Is Internet Marketing really going to increase sales?

1/20/201012:10:36 PM Link 0 comments | Add comment

If you are going to survive in this new-world market place Internet Marketing is an absolute YES. It is all about reaching new customers.

Your website is the new ”yellow pages” of the future and it gives you visibility beyond the traditional forms of print, magazine, billboards, TV and radio.  The fallacy about Internet Marketing is that it will save you money.

Building a professional looking website costs money. Getting a program and server to let you work hands on is not inexpensive. Hiring a person to monitor the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in house or outside is a hidden cost. Identifying tag words, writing copy, blogging, email marketing all are an expense. Accordingly, if you are a writer or have the time to write then you will spend most of your time on the computer in preference to speaking directly to your customers. Nothing is free.

If you are like me you get an abnormal amount of junk email most of which goes directly to my spam folder and is periodically dumped without reading it at all. It is annoying and if I really want something I will ask my friends for a referral, google it, or hang on to a printed message that was sent to me. Nothing infuriates me more than printing a purveyor’s message or manual at my expense. If I bought something the manual and instructions should be a part of the purchase not a hidden add on expense for me to print out on my home printer.

Everyone will tell you that Internet Marketing will get your phone to ring and it does…but what happens after the call?
Unless you have a product that you can buy unseen you will have to meet with your customer. And if it is a large item purchase you will definitely need to leave your message with him either with your business card and or a brochure. Like most of us I tend to believe and trust more if I have it in writing. Handing a customer a color brochure about your company and product line will close more sales.

Abandoning all direct mail, printed color brochures and marketing collateral will leave you at a disadvantage. A fine mix of marketing will be your best bet. Track your ROI (Return on Investment.) That will determine if your marketing dollars are well spent.

“If you’ve got a project too delicate for you to screw up, contact me today. I’ll quote you on a perfect, professional job — no screw-ups, guaranteed.”

Thomas Miner
Bartleby Press

Website Design and Printed Collateral Color Matching

12/29/20098:29:44 AM Link 0 comments | Add comment

Electonic advertising is becoming the fastest and cost effective forms of getting your message out to potential customers. However, it will not replace the old-fashioned business card and brochure that you can leave with your customer after a face-to-face visit. Unless your business is exclusive to web sales you will inevitably be faced with printing. Keeping your brand and color continuity may proof to be a challenge. So when you are looking at colors ask your designer how that color will translate to print. These are some of the toughest colors to match in any four-color proofing and printing systems.

GRAYS

Reproducing four-color images successfully requires simultaneous control of:

Tone Reproduction  -  to render tonal gradations.
Desired Colors  -  often flesh tones or product colors.
Gray Balance  -  to produce a neutral from CMY inks.

When adjustments are made to CMY inks to optimize tone reproduction or desired colors, gray balance will shift. For example, if magenta is added to print warmer flesh tones, gray balance will shift noticeably. Even a slight change in any one of the three color inks will be very visible in neutral gray areas. This is why most process control bars include gray strips or patches.

PASTELS and LIGHT SCREEN TINTS
Color shifts are more apparent in near-neutrals than in saturated colors. The human eye is more sensitive to color changes in light areas. What the eye sees in light areas is mostly paper vs. ink, so the appearance of the image can be heavily influenced by characteristics such as paper color, brightness, finish, and fluorescence. The effect of paper base is so important that it can be considered a fifth color.

PURPLES / VIOLETS
Rich, vibrant purples are notoriously tough to match and, in some cases, they may be outside the gamut of colors achievable using CMYK. Purples are reddish-blues. A slight shift toward either red or blue has a strong effect on final color. These hues are very sensitive to viewing conditions, appearing redder under warm light and bluer under cool light. COBALT BLUE and PANTONE REFLEX BLUE contain red components, and these colors cannot be matched using CMYK.

ORANGES and GREENS
Some pure shades of orange and green are also a challenge for process color reproduction. If these colors are critical to your image, talk to your printer, who may advise you to use spot colors.

HALF OF ALL PANTONE® PMS COLORS
Pantone offers a solid-to-process guide that shows CMYK values which simulate the appearance of PMS colors printed with special premixed inks. Pantone cautions that less than half these 1,089 colors can be matched successfully. There are practical reasons why CMYK derivations of spot colors are prone to mismatch. They are very visible, often covering a large area as screen tints, and you have an original PMS color patch for direct comparison. Fortunately, it is increasingly practical to use premixed spot color inks.

 “If you’ve got a project too delicate for you to screw up, contact me today. I’ll quote you on a perfect, professional job — no screw-ups, guaranteed.”

Thomas Miner, Bartleby Press

The Church bulletin is your first impression—don’t blow it!

8/11/20094:47:14 PM Link 0 comments | Add comment

I was visiting a friend that lives in East of Austin and we decided to drive into Bastrop. Bastrop is the kind of town that you wink at as you drive through on your way to Houston. A sleepy little farm community getting little publicity except when there is a raid on an independent farmer trying raise an illegal cash crop. There we were walking on Main Street which has taken on a fresh new look that could stand up to the likes of Fredericksburg some day. Fresh paint on restored old buildings sporting cafes, saloons and gift shops.

Every time I visit a town I like to stop in at a local Catholic Church. As a church bulletin publisher and a visitor to the town it gives me perspective about the pastor and the community that worships there. I went in to the sanctuary to pay my respects and pick up the bulletin. The bulletin was one of those legal-sized wrappers, or shell with the generic message on the outside. To my surprise there was no printing on the inside page which is the way it is designed to be used but another printed legal sheet stuffed inside. Not the kind of impression one likes to see upon their first visit.

The problem with church bulletins is the person in charge might not think it is important; That no one pays attention to it…they don’t read it. We are a church working with volunteers what do you expect. On the contrary, most people take pride in their church and they want to see their bulletin look presentable.

In this day and age there is no excuse for not having a clean, presentable information piece like the bulletin. My mother always says if you are going to take the time to do something you might as well do it right. Now there might have been circumstances that prevented that bulletin from being printed on the shell . . .but I don’t think so.

If you choose to print your church bulletin yourself on a copier or have a publishing service print it for you, please take the time to make it look presentable. That visitor might come back.

Thomas Miner

President, Bartleby Press