BY CHUCK GREEN Don't be fooled by the terminology—for most of us, “hard-sell” conjures up a less-than-pretty picture. You might even go so far as to say it smacks of intimidation, of someone trying to sell something we wouldn't buy unless we were talked into buying it. That is not the kind of hard-sell I'm going to talk about here.
BY CHUCK GREEN Conventional thinking says a newsletter is a good way to keep your name in front of prospects and customers. And that producing one is both time consuming and costly. Conventional thinking also says a newsletter should be a minimum of four 8.5 by 11 inch pages and costs at least the standard letter rate to mail.
BY CHUCK GREEN Write a book this afternoon. Sound preposterous? To the contrary—you can create an information-packed, 16-page booklet using a single sheet of paper in little more time than it takes to type the text.
BY CHUCK GREEN Folds are as important to your brochure design as illustrations, typefaces, and color. A smart layout heightens the drama with which your message is revealed to the reader.
BY CHUCK GREEN A smart business card is a “tool“—a device that aids in accomplishing a task. It gives your contact a reason to keep your card within reach—it adds function to form. Yet, in an effort to save a few pennies in printing, millions of business cards are printed with a blank back—surrendering half the real estate on what is often our most widely circulated print piece. What should you include?
BY CHUCK GREEN Need to make a big impression on a small budget? Send your prospect an object wrapped in a message. The trick is to find an item that helps you make your point.
BY CHUCK GREEN Think outside the box. Does a newsletter have to be 8.5 inches wide and 11 inches high? Does it have to have a nameplate at the top of the cover with an article below it? Does it have to present 2.5 articles per page?
BY CHUCK GREEN The book is a primary fiber of the information fabric. A form and function so deep-seated, new ways of delivering ideas, no matter how revolutionary, struggle against it. Even with the advent of the computer and Internet, I know few people who prefer it to reading from the printed page.
BY CHUCK GREEN Want to customize your brochure for a specific market or an individual customer? Ever wish you could magically add new products or services without reprinting? Searching for a big-dollar look on a shoestring budget? This design does it all and anyone can create it.
BY CHUCK GREEN The business card—many of us use it more than any other single marketing item, yet it very often demonstrates the least marketing smarts. A conventional card includes a logo and some basic information—the name of the organization, the name of the employee, their title, phone numbers, and street address. What can you do to make your business card generate business? That requires a little “jolt thinking.”
BY CHUCK GREEN Call it the profound power of “free.” I don't know if you're like me, but I get excited about receiving unsolicited gifts in the mail—little unexpected promotional items such as pens, booklets, CD's, mouse pads, coffee cups, and such. If I encountered them in a store, they would not likely even catch my eye, but send them to my mailbox and you've got my attention.
BY CHUCK GREEN “Distributing flyers door-to-door? Chuck, you gotta be kidding! Why,” you say, “would a forward-thinking, twenty-first-century kind of operation like mine, stoop to the stoop?” My sentiments exactly. When I first considered this idea, I thought the same thing. But once I did a little “jolt” thinking—the how, what, and why of doing things—I changed my mind.
BY CHUCK GREEN No matter what we offer online, in many if not most cases, we have yet to reach significant segments of our audience. As I see it, there are three obvious groups who are tough to reach:
BY CHUCK GREEN If you think post cards are for nothing more than “wish you were here” messages, think again. Post cards are serious marketing tools—tiny billboards with big missions. They are one of those often-used but little analyzed marketing mediums—a perfect platform for some “jolt thinking.”
BY CHUCK GREEN A savvy salesperson understands that you don't get far if you do nothing but sell. If you offer a service or recommend products, prospects want to know, before they buy, a little about you and if you are a credible source. One way to break the ice and demonstrate your knowledge of your particular field is to infuse your marketing materials with information.
BY CHUCK GREEN “Formula” thinking defines a business card as your name, company, address, and phone number printed on a 2 by 3 1/2 inch white card. Formula thinking does what everyone else is doing. Effective marketing is all about presenting your unique advantage—it is anti-formula. A marketing-smart business card (figure 1) doubles as a brochure that presents your unique selling advantage and moves people to action.
BY CHUCK GREEN The printing process can produce 1,000 examples of success as easily as it can produce 1,000 examples of failure. Whether you have your newsletter reproduced 100, 1,000, or 10,000 times, you—by the way you prepare the material for the press, oversee the printing, and review the results—control the outcome.
Continue reading "The designer’s prep, print,
and proof checklist" »
BY CHUCK GREEN Finding just the right commercial printer for a particular job is an exercise in narrowing: you identify the ideal printing process, you locate companies with the equipment to execute that process, and you identify people who know how to get the most from that equipment.
Continue reading "How to find the right commercial printer" »
BY CHUCK GREEN Three proposals, three-hundred envelopes, three-thousand business cards, thirty-thousand brochures—if you don't spend a lot of time getting projects printed, how and where to do it can be daunting. If you do it every day, you know that the quality, pricing, and efficiency of various printing services varies dramatically from place to place and time to time.
BY CHUCK GREEN The idea is to mix your marketing message with information your audience will keep at hand. In the case of the card used to promote ideabook.com, side one includes inch, pica, millimeter, and point rulers, a basic color palette with CMYK values, charts of line values and shades of black, and, of course, information about the site.
