Looking to Sell More Digital Print in 2019? Try This

If you want to sell more digital print, sell an experience, not the technical merits of your press. There you go, the promise of this article’s headline has been fulfilled. No need to wait until you’re three-fourths of the way down the page for the big reveal. But wait, there’s more; continue reading to dive a little deeper into what it means to sell the digital print experience, and why it works.

In just about every industry imaginable, from the most niche B2B market to the most ubiquitous consumer-driven market, selling effectively is about selling solutions, not things. It’s unlikely this is a new idea to you. No sale happens in a vacuum. Every product or service, regardless of how impressive, is only as valuable as its ability to solve a problem. This is true especially in B2B markets, where a salesperson’s job is much more about filling a need than a want, compared to, say, a high-end apparel brand or a mouthwatering, indulgent pastry shop.

But, regardless of how seemingly routine, impersonal, or mundane a problem and solution pairing is, the fact doesn’t change that we are emotionally driven creatures. In the world of print marketing, somewhere at the end of the process that starts with a business to business exchange of services, there is a consumer experience that is defined by the (often subtle, but still influential) emotional effect that a piece of marketing invokes.

The advantages of digital printing have been continuously explored and discussed in printers’ circles, but what’s left out of the conversation all too often is how these advantages and unique capabilities translate into end consumer experiences. I’m talking about the moments at the end of the B2B2C chain, when a person walks by some eye-catching digitally printed packaging or receives a hyper-personalized direct mail piece. It’s moments like these that print sellers should zero in on when talking to print buyers. Get them to think about how digital print can impact their customers, rather than just what you can do for them.

More Than Direct Mail

In a rather unique survey by NAPCO Research, commissioned by the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA), the effect of digital print was looked at as it related to the entire buyer’s journey. This 2018 survey found that companies are finding uses for digital print that go beyond just targeted direct mail campaigns. Between 62% and 79% of companies surveyed responded that they are using digital print for things like promo, packaging, and signage. Digital print is amazing for its ability to unlock increased customer engagement rates; 49% listed it as a top benefit of digital print campaigns. But, almost as important as customer engagement rate, 47% of the companies surveyed listed marketing and branding enhancement as effective uses for digital printing. The takeaway here is that digital print has repercussions for multiple stages of the buyer’s journey, not just the top of the sales funnel.

This kind of insight is the perfect kind of jumping off point for a conversation with a print buyer. Your potential customers are much more interested in their customers and the buyer’s journey as it relates to their brand than on what you do as a printer. As a printer, it’s all too easy to focus on what your press can do, what you can provide in literal terms. Just as any good print salesperson must be primarily concerned with how they can provide solutions to print buyers, those same print buyers, whether they’re in real estate, healthcare, finance, or retail, are selling something, and therefore are primarily concerned with how they can provide solutions to their market base.

So, if you want to sell more digital print, skip the step where you talk about your press’s capabilities, and skip the step where you talk about what you can give your customer and how quickly. Go straight to how your digital printing services can create unique experiences for your customer’s customers. In other words, don’t leave it entirely up to the print buyers to be creative and imagine all the possibilities that digital print allows for. Spark their imagination for them and they’ll follow your lead.

Let’s dive deeper into that imagination sparking angle. With offset printing, you don’t necessarily have to speak to the creative part of your customer’s mind. Offset fills a very well understood, necessary, and common role in the world of print. You sell offset printing if you’re fast, accurate, consistent, and convenient to work with. Digital print is a different beast. Digital print gets sold when there’s a use case that goes beyond what people expect from print. Its place in the print world is defined by outside of the box thinking. Variable data printing for customized mail campaigns, multi-channel marketing, unusual surface printing, expanded color gamut and substrate options, these concepts are the brushstrokes that you need to use to paint a picture of what’s possible. The more vivid the picture, the better. The way to sell more digital print is to sell on anecdotes, on the consumer experience.

Paint the Picture For Them

So, how do you talk about digital print in a way that quickly and memorably gets across the creative potential of digital print? Let’s break it into three steps.

Step one is to do your research. You need to really understand the kind of work your target customers do. Unlike in days past, selling digital print in 2019 is a game of multiple contacts, varied sale cycles lengths, and, often, talking to people who know and care very little about the technical aspects of printing. You’ll be talking to creative types, graphic designers, marketing directors, and branding specialists. The more you know about the industry and the role of the print buyer you’re talking to, the better you’ll be able to translate the possibilities of digital print into concrete examples. In order to have anecdotes to tell about how digital print can be used to create memorable marketing moments, you need to know what these creative people do and how they connect to their customers.

Step two is to craft those anecdotes. Depending on the experience and history of your enterprise, this is either going to involve turning your most effective digital print jobs in the past into compelling stories or researching how others are creating memorable digital print campaigns in your prospects’ markets. Both methods work, but obviously having concrete examples of how your company has helped marketers do amazing things with digital print is the ideal scenario. Turn these examples into case studies. Marketers love a good case study. Success stories should be your bread and butter when it comes to securing new digital print customers. Good stories that strike a personal chord stand out in the sea of typical print negotiations.

Step three is to connect the dots. The third and final step is to use these anecdotes and success stories you’ve crafted to not just get the attention of your potential customers, but to carry the conversation over the finish line. The way you do that is by connecting the dots between the unique benefits of digital printing, the services you bring to the table, and the enticing end results these print applications can have for their brand. This is when you can start talking numbers, given those numbers are ones that your prospect cares about: things like turnaround times, ROI, conversion rates, and website traffic. Once a marketer fully grasps digital print’s ability to create personalized print experiences for their customers, and how that affects their bottom-line metrics, they’ll be on board.

Digital print offers print buyers unique, engaging, and innovative applications that provide a deep well of potential for marketers to tap into. Be the one that connects the dots for a print buyer between the power of digital print and memorable end results for their customers and you’ll be the one that makes the sale.