GUEST BLOG: Sarah Weightman from Glow Creative Marketing explains how to ensure your business’s printed promotional material delivers maximum results
With the ever increasing popularity of e-marketing, and businesses embracing social media as a form of promotion, it can be easy to overlook the importance of printed promotional material in spreading your company’s message. When used effectively it can be an extremely powerful marketing tool, offering the opportunity to put something tangible in you customers’ hands to engage them with all you have to offer. ...read more
5 Simple Tips for Creating a Successful Direct Mail Campaign
1. Know what you want to achieve It may sound obvious but it’s vital that you establish what you’re looking to achieve from your mailing before you do anything else. You need to be clear whether you’re trying to sell something, raise awareness of your brand, direct traffic to your website or promote an event. This is important because the outcomes you’re looking for will inform the creative side of your campaign and if you aren’t clear about what you want the recipient to...read more
Making the best use of your Business Cards
A successful salesman and business owner once told me that if he didn’t need to re-order his business cards every month he wasn’t using them enough. His philosophy was that the more cards he gave out the more people would have his details and the more business he would do as a result. And when you look at it like that it’s hard not to agree with him. Think about it. How likely are you to even bother the search engines if you already have the details of somebody who...read more
Making the Right Paper Choice
Choosing the right paper for your print is very important. The right paper will not only suit the document itself but it can also play a vital part in reflecting your brand. There is an incredible range of amazing paper and board available in many finishes, from metallic coloured, to speckled and lots of different textures and thicknesses. In amongst this enormous choice are the varieties that are most commonly used – silk/gloss coated and uncoated/offset. Let’s look...read more
Marketing in a Recession
It’s a fact that under testing economic conditions one of the first budgets to be cut is marketing. Why? I guess it’s because many perceive it to have low value and that their business can manage without it. And when you’re desperately looking at ways to reduce costs you can understand why. Unfortunately, this is the one of the worst things you can do. While marketing is closely related to sales they remain two very different things. If we think of marketing as a...read more
Is it time for Direct Mail to make a comeback?
Once vilified as junk mail, the enemy of the environment as well as the door mat, direct mail has finally come of age. Says who? Says me, and here’s why… Before going any further I should point out that I am anything but anti email. I use it myself for our newsletter and for other marketing messages. I just believe that printed mail can’t be beat when used creatively, with careful planning and for the right application. While email has no doubt...read more
How to create a print ready PDF
PDF is our preferred format for receiving your artwork. To create a PDF you need to have Adobe Acrobat installed. Then simply follow the instructions below appropriate to the software you’re using to create your artwork. INDESIGN Artwork should have a minimum of 3mm bleed (image area outside of the trim area). All fonts must be embedded or converted to curves. Go to: File / Export / Layout as PDF, this will give you the ‘Exports as PDF window, select ’Press Quality’...read more
DIY Design – Why not to do it
There are a lot of DIY designers who believe that they’re doing themselves a favour by saving the cost of hiring a professional to create their artwork. And on the surface it’s hard to disagree that not having to pay an agency or in-house print designer a fee when you can do it yourself isn’t a good thing, right? Well not really. You see professionals are exactly that for a reason: they’ve paid their dues and perfected their art and you’ll see this in the results of their...read more
Colour Consistency – Holy Grail or Fools Gold?
Achieving consistent colour across a range of documents and media can be something of a holy grail for some. As part of a brand, colours are chosen very carefully as they can communicate much about an organisation and subconsciously appeal to different market sectors. It can be a very precise science. A brand identity will be communicated in many ways across many different substrates and media. Is it realistic to expect that colour will be identical across the board? Let’s have a...read more
Make sure to add bleed to your artwork
Bleed. It sounds pretty gruesome doesn’t it? But before you start attacking your screen with a kitchen knife, don’t worry, it isn’t quite as dramatic as it sounds. No, bleed is where the image or print on a page or document runs off the page when trimmed to size. Adding bleed to your artwork simply involves extending the image beyond the boundaries of the area to be printed by a few millimeters, typically 3. It’s important because without it you run the risk of having white...read more
