ForumsAdvertising, Sales and Marketing

Graphic Design & Printing Company - Marketing Help.
First of all welcome to this web site.
I am a SCORE Counselor and both SCORE and I can help you with MARKETING (FREE)
SCORE is FREE. SCORE talks about developing both a Business and Marketing Plan.
You just hired your first employee. Congrats. Does the employee have a title??
Who is in charge of Marketing, (new sales, promotion etc)
What's the most affordable way to advertise??
There is NO one way. Every company is different and every location is different.
That is why there are horse races or different brands in the store.
Good luck, LUCKIEST

Decide what market you are going to target and use a tool such as salesgenie.com to help identify prospects. You can then sell by phone and mail.

salesgenie can help you identify companies by geography, sales revenue, and industry

Will you be a mile wides and an inch deep or laser focused? I.e. all small business or a certain type? If you specialize (real estate for instance) you can develop a reputation as an "industry expert" and network at local events.

Are you limiting you clients to local or do/can you serve clients nationally?

If you are going "local" stress the benefit to clients of working local versus out of state printer or companies like Vista Print

Do you provide free samples? Again, much easier to do if you focus on an industry or two because companies can relate better to samples that are more representation of what they might need.

Best of luck!

Can you print directly on plastic? I run a small candy business and I would like my company name and ingredients on the package.

Hi there,

You have probably gotten your answers but i just wanted to give you some feed back. I do marketing myself such as full color flyers, banners, business cards, apparel, web design etc. my website http://www.topclassdesigns.com

As you can see i do a little of everything. The thing that works best for us is online, networking and word of mouth. When i say online i mean more SEO type of stuff. Its the best means of online advertising as adwords etc does nothing! Dont get me wrong it does work for some clients but for us none. A lot of the time people are just browsing clicking around. Every click costs you money. I rather advise clients to do SEO, its a monthly investment that can help your ranking grow over time and get unlimited amount of visits rather than whatever you spend in your budget.

Look up your local chamber of commerce they normally have several monthly events that you can exchange business cards at, that works good for us too.

Also if your looking to expand your current marketing line we offer reseller pricing.