Okay, so Brady called me out on the last post and asked how printers can build a marketing campaign on the internet. Which is great, as it’s nice to have some of readers actually show an interest in this topic. By the way, Brady, your company has a nice website. Some printer’s website are just brutal to look at, and considering that a large number of printer’s customers are very net-aware, it doesn’t make sense to me. But whatever, on to the nitty-gritty.

There is a library of information out there on web marketing and a million ways to do it, but let’s focus on the most productive and profitable way to generate business: Generating leads for your sales staff.

It’s a useful metric to know the value of each lead: That is to say, every time the phone rings with a new prospective customer asking about your services, how much is that worth to you? Once you have that, you can determine if you internet marketing campaign is profitable to you. That is to say, if the phone rings 10 times a day and your conversion rate is 10%, and you generate $1000 off that one sale, and every 4 sales generates recurring business…. …well work out the numbers. If you can’t put a dollar figure on the value of new business, then it’s hard to justify the cost of a marketing campaign.

Okay, the second thing to do is to write what is called a landing page on your website. This is the pitch page where you get people to pick up the phone or email you. On your landing page, you put your pitch like “Pick us because we are the best in town” (Lame) or “Are you a graphic designer who has built web sites but not pamphlets? Give a call for an intro in the world of offset printing” (better). Something like that. Just remember that nobody knows the business like YOU. Put your phone number on the web page and say something like “When you phone us, mention our special newbie assistance plan.” That way when somebody phones up, you know the lead came through the landing page on your web site.

Next, set up tracking on your web site, using Google Analytics. Installation is dead easy, bribe your pre-press operator with a case of beer to do it (you just have to copy a snippet of code to the bottom of each page you want to track). You have to do tracking because you need to track the ratio of people who visit your landing page versus the number of people who phone you (conversion rate for your leads). For example, if you have a hundred people visit your web site, and it only generate one phone call for a lousy fifty-dollar business card order, then you know you have to tweak your landing page and probably find a different source of traffic.

Call a meeting of your sales staff and ask them, what sort of leads do they want? Take REALLY GOOD notes, because you are trying to capture keywords (more on that later). Keywords are really important, these are the words that your customers type in to find businesses that will serve your needs. I give you a hint on this: your customers do not type in queries like “six-color Heidelberg offset printing” or “three-point trapping” okay? Instead, they type in phrases like “colored business cards” or “environmentally friendly printed pamphlets” or “(your city name) printer”. Stuff like that.

Armed with a list of keywords, here is how you generate traffic to your landing page on your website, good quality traffic that after a little bit of tweaking, should generate some quality leads: Google Adwords.

Okay, this application is a bit of beast and has a steep learning curve, and you either have to farm this out to an Adwords consultant who won’t rape you on fees or build up expertise in your organization. I will give you some hints that will save you some big bucks right off the bat.

Set up a campaign with a daily budget of only $10 that runs from 8:00 am in the morning to 5:00 pm at night. Outside of business hours, people who will hit your website are basically lookitee-loos who are not interested in buying. Don’t run the campaign on the weekend.

Ensure you are running a local campaign, that is to say, set your ads to show only in your target market (you can choose by state or by city). Set your bids high to start at about $1.50 a click. Sure for the first couple of weeks you will get maybe ten visitors a day to your landing page, but you want quality not quantity. Give it a couple of days and check your keywords bidding to see if you have a good quality score or a terrible one. If you have a terrible quality score on some of your keywords, then create a separate landing pages for them and stuff that page with the keywords you are shooting for, that will improve your quality score.

Okay, here is where you get the best value. Track the number of clicks you get to the website. Track the number of phone calls (or leads) you get from the landing page. See which keywords are getting clicks to your site. Just as important, check which keywords have lots of competition, that’s a sign that they are keywords which convert well. For example, you will probably find that “business card printer” is a very competitive keyword query. Now, you may hate printing business cards but the fact is that the first print job for many new businesses is well, printing their business cards. Another competitive query is “printing restaurant menus.”

Okay, so there you. If you stick at it for a few months, the phone will start ringing and your sales people will start to be converting some of those leads. Remember it’s really important to get feedback on the leads, I will repeat over and over again you are looking for quality not quantity. For example last spring the campaign at Printcraft was generating lots of leads for wedding invitation but the leads were crap because you guessed, people only wanted print runs of 100-200 and Printcraft just does offset. So we scrapped bidding on that keyword, heck we even deleted the landing page to stop the organic traffic coming in.

Looking over this post, I realize that even stripping away a lot of stuff and trying to make it as simple as possible, your head maybe be spinning. Okay so if you are totally lost, here is what I will do for the first three people who email. For the magnificent sum of $200, I will run a two week Adwords campaign for your company. Now if $200 is too much, that’s cool because I have work coming out of eyeballs right now and I don’t need the business. No really, I’m not going to make crap charging $200, that probably just cover my costs.

Anyhow, in addition to paying me 200 clams, here is what you have to do as well:

1. Generate sales content for your landing page. No, I am not going to do this for you. I will be editing your sales copy and tweaking it to get a better quality score for Adwords, but I’m not going to your copywriter. If you can’t be bothered to write 250 words on why somebody should want to do business with you, then it’s not worth my time to try to promote you.

2. Meet with your sales staff and ask them for keywords. Then give a list of the products you sell (bindery, pamphlets, magazines) etc.

3. Install Google Analytics on your web site and give me access. If you don’t have an inhouse webmaster, I would need a username and password to the hosting provider of your website so I can install it myself. If your organization is so hopeless that you’ve lost the passwords to your website and you haven’t updated it since 2002, then please don’t email me because honestly, you guys are a lost cause and I’m no Saint Jude.

4. At the end of the two week period, we’ll have a conversation and you tell me how many times the phone rang and what it’s worth to your organization.

My email is dj dot dunkerley at gmail dot com. Hey, if nobody takes me up on the offer, I’m cool with that, like I said I’m really busy right now and the two hundred is basically to blow off the not-serious crowd. But I know for sure that if your org doesn’t get off its ass and start pushing the internet thingie then your competitor will and bury your sorry butts. There are offset printers in Vancouver right now laying off people cause they are dead-slow but my client isn’t one of them.

Ciao, dj

Well, okay I didn’t go. And I can’t even pretend I’m some sort of industry pundit with a 30,000 foot of the industry. I mean, I spent the days fixing the ink profile server and haggling with vendors who probably enjoyed the conversations less than I did and are most likely good people, trying to turn a buck in a business where margins are thin.

But I’m reading what’s coming of out the trade shows and I’m thinking, okay, maybe some things were missed here. Now American Printer had a nice write-up on what was being hyped “ten technologies you should look into” and the big one was…drumroll… MIS!! And they even managed to slip in a mention of JDF.

PrintCeo did make mention of MIS when they noted how Vistaprint is making big inroads in the industry. Yah, no kidding. But I’m surprised (okay, I’m lying, I’m not surprised) that there was absolutely no mention of Vistaprint total domination of the print marketing in the internet marketing space.

How many Google Adwords tutorials or info-sessions were held at Graph Expo? I would guess zip, zippo. How many affiliate marketing introductions powerpoints were shown at Graph Expo? Negative, nothing. Do you guys really think that Vistaprint is kicking your butts because of their MIS system?

Gees, can I say this? You guys are a bit dim. Google business cards or ‘free business cards’ and watch the screen fill up with Vistaprint affiliates. Check out affiliate companies like COPAEC and Neverblue and note the number of affiliate offers that Vistaprint is running.

And that, my friends, is where this industry is going. Whoever has the best marketing will win. And most offset printing companies are not even showing up in the arena to compete.

If you have been following my blog for the last few months, you will know that we spent the summer switching over from our ISP’s email service to Google Apps for the domain. How did it go? Well, at the very end of it, we still have some mail sent to us from clients that never hit our Outlook box. We sent off a request for support from Google and…. ….never heard anything back. This is what you get for using a free service.

So, we were faced with using the paid Google service or finding a different service provider. We went with the email services from Radiant, and hosting on a remote Microsoft Exchange server. Last week was very busy as I was running around upgrading everybody to Outlook 2007, creating new mail profiles and getting on the phone every few hours asking how to do this and that.

Sometimes, it’s not the software, it’s the support. The Radiant representative was just fantastic, her name was Sherri and she works out of the Vancouver office. Very responsive, whenever we had a problem she responded within a few hours at most, usually inside a half-house. Sometime during the day she log on remotely and get it fixed either on this end or her end. This was very important as the sales staff were really not happy with the email situation that we had.

As an added bonus, radiant’s email package support Blackberry integration, so this week I am working on getting the BlackBerries of the sales staff fully integrated with our mail server, so now all mail will go directly to the sales staff rather than the kluge forwarding hack that we are doing now.

So now I think, unless Google starts getting serious about providing real support for their email services, they are going to have a tough time competing for serious corporate business. I mean, when important messages were getting lost and I had to tell the front office guys “oh yeah, I’ll send a mail off to Google and cross your fingers it wil get answered” that went over so not good.

Anyhow, back to the BlackBerries.

One of the great things about having a blog is that it provides a virtual guilt-free way to procrastinate. Like for example, my year-end for my consulting business is July and I should be doing my books, especially since the general ledger is a stinkin’ mess as always. So right now I should be looking at bank statements.

But my readers beckon me to come before them and amuse them with my wit. Or my writing. Or whatever, I don’t feel like looking at old invoices tonight. With 3 kids and a wife and a humongous mortage, I know how much money I made. Not enough.

Okay, enough about that. Let’s talk about Vistaprint. They offer free business cards to freakin’ everybody. You, me, the kid down the street, the panhandler on the corner, and the neighbour one block over that runs a grow-op. How much money is there in offering to print free business cards? A lot of money. Look again at those gross margins, 60% percent. Those are Microsoft margins, baby. Nortel is dying with 40% gross margins and ANY business in the world would be happy with 50% gross (except for Google and most casinos.. oops sorry, same thing). Quebecor last had 50+ % margins when Gutenberg was setting type in his new infernal contraption.

So how do they do it? I don’t know, if I ever figure that out, I’ll be sure to spill the beans. However, one thing you need to know is their stock ticker and their current stock price. For you and me, that what’s important.