Amid fears of the spreading credit crunch affecting your core print business and limiting your ability to purchase expensive print equipment on credit and half measures for tiding the poor economic conditions, we suggest you diversify your business out of trouble.

While your immediate concerns are to cut down staff and reduce investment (even on marketing), these actions may leave you in a disadvantaged position to grow your business when the economy picks up.

A better option would be to reduce your cost while increasing business even while your competitors trim theirs.

Industry Data:

Clear market trends suggest that marketers have long been looking to the web to compliment print in reaching their target customers.

Marketers are increasingly going direct, personalized and online! Are you keeping up?

If you are already using digital press from the Canon CLC and Konica Minolta 850 on the low end to the Xerox iGen3, Kodak NexPress and the HP Indigo on the high end, then you have already made it easy for your print company to diversify your business, growing while the industry does!

If you’re stuck with offset press that are huge and expensive to run and maintain and set you back with millions of dollars in debt then now would be a good time to ‘go digital’.

5 key production characteristics*

From a marketing perspective, there are five things marketers need to know about digital production presses:

1. Like Color copiers, the per-piece cost is constant, regardless of the length of the run.

This means that you can print four-color marketing collateral in any quantity, with no price penalty. You can print four-color brochures at the same price per piece for 25 copies as you can for 2,500 copies.

2. Each page can vary 100% in content. This means you can produce pieces unique to each recipient.

Each one of your 2,500 four-color pieces can be different from the other, while the per-page production cost is the same.

3. Digital presses are not limited to paper substrates only.

Some are able to run film and foil, labels, magnetic substrates and even folding cartons.

4. Digital presses are not limited to short-run production.

High-speed black-and-white laser printers and four-color inkjet presses are capable of producing runs in the millions.

5. While most devices are CMYK, some presses are capable of producing five, six and even seven colors.

Presses optimized for film and foil generally offer white. Some presses offer inline coating. The consequences are enormous. You can print on a just-in-time basis for a wider variety of applications and products than many marketers realize – from direct mail, to refrigerator magnets, to packaging.

* 5 production characteristics provided by Heidi Tolliver-Nigro at the digital print, marketing primer series