Dramatically Reduce Your Printing Costs

Have you ever gone through the trouble and expense to create a beautiful brochure only to discover a typo after you'd printed ten thousand?  I once printed five thousand letterhead envelopes only to discover upon receipt the zip code was truncated to four digits!  All that time and money for layout, a copywriter, graphic designer, printer... down the drain.  What a headache.

Has this ever happened to you?  If so, your enthusiasm at handing out your gorgeous new brochures probably waned.  You were stuck with a mess of less than ideal material and had to decide: do you suck it up and use the substandard material or repeat the ordeal and expense to reprint the job?

In this internet age businesses need a digital form of their printed material.  Use it to entice visitors to download brochures and information from your website.  Instruct your sales reps to email them to prospective clients.  Send them to web publishers as camera-ready artwork.  Use whenever possible in lieu of printed material.

Why wouldn't you?  An electronic pamphlet costs nothing to reproduce compared to a printed version, and the recipient receives it instantly for immediate gratification.

You can still print handouts.  But you'll obtain a significant cost advantage when creating any printed material beforehand by producing short runs from a digital file.  Even if you never intend to distribute it electronically this will save you money.  As a bonus, you won't stockpile hoards of dated material.

Suppose you're creating a new full-color brochure and you want ten thousand copies commercially printed.  Before going through the expense of mass printing, create a digital version.  Until you're certain you have what you want, run off only as many copies as needed at a color copy store like Kinkos.

Printing small batches allows you to fix typos before printing large quantities.  Printing copies as needed also allows you to test multiple formats.  You can tweak all aspects of the flyer - layout, content, color, style, paper quality - to discover what combination draws the best.  Only after you've determined the optimum mix should you then print at quantity.  You'll never print a brochure with a typo again if you test your marketing.  And this way your print ads will be much more effective.

In the next article I'll share with you one job duty your salespeople should never perform.  And shortly, I'll tell you how to inexpensively test your marketing, and how the printing process often works against you if you're uninformed.  After reading this post, you'll never see a marketing firm, service bureau, or publisher the same way again.  And you'll stop throwing away your money on advertising that doesn't work.  Look for it in the next couple of days.  

Until then,
profitable business All!