Customer is the king for any business; this holds true for the printing businesses too. As a printing business, the key challenge you may be facing apart from retaining existing customers, could be to find potential customers. Without marketing it could be impossible to survive and an effective marketing campaign may seem way expensive, especially if yours is a startup. This is why most of the times printing companies try to stay away from marketing, even if it means not gaining any potential customers.
How nice would it be if there was a way to gain potential customers without having to spend too much money on marketing? In fact, there are many. Here is a list of things you can do to increase your customer base:
Concentrating on the Quality of your services: Quality is what customers want and if you can provide top-quality printing services to your existing customers, you can rest assured that they will bring you newer customers. Another thing you can do here is to promote recommendations by offering discounts or referral incentives.
Networking: Another cost-effective way to gain potential customers for your printing business is networking. Making a contact list and building up on your profile is the first thing you need to do here. Meeting new people and talking to them about your business are a few more things you should focus on. You can meet new people by attending trade shows, product launches, exhibitions, conferences and various other events. You need to first focus on building a rapport with these contacts before you start selling your services. Always make it a habit to hand over your business card to any new contact you may come across. You have to focus on building relationships with businesses that are non-competitive.
Affordable Advertising: Keep looking for new ways to promote your business. Print a few posters and flyers about your business and put them up at places where your target customers can see them. Try postcard marketing and label printing to advertise your business.
Online Marketing: Use the internet to find and connect to your target customers. Creating a website for your business and developing a Facebook Page are great ways to make your presence felt online. Nowadays there are many portals that offer free templates for developing websites. You can work on creating your own website without taking any help from the web designing professionals. Also, you can put up ads (both paid and free) to boost traffic to your website. ‘Online forums and blogs offer excellent ways to participate in conversations with your target customers, understand what they want and modify your services to suit their needs.’-says Mark of City Printing.
Web Directories: It is possible to find many potential customers by going through the web directories. Submitting the link to your site to these directories and exchanging your link with various other websites can help you achieve your objective within a short span of time.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is probably one of the most affordable ways of gaining potential customers for your printing business. You can buy a list of email ids from various list brokers and send an email to all of them, to improve the visibility of your business and market your services.
Whichever way you adopt to get in touch with your target customers, you need to remember that this is an ongoing process. With time, you will have to look for more and more effective strategies to find customers, promote your services, increase your sales and make a place for your printing business in the market, both online as well as offline.
