Marketing

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Comment by Tonya Lea McKinney on September 1, 2009 at 3:20pm

On-demand printing. A must for startups. Don't offset print thousands of pieces of collateral. Small batch on-demand printing has made leaps in quality while the cost has gone way down.

I'm not talking about the 70 cent per page Kinko output. There are great on-demand printers out there who can do full-color, high-quality print jobs for well under 30 cents a page.

You can sometimes get turnaround same day and overnight shipping anywhere.

Besides cost, quality and speed, there are two other even more important reasons to think ondemand printing. Reasons that give you a real edge over competition big and small.

One is change: Things change too fast in a startup. You need to change your marketing and sales material quickly to keep up. You and the other guy just hit the market with new, similar features. He talks about it, you point to it in a professional printed hand out. Who wins?

Two is custom: Want to beat the big guys? Want the customer to not care that you're small and underfunded? Customize to suit their needs. Being responsive and adaptable trumps being big, slow and expensive any day. On-demand helps you respond and adapt to customers.

Comment by Tonya Lea McKinney on August 25, 2009 at 10:06am

The Lazy (and cheap) Marketer's Message Testing Tip: Twitter is great for testing messages when you're a cash-strapped start up. I put out three tweets, each with a different message, three bit.ly URLs. I see which gets the most RTs and which bit.ly links get the most hits. Then that's the message I go with for an email,DM, web ad, landing page, etc.