Five silver bullets for your campaign management

Commercial printers are always looking for a silver bullet to combat the threats facing their industry, but the word on the street is there’s no such thing.

I’ll contradict that opinion by saying that silver bullets do, indeed, exist.

Case in point: Campaign management. Many technology partners have moved beyond hardware to offer packages that allow commercial printers to create, launch, track, manage and modify ready-made campaigns – across all channels. These can empower you with a quick, easy, intuitive solution for campaign consistency and effectiveness.

Today, your campaigns should allow you to pick and choose among individual offerings or select a single package that includes everything you need right out of the box. Do you have those options? And are they doing all you’d hoped? If not, flip open your six-shooter and consider loading up these silver bullets to help you thrive in today’s new world of campaign management:

Add new capabilities without losing old customers

The new age of print demands marketing consultants, rather than commodity marketers. It’s about delivering a campaign that works for each of the campaign’s recipients, so you can drive new business. Consider bringing on new hires or consultants, people who bring a fresh point of view, understand the market and understand how campaigns are changing – and how successful campaigns are run.

Rev up your graphics and color capabilities

Typically, commercial printers don’t have graphic designers on staff, yet color management is paramount today. When you were first coming up, maybe you could get by relying on a nephew who is “good with computers,” but those days have long since passed. Why not take advantage of professional content creation packages that point you to skilled artists who will work with you and your clients, within budget, to prepare brilliant, stunning graphics?

Connect with your customers

There are services and tools available today that can help your customers make more informed decisions about whom they are targeting with a particular campaign, and via which channel they can be best reached. Offerings that incorporate solutions from Salesforce’s ExactTarget USAData and others are prime examples. Rather than blasting out mail pieces from a database, help your customers stay alert to the preferences their audiences are expressing, based on which campaigns drive them to act. Leveraging proven solutions to stay apprised of these response patterns can help deliver more effective campaigns.

Make data management a key to your campaign

By slicing and dicing data properly, you can target the correct audience demographics and drive efficiencies in your campaign. While leveraging the glut of data campaigns and their audiences generate to improve campaign targeting and increase visibility into operations sounds great, it’s worth remembering that all of the information in the world isn’t worth a spent shell casing if you don’t know how to manage it. Implementing a robust solution to track, manage and move information intelligently is key, so you may want to consider enlisting an experienced partner to help.

Grow your business with low-cost, cloud-based services

Web-based platforms can deploy personalized marketing quickly, easily and inexpensively. Cloud-based services allow you to grow your capabilities – and revenue streams – without having to proportionally grow your front-end infrastructure, as you are enabled to accept orders and interface with customers through expertly designed interfaces for services hosted off-site.

Whether you choose an experienced print partner to ride along with you or the Lone Ranger approach, as long as you keep the chamber full of innovative approaches, you’ll be ready to take on the industry’s challenges of the day.