It’s alien to us," claims Trevor Price, managing director of Glasgow-based 21 Colour. He’s not talking about the trials of intergalactic printing; he’s talking about doing business with normal folk. For a company that has built a successful business printing brochures and marketing collateral for a range of agency and trade clients, building a new arm of the business to offer photobooks to consumers is a daunting prospect.

It’s not the technology that’s the challenge, it’s that consumers have entirely different expectations of dealing with a company than the trade.

This expectations gap is something the industry is increasingly going to have to find a way to bridge if it is to capitalise on the lucrative business-to-consumer (B2C) market. Be it photobooks, gift cards or other bespoke printed products, the demand from the consumers appears to be there, with outfits such as Moo leading the way.

Capitalising on that demand, though, is somewhat more complicated than just installing some new hardware. Consumers are fickle and print needs to woo them. But how do you direct your marketing efforts to attract their attention?

Tom Pickford, business development manager at Surface View, a company that creates bespoke prints for home decoration, says the first thing printers need to realise is that the consumer is a completely different animal to the trade customer.

"Trade buyers are more technical, they’re looking to fulfil requirements," he says. "With consumers, they get excited about the imagery. They’re thinking ‘I’m not going shopping to get a roller blind, I’m getting a roller blind because it means I can have this amazing piece of imagery’."

It’s the fact that there’s an emotional transaction, as well as a fiscal one, that seems such a difficult notion for the print industry to get a grip on. The rules are different and so the way you handle the client relationship has to change.

A hard sell
But before you even get to the client stage, you need to have something in hand to sell them. Product choice is not a simple process, as innovative ideas are hard to come by. If you do manage an original idea, you have to ensure there is a market for it; if you decide to enter a market already catered for, such as photobooks, then you have to make sure your product can deliver something unique.

At Surface View, the USP is exclusive imagery from well-known names, such as designer Wayne Hemingway, for prints, murals and blinds, sold at a price that mark products out as something unique.

"We’re not something anyone can afford," admits Pickford. "We’re placed in a price bracket so we can offer the quality and service we want to. We often install the products and a lot of our customers aren’t just one-offs – people often start off with a single canvas and then come back for more."

For London-based printer Richard Edward, standing out means a twist on the company’s specialist knowledge of gaming cards for card and board games. It had the idea to have a consumer product as a way of attracting footfall to its stand at toy fairs.

"We didn’t want to take the risk of licensing character cards as there would be licence fees to pay, and we would be going up against our own customers," says marketing manager Louisa Moger.

Instead, it commissioned bespoke designs for the court cards of a standard deck and produced it to the highest environmental standards marketing it heavily on its green credentials. In 2009, these ‘Green Cards’ were short listed for Gift of the Year by The Giftware Association.

Product in hand, you then have to identify who your customers are and how you are going to persuade them to part with their cash for your product. For Moger, there was a specific set of criteria that narrowed the field: the item is a gift that would appeal to people with ‘green’ principles and who recognised its ‘portable entertainment’ value for families on holiday. That said, you can’t second-guess all eventualities, with Moger revealing that the cards do surprisingly well in Brazil, despite the £3.99 price tag.

To find out more than just the most basic information about your customer base, however, you need to start shifting products through a broad marketing campaign. You can then define that base by using the transactional data of any products you manage to sell. This will enable you to target like-minded people. From this you can start to build customer profiles and draw up your hit list for direct marketing campaigns.

Linking your transactional data back to your individual customers is the first step, says Ruaraidh Thomas, managing director at Data Lateral, part of the Lateral Group. You can then overlay that information with third-party data from providers such as Experian or Callcredit and even from sources such as the electoral roll.

"Ultimately, if you’re selling something, you’d like to know why those people bought your product. Then your next question is ‘how can I find people that are the same?’," says Thomas.

However, there’s some regular housekeeping you need to do when handling data, such as using suppression filters, which will, for example, weed out names of the deceased. Then you can economise further. Communisis account director Charles Ping says developing a propensity model will give you a window into who on the list is most likely to buy from you, and perhaps just as importantly, who isn’t.

"Dropping 20% of your mailing list, doesn’t have to mean a 20% drop in volume of response," he says.
And taking advantage of initiatives such as PAS 2020 and Royal Mail’s Sustainable Mail can help keep costs down and win you environmental kudos with your customers.

If this all sounds either too expensive or elaborate, there’s plenty of help out there. Royal Mail, for example, has lots of advice for SMEs at its Mail Media Centre (mmc.co.uk). But it doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, be all about direct marketing, you’ll want to look at other ways to alert potential customers to your brand and products.

Dead letter drop
Kent-based The Marstan Press has branched out into personalised cards, but it has found a niche selling personalised funeral cards where there is less competition. With no intention of putting the ‘fun’ into funeral, some often-used marketing routes are a little trickier for Fond Farewell Funeral Stationery.

"The immediate problem is obviously that in the ideal world, people don’t want to have to use us, and social media outlets like Facebook are ruled out, as people don’t want to ‘like’ a funeral stationery website," says director Martin Lett. "Because we can’t particularly build up a regular customer base, we have to focus on Pay-Per-Click and search engine optimisation to get to the top of the Google search results."

This means making sure you have a well-structured website, rich with keywords relevant to each of your main pages, and that you know the journeys through your site users will take to get to the products and a subsequent transaction.

There are various free online tools to help you formulate your SEO strategy such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool for finding key words. You also need to ensure you’re registered with all search engines – not just Google – and relevant directories and start a strategy to get links back to your site from other popular and relevant websites.

The quick route to get on to page one of search engine results is, for Google, AdWords, but don’t forget paid-for listings services run by other search engines. The trick here is to first identify which keywords people use when they would be looking for your product and create a campaign around these sets of words and phrases. Again, Google’s Keyword Tool is probably your first stop here.

It can often be more effective to target multiple sets of less well searched terms where your advertising competition is less fierce, than compete for the most expensive and frequently searched words.

"Our next step will be to approach funeral directors to get site exposure, and pay them a referral commission," says Lett.
It’s a good plan. Getting a shop window to your product somewhere where you already know you have a receptive audience can be beneficial both for your partner and you. It’s effectively product placement – something Moger and Pickford both recommend. Whether it’s having your products reviewed in websites and magazines, or offering them as competition prizes, this can be an effective tool.

However, says Moger, it does demand that you research relevant titles and their audiences, as well as forming good relationships with the editorial teams. And, of course, you have to be prepared to get a bad review if your product doesn’t shine.

The final piece of the marketing jigsaw is the customers themselves – they can be your most ardent ambassadors or your worst nightmare. Assess how you meet their expectations at every point of their interaction with your company because this defines their perception of you, and how they will describe you to others.

Eileen Gittins, chief executive at Blurb, a service for users to publish and print their own books, says the key is to identify your core competencies and stick to them.

"We enable people to produce bookstore-quality books – that is what we do best. By focusing on a core offering, you ensure that you are able to give the very best possible service in your area," she says.

Keep it simple
That means the platform for configuring and ordering your products has to be pretty straightforward and work every time. Back at 21 Colour, Price spent months researching a photobook platform to use, both from a technological viewpoint and also by ordering products as a user from systems already in place.

"As a consumer, I found I didn’t like it when you had to download a company’s software to your desktop first to prepare files," he says. He eventually signed up with Spanish company Imaxel, which has years of experience with user-interface engineering because of its background in kiosk photo printing and it also enables users to complete the entire process online.

But getting the user experience right means making it enjoyable as well as functional, according to Blurb’s Gittens.
"Our platform was developed to be flexible and personal, however, it also needs to be fun," she says. "Making a book should be a pleasure, which is key to keep in mind when thinking about the software and processes."

The marketing element of this is that once you have your customers enjoying buying from you, you can then start to engage with them. This is particularly effective in online channels where every positive word is archived and searchable on the internet.

This is an area where Moo has excelled, with the company enjoying regular rave reviews from customers. One of its core products is mini cards – business cards for consumers. But through keeping a dialogue open with its users, through social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and other lines of communication, it has uncovered literally dozens of other uses they are being put to, from hang tags for fashion ranges, printed stickers and seal envelopes to sign cards, receipts and handy alternatives to portfolios for models – the list is endless.

"‘Mum Cards’ are really popular at the moment," says Moo head of marketing Paul Lewis. "They have photos of the kids or themselves and have something like ‘Tommy’s Mum’ written on and they hand them out at the school gates, or at play dates. There are loads of different niches, the products can change to suit the needs of these groups."

Moo uses these ever changing ideas as content for its own marketing. It produces regular moosletter email bulletins profiling these creative uses, and has even produced an ‘ideas and inspiration book’ celebrating the ingenuity of its customers.

And this is perhaps the key thing to remember for those printers treading carefully into the business-to-consumer arena: the customer is part of the product. Ultimately, it is the customer that determines what you sell and how you sell it and the success of any venture – a great idea is nothing if no-one is buying it. And so finding a product that fits is only half the battle, appealing to your customer base in a way that suits them is just as important.

15 TOP TIPS FROM THOSE IN THE KNOW
Louisa Moger Marketing director, Richard Edward
1 Segment Researching your potential customers means more than demographics. Think about the situation in which your buyers are going to purchase your product. Why would they choose to buy it? Why would they want to use it?
 
2 Competition In retail, competition is very different. Your competitors are not simply rival sellers of an equivalent or similar product, they are anyone and everyone that your customers could spend the same amount of money on.
 
Ruaraidh Thomas Managing director, Data Lateral, Lateral Group
3 Transactional data This a critical tool that you already have to help identify new customers from existing ones. The tools are there for even small businesses to maximise its use.
 
4 Ensure your data is up to date Marketing to the wrong address or, worse, someone who has died, is a fast-track route to a ruined reputation. Use suppression lists to ensure accuracy.

Martin Lett Director, Marstan Press
5 SEO Make sure you do your homework, have a strategy and structure your website accordingly – the best site on the net will have no visitors (and therefore no customers) unless it’s easily found via a search engine.
 
6 AdWords You can ensure you’re on page one of a search engine’s results by advertising against key words. But make sure they are the most relevant terms.
 
7 Buddy up If your product can be sold as an ancillary to something more established, you already know where your customers are, so consider partnering up with better known businesses that serve the same sector, but don’t have your product. Consider offering your service on a ‘white label’ basis or set up some kind of promotional deal.
 
Tom Pickford Business development manager, Surface View
8 USP Establish where your niche is and what sets your product apart from everything else on the market to cut down the competition.

9 Product placement Make contact with magazines and websites that serve your core target audience and try and organise product reviews, competitions and giveaways to boost brand and product recognition.
 
Trevor Price Managing director, 21 Colour
10 Live up to expectations A customer journey through a transaction with you must be seamless. As soon as you fail that expectation, you either lose a customer or spend time and money on keeping them, which with low value orders, can quickly wipe out your margin.
 
Eileen Gittins Chief executive, Blurb
11 Keep it fun Buying products from you should be an enjoyable experience, which is key to keep in mind when thinking about the software and processes.
 
12 Stay focused Decide on your core offering and stick to it.
 
Paul Lewis Head of marketing, Moo
13 Engage Your customers can be your brand ambassadors, your product development team and a self-sustaining community. Your relationship with them does not start and end with them buying something from you. Find out how they are using your product and celebrate and share those ideas.
 
14 Personality Give your brand product values and personality. Consumers buying online means low-value orders and automated processes, but it shouldn’t mean a robotic relationship. Consider every part of your interaction and the context in which that happens. Even basic things such as a ‘404 error’ page on your site or automatically generated reply emails should reflect the human side of your brand and what you stand for. Similarly, when you are using social channels to engage your audience, keep it social not salesy.
 
Charles Ping Account director, Communisis
15 Cut down Once you have a list of profiled users to target, develop a propensity model that will predict who is most likely to respond. You can then chop out the other end of that list, saving you costs, with low impact on responses.