How to Be a Marketing Rockstar in a Multimedia World

The company’s campaign includes regularly promotional images on its Canvas People landing page (a St. Patrick’s Day-themed “Go Green, Get Lucky” image, for example in March), as well as updates on new promotions, contest and tips on buying canvas prints.

Canvas People’s Facebook ads focus on promoting prints to commemorate life moments, such as having a child or getting engaged. Asking questions on the ads, e.g., “Love Art?” grabs viewers’ attention and helps to drive sales.

Canvas People’s Facebook strategy also includes a Photo Contest tab on its Facebook site, as well as a Sweepstakes tab that gives people the option to sign up and win gifts, like a free canvas. To reach a broader audience, the company runs a “Like us and get a deal” promotion on Facebook, which allows customers to create a canvas and apply a discount offer with a single click.

The campaign’s impressive results include nearly 4,000 transactions, 180,000 Facebook likes and, overall a 1.5x return on the company’s investment.

Multimedia has a lot of benefits. Not only can it be used for finding new business, graphics businesses can use it to re-position themselves. For many, it represents the ultimate chance a re-branding from the old school printing days of the past. One stalwart business taking up this opportunity, Hiawatha, Iowa-based commercial printing firm Cedar Graphics, took to aggressive marketing as a means to combat commoditization of commercial printing. The company successfully re-branded itself as a multichannel marketing solutions provider. Its digitally printed, high-response re-branding campaign got a marketing edge with web-based solutions from interlinkONE, Wilmington, Mass.

Utilizing its digital printing operations, Cedar Graphics’ marketing logistics operation planned, executed and measured its re-branding campaign. The result? Better market position in a crowded marketplace.

“InterlinkONE gives us strong campaign management and integrated capabilities to build, execute and measure marketing initiatives,” according to Cedar Graphics Owner Hassan Igram. “We create corporate websites for customers from which they can order static and personalized print online, track inventory numbers and locations, and measure campaign response rates in real time. Our combination of conventional offset and digital capabilities enables us to provide customers with a comprehensive range of print services.”

With so much of the print industry, especially large-format printing, tied to marketing industry, developing a sound marketing strategy is a case of a business taking a dose of its own medicine. And for businesses like Cedar Graphics and Canvas People, it is a very effective cure.

“We believe in it because we do it for ourselves and have excellent results,” explains Cedar Graphics’ Igram. “It just shows what customers can achieve too.”

Ed. Note: Wide-Format Imaging readers can get a free copy of Barbra Bannon’s e-book, “How To Be An Online Marketing Rockstar,” by visiting http://hub.am/VWcdTz.