Printing Innovation Asia Issue 2 2020
8
Bringing the Rain On the journey to realising a digital transformation, printers find that there are plenty of solutions to transform their business model, but the extension of integrated digital services to their service offering proves more challenging. One company in Southeast Asia is working to help print providers with this aspect of their business.
I
t’s a problem that demands attention sooner rather than later. Razor thin margins and stiff competition for a share of everdecreasing printing budgets are forcing print providers to look for new ways to maintain profitability while retaining customer loyalty. One solution is to elevate your position in the marketing value chain by integrating print with other channels, providing additional services from campaign inception and strategy to program execution. But how does a printer transition from Print Services Provider to Marketing Services Provider? More importantly, in a sea of MSPs all offering the same tactics, how do they do it in a way that makes their company stand out? PURLDIVER is working with Southeast Asian printers to help them make this change, and lift their bottom line. In a recent study by Demand Metric and Printing for Less in the US, over half of respondents had integrated direct mail into their multichannel campaigns with 80 percent reporting that direct mail improved their multichannel campaign performance. This mirrors Marketo’s findings where 79% of consumers say they are only likely to engage with an offer if it has been personalised to reflect previous purchases.
com prldvr shape the input – shape the outcome
So how does a Printer or an MSP take advantage of this phenomenon? What expertise is required? What new software is needed? Where do you find the experience to provide some of the more complex programs? How are those new services confidently sold in to existing and new customers? PURLDIVER is working with Southeast Asian printers to help them make this change to their bottom line. We caught up with Bob Pente, the Managing Director of PURLDIVER to get the answers to these questions and a few others. PI: What do you mean when you say you are “Bringing the Rain”? BP: A lot of printers today are grinding away every day trying to increase sales. They cling to the idea of doing what they have always done – just more of it – and hoping for a different result. That way lies madness. The print market as we knew it 30 years ago – hey even 15 years ago, has changed and we’re never going back to those times. Marketing has changed, and print is being dragged along with it. Direct marketers today are using the online channels to reach and then engage customers and prospects. Just look at the channels you, yourself, scan every day. Ads on Facebook, Instagram and
Google are determined by the last thing you searched for, or clicked on, and they follow you seemingly forever. And a single impression costs a magnitude of 10X less than a print piece with the same offer, maybe even less than that. That’s hard for a marketer to resist, and it’s a battle a printer will never win. Instead of fighting it, we help printers integrate print into the marketer’s online continuum, and in the process, we repatriate a large chunk of that marketer’s business. Business that until now, was going to online marketing firms. We help them formulate the proposal, pitch the customer, and then we put together the strategy and creative. Finally, we give that printer access to the software they need to make it all run flawlessly. The result is a repeatable, sustainable campaign and a loyal, repeat customer. PI: Aren’t agencies and marketing firms already doing that for their clients? BP: Not really. The agency will always choose the path of least resistance, and online marketing represents the greatest profit for them with the least amount of campaign overhead. An online campaign is faster to put up and costs less. But that campaign lacks in its targeting and the level of engagement that it elicits. The result is a lower return on investment. It’s still high enough
