Want to stand out this holiday season? Check out some of these useful tips to have your best print marketing campaign yet:
Give Your Target Audience Something Useful
Look, it’s not to say that a standard holiday advertisement isn’t useful, especially if you’re notifying your customers of a sale or special event, but a great way to stand out among the rest of the holiday direct mail is to provide your customers with something they can use.
Examples of something useful might include:
- Calendars
- Recipes
- Stationary
The above should give you some ideas, but we’ll explore them in more detail.
Calendars are a tried and true strategy, because even in the era of digital planners and smartphones with built-in calendars, a real life, physical calendar is still something appealing for many people—especially if you choose the right pictures/graphics for the top fold.
These calendars often end up on refrigerators, desks, workshops, and so on… for the rest of the year. Talk about staying power! A calendar put to use is by far one of the most cost effective brand recognition tools available to nearly any business in any industry.
Recipes are also good attention-grabbers. Your first inclination might be to go with a holiday themed recipe, which is fine, but consider putting a few additional recipes into your print appropriate for other times of the year (e.g., a summer recipe). That way your advertisement-plus-recipe will likely get stored away in a recipe book or kitchen drawer to be viewed again even months down the road.
Stationary is similar in the sense that it’s likely to be used (and thus seen). Few people will throw away a perfectly good notepad or organizer, even if it is emblazoned with your logo and contact information.
Stand Out With Personalization
Personalize whenever possible. With Xerox variable data printing, this is easier than ever before. Variable data printing allows you to create document templates which will pull information from a table of data, for example first names, city names, or anything else you like. Xerox variable data printing is so powerful that it can even print customizable images alongside text.
Review the customer data you already have. An automotive service shop might be able to include details like the make and model of their customer’s vehicle or a veterinarian’s office might give their holiday wishes to both the customer and their pet by name. With variable data printing, the possibilities are endless.
What Do You Have That’s Perfect as a Gift?
We all know someone that’s hard to shop for. Make last-minute shopping easy for your target audience by suggesting to them the perfect gift idea or offering a limited time gift card option. This works well when you sell a product, but businesses in a service industry can make it work too, for example with a free carpet cleaning/oil change/landscaping service, and so on.
Memorable Holiday Print Marketing Has Lasting Effects For the Rest of the Year
While we hope that this post has give you some inspiration for ways you can stand out with your print marketing this season or next, it’s also worth noting that the tried-and-true “classics” will always work—for example, sending out hand-written holiday cards to your most loyal customers will only cement that relationship further. It’s not “fancy,” but it works.
If you built your business on honesty and integrity, then you’ll feel right at home when you come to visit us at Southwest Office Solutions in either of our convenient locations in Albuquerque and Los Alamos. Stop by today or give us a call toll-free at (888) 784-3494. You can also send us an email or request a free online quote.
