d warmed up to her.

In no time, her Friday morning yoga class grew. Though 7:30 had been (or so I thought) a deal breaker, it suddenly attracted more and more new people.

Now we have 15 or more every Friday, where once there were 2 or 3. I think it will keep growing.

If the instructor hadn’t been in a new spot where potential students gathered regularly, the Friday class would still feel like my own private lesson.

The yoga instructor was in a new place at the right time, purely by circumstance.

Want to grow your business? Where else could you happen to be?

For the Love of Print (Buyers)

Last week I took part in a fascinating webinar entitled, “Do Modern Print Buyers Have New Expectations of Their Printers?” This live 60-minute event on November 5^th was sponsored by Canon USA. It was offered by Printing Impressions and moderated by Mark Michelson.

At the top of the hour, I gave a short presentation of the results of a print buyer study I conducted with John Zarwan. If the 40-page report on this study (available for purchase on my site) is the Book, then this presentation was a Tweet.

I painted a profile of modern print buyers: who they are, where they work, and what they want from the industry. It set the tone for the next part of the hour.

Then two print buyers weighed in. They answered questions posed by Mark Michelson and a few more submitted by webinar attendees. The panelists were Liz Howitt of John Hancock Financial Services and Jeff Dickerson of State Farm Insurance. Both are print buying veterans, and both (coincidentally) have some experience on the ‘other side of the fence.’

What stopped me cold early on in this webinar was something Jeff said: “I want print to thrive.” This is a common sentiment among many print buyers. It’s important that printers are aware of it. The print industry and their customers are on the same side of the table. Doesn’t this mean something? I think it does.

I’m planning on writing some of what I learned from these buyers in future posts. What’s key for today’s post are these facts:

“Print buyer” is a term I use to describe the role of professionals who source print for their employer. It doesn’t traditionally include designers, and we’re not talking about consumers. I use the term to keep it simple. Buyers self identify with this term, regardless of their titles.
Every print buyer is different. Liz Howitt made this point, and it deserves repeating. Yes, there are trends to be acknowledged (that’s my job – to get them out there), but printers still need to know their customers.
Print buyers who are baby boomers are very different from those who are Millennials.
We’re not really sure how Millennials view or feel about the print industry. They’re harder to identify and poll. I’d love to do it.

This event was a valuable experience for buyers, giving them a place to voice their opinions and be heard. It’s clearly valuable for the hundreds of listeners, most of whom, I suspect, were printers.

Here’s to more and more of them.

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Yearly Archives: 2015