Just add a printer and stir.
By Chris Morrison, Kathi Morrison
If you’re interested in buying a large-format digital printer, now’s the time to join the club. Depending on your technology choice – and your shop’s specialties – a digital-print machine can add new products and increase your shop’s production. Additionally, it can leverage existing clients and land some new ones. However, if you don’t have a game plan, you may find yourself holding an expensive dust collector.
To succeed, you must announce your shop’s new capabilities to your customers. The word-of-mouth method works until you’ve saturated your customer network. So, what’s next? A marketing program that comprises ads, websites, brochures, mailers and press releases? Sure. You can hire a PR firm to do the work.
However, if you’re like us, you probably spent your last nickel to buy a printer and, now, must roll up your sleeves to tackle the marketing work, which soon becomes a time-consuming and daunting task. Luckily, the Hewlett-Packard (HP) marketing planners recognized this and assembled a program – the HP Graphics Arts Capture Business Success Kit – to help signshops jump into digital printing, without too much midnight oil. Sound interesting?
The kit
Available to HP’s large-format printer customers is a colorful folder that contains instructional booklets, a media guide and a DVD of customizable templates for everything from business forms to direct mail to posters. It also holds a practical marketing – “how to” – plan. To fully use the plan, you may need Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. You could also apply CorelDraw and QuarkExpress to create ads and posters, or to add to the kit’s ideas. We assume you already own and use first-rate, signmaking software.
Where to begin
We’ll dip into the kit to show you how it works. For additional information (and tools), visit HP’s dedicated website, www.hp.com/go/capture.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably justified your digital-printer purchase by now. Perhaps you want to market digitally printed signs and banners … or have artistic and photographic skills and want to sell canvas prints. However, if you’re unsure, or hungry for additional ideas, a great starting place is HP’s, 55-page Building Your Large-Format Business Guide. It’s in the kit.
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