When also Marketing Fails!

Marketing has at least three purposes. One is to generate leads, second awareness, and third recognition. With an intense focus on mainly the lead part, marketers are very focused on numbers. It's always a question about the number of impressions, number of conversions, or number of clicks. This focus came along with the Internet, and this is something that in many ways, is very damaging concerning at least awareness and recognition. Before the Internet, ROI was measured different, the time-to-market was different, and the time itself was, of course, different.

To some extent, marketing, today is more about quantity rather than quality. When I used to work as a Sales Manager, I always told my salespeople that there are two types of customers: those who have a defined need, and those who have an undefined need. The first group is relatively easy to target since they already know what they need. Prospects with a defined need are more comfortable to sell to, but at the same time may be less profitable, since they will know your competitors, they will ask for more significant discounts, they will push you in circles between vendors, etc. For prospects with an un-defined need, you first have to market and convince the prospect that your product can solve a problem that your prospect at this time isn't aware of. This takes a longer time, but you may end up with both a profitable and loyal customer. But how do we market products and services to customers who are not aware of their needs?

Is it my mass-marketing a product? Is it by using Social Media to "engage" with prospects? Or how should this be done? Of course, I don't have the solution to this, but I have over some time tried to analyze and understand the 'marketing challenge.'

In my opinion the 'Marketing Challenge' is that few companies have excellent communication channels with the printing companies, their owners, their challenges, and wherein their company life-cycles each company is, is not available data. That becomes a 'marketing challenge' since the printing companies are not targeted marketing- and product-wise to address that understanding. Being a busy printing company with fewer people than just a few years ago also makes it more difficult for the owners to obtain the knowledge needed to understand what solutions can bring the company forward. When the large media such as WhatTheyThink and NAPCO Media claim to have large databases, this is of course, true - but I doubt that the details and validity of these databases are very much up-to-date. Opening- and click rates on electronic newsletters by all measures gets lower and lower, and the result is often more of the same newsletters, fluttering the mailboxes, and annoying more and more of us. Relevance becomes obsolete. Check your inbox and answer honestly how many un-read newsletters you have - even from vendors, and/or media that you like and would like to read! My mailbox is maybe not representative.

So. We are in a situation where marketing fails because we are unable to find precise communication channels that reach at least the un-defined audience. When a printing company needs a new piece of equipment, they will reach out to media, to vendors, to consultants, go to exhibitions, etc. The issue is that printing companies who could benefit from knowing what's available, what's possible, and what can make their business more profitable, isn't on most vendors radars. How do we reach these companies?

And remember - some don't trust trade-media, some don't see films, some don't use Social Media, and some don't attend trade shows! Some are skeptical about the "truth" in all above and have got into an information overflow situation. Some have maybe come into this situation because they have been flooded with irrelevant information for years!

I believe that the best way to reach all printing companies in the industry is by focusing less on fast-kind-of-stupid marketing where everything is just a question about traffic. I believe the most important thing we can do is ensuring a high level of knowledge. Accurate, unbiased information where the editors and the media test, review, and offer an opinion! I believe that brands should focus on becoming severe, consistent, and responsible for the long-term development of the industry, not just short term gains in sales. We should build services together that ensure our customer's more print customers, more revenue, higher profits, and we can do this by driving traffic to the printing companies.

Print Sample TV with Pat McGrew, Project Peacock with Deborah Corn, PaperSpecs with Sabine Lenz, Fold Factory with Trish Witkowski, Fubiz with Romain Colin, and many more, drive interest in paper, in the applications, in the technologies, but targeted the designers, the print buyers, the brand owners, etc. The print customers are the people that drive demand for print, and we need to create a demand for all the amazing products possible today. Printers have an equally important responsibility for communicating with the customers. Last week I was exposed to one of the more intelligent posts here on LinkedIn. It was a post by Paul Gardner from Xerox. The job was about a printer who has produced a print sample on his new Xerox Iridesse printer. First Paul Gardner tells a lovely story about the printing company www.kanovits.com - afterward, he mentions a list of names on what he refers to as "Global Print Innovators & Disruptors" - who don't want to be on that list? I was - I am honored, thank you, Paul (However, I don't consider myself like either).

However, I didn't like or shared the post, because the question isn't about the print sample but a question about how to get free marketing. The industry, of course, supports a lot of projects and of course, you can't support all projects. If I could find funding going to Slovakia to visit the printer, I would for sure do it. And here is the problem that is the reason why a lot of things don't happen. The money available to market not only specific printers but the entire industry to the print buyers are simply not possible. I don't know Paul Gardner very well, but he has a good reputation, and I may be wrong, that he just liked the print sample from this Slovakian printer and that he didn't have any marketing thoughts behind his post, but excuse me - even though we don't have any channels bringing press-releases I get around 20-30 press releases weekly.

Why? Why can't PR companies and all the nice "marketing ladies and marketing men" in the industry at least have the courtesy to visit the websites of the media they spam, before spamming?

Why press-releases? Of course, you can argue that it's cheaper, and maybe even more comfortable to just send a press release to a few selected media and let them do the job. You have at least one advantage the sender becomes "neutral" or "independent," and you can demand some kind of statistics about opening rates, number of clicks, conversions, whatever measurement you may require?

But what do the numbers say? Well, leads are, of course, interesting since we must assume that a lead is a 'consent' to be contacted. The implications of what I just wrote - think about it. I write a press-release about a multi-million Euro product. The press-release is more or less published un-edited, and maybe both online and on print. The press-release praise a product. A printer consent to be contacted to the media, the media gives the lead to the advertiser, the advertiser contacts the reader. How likely, is it that this reader wasn't known at all by the advertiser in advance? My take is close to zero percent, and therefore the quantification model has outplayed its role as being valuable, though most marketing and PR people find this the only thing necessary.

In the past, - a product would have been reviewed, and the media would have an actual role in the education of the industry. The education the media today offer is way more complicated with so-called 'White-Papers' and more information about people, and technology, rather than digging into a product. Doing a review of a new printing machine is not easy; however, when going to tradeshows like Print? or Printing United, not many machines are operated on the event floor. DRUPA is a different story, but if we look at the visitor profile, still only a fraction of the visitors are from outside Europe?

The role of the media is supposed to be the "independent" but is that the case?