Learn How To Manage Today’s New Media Dynamics
MANAGING NEW MEDIA DYNAMICS ARTICLE
As we all know, the media mix that print service providers must deliver on is changing. Today’s businesses have more marketing options than ever before. How are your peers in the printing industry coping with these changing dynamics? In the Canon Solutions America-sponsored webinar entitled “Managing New Media Dynamics,” presented by Printing Impressions and Target Marketing magazines, Barb Pellow (group director of Keypoint Intelligence — InfoTrends) is joined by Brian Soifer (partner at Dolphin Creative Promotions) and John Mashia (president and chief operating officer at IMS, Inc.) to discuss how data can be leveraged to deliver business results.
Yet print remains a key factor.
To introduce the topic and setup the need for better management of these dynamics, Barb Pellow shares survey results from over 700 enterprise executives in InfoTrends’ report entitled In Search of Business Opportunities: Finding the Right Prospects (2017). “There is optimism about the print opportunity among marketers, but it’s connected to communication across all channels,” Pellow reports. “Depending on vertical industry, annual communication spend is expected to increase between 0.9 percent and 5.8 percent.”
Figure 1: How much do you expect your company’s/organization’s total annual communication spending to increase by? (Means)
N = 437 Enterprise respondents who expect their company’s communication spending to increase
Source: In Search of Business Opportunities: Finding the Right Prospects; InfoTrends, 2017.
Throughout her summary, Pellow also shares data on methods for communicating with customers and discusses how communication spending budgets are allocated across channels. “Everyone is clearly wedded to email and mobile marketing strategies because they’re all investing in digital strategies,” she continues. “Yet print remains a key factor, whether in the form of sales and marketing materials, print publication advertising, print direct response, business identity productions, print signage, or promotional products in their planned budgets.”
Pellow also shares critical market insight, including marketing objectives for communications, challenges in marketing, media types used, the level of personalization integrated into today’s marketing campaigns, and real-world examples of how print drives online customer engagement. “Marketers are looking at personalization as a mechanism to truly deliver better results and driving customer response to online channels,” she explains.
Dolphin Creative’s Brian Soifer echoes Pellow’s insight and shares how his company has differentiated itself by creating a stress-free experience when delivering creative campaigns to clients. This full-service agency specializes in promotional products, mailers, and signage that are delivered in creative and unique ways. “The trend of the power of personalization is growing quickly in our business,” Soifer says. Following a brief overview of Dolphin Creative’s personalized products and services, Soifer dives into several case examples that show the value of personalized print and good data management.
How do we cut through the clutter and capture more attention?
“One of the questions we always ask before every brand activation is, ‘What does success look like to you?’” Soifer says. Based on the starter discussion, the company then establishes goals with clients and brainstorms ideas that address clients’ key questions—such as, How do we cut through the clutter and capture more attention?
“Typically, it comes down to more targeting, using their same budget, but reducing the number of recipients and increasing the complexity of personalization to get the attention desired,” Sofier continues. “Our goal is to create one-of-a-kind, memorable, and useful materials for our recipients.”
According to iProspect, 67 percent of online searches are driven by offline messages, with 39 percent of consumers making a purchase. Furthermore, for every $167 spent on direct mail, U.S. marketers sell $2,095 in goods. During his portion of the webinar, John Mashia explores what this means. “We must use targeted data to be able to drive people to the web,” he notes. “Direct mail is driving online engagement and delivering the ROI that our clients want.”
Realizing that this was necessary to grow and remain relevant, IMS built out its Marketing Innovations Group to help drive revenue and profitability by leveraging data better. Following a brief company overview, Mashia gets real about his business transformation and shares important details on how print service providers can start delivering more targeted communications to customers. He discusses his company’s transition to drive more revenue through these campaigns, providing powerful examples to support his discussion.
