Marketing is not a one time solution where you go all out and stop at a certain point. Rather, it is an on going process to sustain regular customers or to expand your market. It’s not enough to acquire the services of a large format poster printing company at one point and stop as well. It is a relationship you must keep - both as your business partner and service provider.

• The same thing cannot be said truer with your marketing strategies. It is too a relationship you must keep with your clients and build new ones with your prospects. Sending out a few brochures every now and then or handing out flyers when you feel like it isn’t enough.The only way to retain your hold on your consumers is to remain visible. Planning the right time, for the right products and services, to the right audience are just some of the several things you should consider. Communication is always the key and with which will propel your large format posters well.
• Large format poster printing is a way to anchor your advertising materials. It is the backbone your marketing can build upon. Large outdoor advertisements create the visibility you need to stay on top of your customer’s consciousness. Although it barely scratches the surface, it places a big foot in fast closing doors.

Marketing with Posters For whatever purpose you may think of, large format posters can generally do it for you. Brand your products well, build up your image, announce your promotions and increase your sales.

1. Use posters as a spring board to your marketing plan. Nothing would help establish your campaign better than large posters that can effectively dominate any landscape. Large posters give your other marketing materials a sense of credibility. Being viewed by a large audience, it is accountable to more people to get their facts right and promotional legitimate.
2. Call your clients to action. Poster slogans might be short, but it can be powerful. Suggest actions they can do immediately and conveniently. “Ask your Doctor (or dealer, mechanic, etc)” or “Visit our website”.
3. Use posters as your foot in the door. They can be patterned not just to make or promote direct sales. As illustrated in the previous paragraph, you can use posters to motivate your clients through more information, increase your visibility, and drive clients to your websites or events like trade shows and more.
4. Hammer in the message with repetition. It may be the same message over and over, but it works to build your brand and your customer confidence in your products. Consistency translates to dependability, and dependability sooner or later becomes trustworthiness.
5. The beauty of large format posters is that it is a very low maintenance advertising solution. You have it printed, you put it up and you forget about it, but it still keeps advertising.

Achieve these and more through the expertise of a large format poster printing company who can give you a variety of possibilities - from materials, designs, print options and more.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Carla_San_Gaspar

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In building your business identity, it pays to invest in your print materials. They are likely to come in contact with your clients before they enter your store and will make the first impression. Outsourcing your business printing to a commercial advertising company is your best bet to getting high quality print outputs that will surely impress your customers.

Your marketing materials and advertisements are a crucial factor in building your identity or business brand. It communicates intentionally or unintentionally promises or standards your products or services are set to deliver, or connect emotionally to your customers.

When you are building your brand remember to create a unique selling point or USP that differentiates your product and service offerings from those of other businesses. Your brand gives your customer of what to expect from your business. Do this and observe these following points, for both you business and printing concerns:

1. Educate your niche market with brochures and catalog printing

a. Innovate or market your business in a way that it meets highly specialized needs your customers are willing to pay a premium price for. The niche market is often a market segment large corporation with thick layers of bureaucracy and mass production fails to address.

b. Small businesses that innovate new ways to expand on current offerings find that they have to orient their customers about their products and services. Brochures, leaflets, and other print resources are the preferred marketing materials as they can be laden with tips and information.

2. Create emotional value with outdoor advertising

a. People associate themselves with the products they use and the services they hire. The brands of these businesses often communicate a set of attributes and values that reflect the customer’s own personal beliefs. These values are often unrelated to the products and services themselves, but influence the customers’ experience with the business and thus affect their purchasing decisions.

b. Posters, billboards, and other print materials that emphasize on images that resonates their emotional content are often the choice advertisements. They market their products and services as part of a lifestyle or a subculture that your customers are already predisposed to believe in.

c. Popularly, posters or print designs communicate notions that appeal on beauty, sex, distinction, confidence, and so many other facets that can attract clients. This gives them something to aspire for or lead them to believe that such products and themselves share a common ground.

3. Build Credibility with One-to-One Marketing

a. Your business brand creates and maintains the prevailing perception about your business. This reputation is a reflection of customers experience with your business or what you intend for them to expect in your products or services.

b. Credibility and building a reputation is a result of sustaining a relationship with the customers themselves. Enhancing the customer’s experience requires special treatment and personalized service. Postcards, greeting cards, and other one-to-one direct-mail-strategy are best used to build long term relationships and build credibility.

Brand management requires a sustained advertising effort. Dominating the consumer consciousness means saturating the market with marketing materials that affect your customers perception.

Having your marketing materials custom printed with business printing services allows you to create a premium brand for your small business. It reflects the amount of professionalism you place in every aspect of your business that will win your brand customer loyalty.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Carla_San_Gaspar

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Many people mistakingly believe that Adobe Photoshop is the end-all program for graphic design.Wrong.True, Photoshop is an incredible graphics app, there are many instances where other apps are better suited to the work you’re doing. For instance, you wouldn’t want to use Photoshop for:

• Layouts for multiple page documents such as booklets, brochures, magazines or catalogs.
• Logos
• Spot color work
• Designing items that need to be resized later…
the list goes on. 

There are many apps that are much better suited for this type of work. They’ll make your job easier, as well as save you time and money with the vendors you send your art to.If you have questions on when to use which app for your project, don’t hesitate to contact me! 

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With the costs of process color work on the decline (or maybe it’s just that fewer designers these days know the ins and outs of spot work), spot color seems to be more and more of a mystery to the average print designer.So what is the difference between spot and process color?

Process color, (or CMYK, or full color, or four-color, or photographic color - depending on your background and who you’re talking to) uses four ink colors to create full color spectrum. The inks used in this process are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (Key). These inks are semi-transparent when applied to the paper on a printing press and are combined in various densities to closely reproduce photographic (or natural) color.

I say “closely reproduce” because due to the color combinations available as well as the press operator’s eye for color (and the fact that the CMYK color spectrum is considerably smaller than gamut of color the human eye can interepret), it’s not always possible to get the exact color reproduction as you may see on your monitor, or from your inkjet printer.Spot color, on the other hand, includes only the color inks specified in your print document. For this method of print to work correctly, you must first specifiy your colors correctly in your document. This is most commonly done by specifying Pantone colors as “spots” in InDesign or Quark (and can be done in Illustrator and other applications as well).

Why print Spot instead of CMYK?Many businesses have certain spot colors assigned in their logos (for example, Mercer University’s branding colors are Pantone 158 and Black) to ensure that they are printed with consistency from printer to printer, project to project.Costs is a factor as well. It doesn’t make too much sense to pay for color when printing a letterhead… Only the two colors used in the branding piece are going to be used, no photography, etc. With these types of projects, it’s generally cheaper to print using the two spot colors instead of the more complicated four-color process (and color printing sometimes cannot reproduce Pantone colors).

The process of spot differs a little from full color printing as well. With spot printing, pre-pigmented opaque inks are used to print. So if your business’ branding piece used Pantone 300 (a light blue) and Pantone 032 (a bright orange), these color inks would be used on the printing press instead of the being built using the translucent CMYK inks.

So to recap, when to use spot vs. CMYK printing?

CMYK:When full color is preferred.

Spot:When creating a piece that uses only a company’s branding colors.
Cost.

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Again, it’s been a little longer than I would have liked since my last post, however things have been rather busy in the studio lately. My new family and I were cotemplating a move out of town, however, decided otherwise. I’ve also been working on a quite a number of projects. Since my last posting, I’ve left my day job and am now pursuing studio work full-time.

Running from meeting to meeting, doing a good deal more self-promotion and sales work has cut into my computer time, but it’s time I get back on the bloggin’ wagon and update the rest of my site as well.

Though I try to provide a good mix of advanced marketing and design tips, it never hurts to go back to your basics and remember the fundamentals. So this installment is all about the things we should know when beginning a design project, but may have forgotten after getting in our daily routines…

Know Your Colorspace

An oversight here can easily ruin any print project, or cause a web projects colors to look funny. Always work in CMYK for print projects and RGB for web work. For photography work that’s going to press, I’ve found it’s best to make the CMYK conversion after doing any image manipulation or color correction. For fine art reproduction, talk to your printer first, some printers prefer to do the conversion themselves.

Resolution, Resolution, Resolution

Just like the relevance of the three “L’s” of real estate establish property value, resolution determines the quality of your reproductions. When starting any project, know it’s final output and set your resolution accordingly. This is primarily in relation to working in Photoshop. If you’re producing a graphic that is to be used in a print project, 300 dpi is generally the minimum resolution you’d want to use. Once again though, it’s never a bad idea to check with the company that going to be doing the printing for you. For example, newsprint generally prints at a resolution of 150 dpi because the paper that’s used in newsprint won’t hold an image much clearer than that, at the opposite end of the spectrum, some fine art publications request resolutions as high as 600 dpi. There are also some oddball requests out there as well. One printer I work with for glicée work requires 302.6 dpi resolution. Why? I have no clue, but just goes to show, when in doubt, ask your output provider what they prefer. It’ll save you money and headaches in the long run.

Use the right Program

Simple. Use a photo editing program such as Photoshop for editing pictures. Use a page layout program like InDesign for publication layouts. Each program is catered to a certain type of work. Sure, you can lay out a brochure in Photoshop, but that’s not what the program was designed for and as such, you’ll be causing yourself to do more work to get the project done than if you did it in a page layout application such as Quark or InDesign. The same goes for logo work, this is Illustrator’s forté, not Photoshop’s. I’m always amazed at what designers try to do in Photoshop when it’s clearly not what the application was designed for.

Remember the Bleeds!

If your document has color that is supposed to run to the edge of the finished sheet, you need to make your artwork bigger than the actual finished size. For example, if you’re creating an 11 x 8.5″ trifold brochure that has a graphic taking up the entire background, your artwork should be 11.25 x 8.75″. The reasoning for this is that your printer will be printing your brochure on a piece of paper larger than 11 x 8.5″ and then cutting it down to size. The .25″ allowance is called a bleed and ensures that should the paper shift during the cutting process, there will be no white fringe at the edge of the paper.

Preflight, Package, Send

Probably the biggest faux pas I’ve seen from a disappointly large number of designers is submitting artwork without preflighting. All page layout programs worth having include a Preflight tool. Preflighting simply checks your document to make sure you’ve got all your art in the right colorspace, resolution, all fonts are either embedded or available for packaging (not copyright protected) and all links are up to date. Running a preflight on your document will instantly tell you if there are any problems with your files and what you need to do to fix them. Again, saving you time, money and headaches with your output provider. Packaging is done after preflighting. Packaging your document places a copy of your working page layout file, all included fonts and graphics as well as a .txt file containing any special instructions and your contact information in one folder. Essentially creating a copy of all your working documents in one location for you to stuff (or zip, depending on your platform preference) and send to your output provider.It may seem elementary to the seasoned professional, but in my experience working with other designers and marketers, these are the steps most often overlooked in many, many projects.

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“Can you make this more blue?” “I saw this nice purple on a shirt, can you make this part of the logo that color?” “My company’s colors are orange and blue, let’s do that.”

All of these requests are fairly common in the graphics world, unfortunately, not very effective when trying to communicate color in the business world.

Because everyone’s eyes are slightly different and everyone experiences color a little differently, not to mention the numerous factors that can influence how an individual perceives color (ambient light, mood - yes, mood, blood sugar, medication, adjacent color… the list goes on), making something “more blue” to me may look completely different (like purple) to you. In the business world, this can be disasterous.

Many businesses have a specific color they want used for their logo. A good designer will work with a company to set color standards for their branding piece. Part of the reason for this is to prevent consumer confusion. If Company A advertises in 30 different publications, has all types of signage, printed marketing collateral, promotional products, etc. without specifying exact colors, it’s entirely possible that the logo will appear in an endless number of different shades of the color that the logo is supposed to be. This can confuse potential customers; Are there two companies with the same name? Is this ad from the same store I was just in? Is there a Company B that is trying to copy the look of Company A? Leading to the ultimate conclusion: “I’m not too sure about Company A, I’m going to buy from their competitor instead.”

Not good.

The advertising dollars you spent on establishing a brand can easily be as good as wasted if you’re not protecting and extending your brand. This includes not only the physical characteristics of your logo, but also how its colors are reproduced as well. Luckily, there’s a solution to make sure you get the exact colors you’re expecting.

The Pantone Matching System is the universal guide to communicating color. Every marketer should be aware of what PMS colors are used in their company’s brand. This system relies on pigmented inks being identified as numbers so that designers and service bureaus are speaking about the same colors.

The crucial link in this system are the swatch books manufactured by the company. Each book is printed with the various inks available and printed colored swatch has a corresponding number associated with it. There are more than 1,100 available inks to choose from, which without a matching system would make for a nightmare for designers to keep colors consistant.

To acheive expected results when reproducing color, it’s imperative that your designer consult with you during the branding process and choose the exact colors for your business’ logo or marketing pieces. During this process, you should ask to see a swatch book and pick out the colors that appeal to you or specify the exact colors that your company requires. This way, when you have your collateral produced, you’ll get the exact colors you’re expecting instead of something close…

Pantone swatchbooks are an essential tool to have in your arsenal. They can be ordered direct from Pantone and generally run about $120 for a three book set. www.pantone.com. Always specify PMS colors for any project that is color critical (and when it comes to your brand, they all are!)

If you have additional questions about how to effectively communicate color, or have a few projects you’d like to discuss, contact me.

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Sure, any of us can open a web page in our favorite browser, go File>Print and print what’s on the screen to our desktop printer. It looks OK, you can pass it around to your friends, read it, admire the super saturated colors your uncalibrated inkjet gives and throw it in the shredder. All’s well and good.

Ever look closely at the pictures and graphics after they’re printed though? Notice the graininess of the photographs and logos, and in some cases even the text? Whatever, right?

But you really like the picture they used of the close-up of the model’s face and want to incorporate it into your next mail piece that’s going to be about a new type of makeup you’re promoting.

Uh-oh… Here’s where that next project starts to fall apart. Get a cup of coffee for this post, put on your thinking caps – and for those that may not be very technically inclined, this one could be a doozy.

Without fail, at least once a month or so, I’ll take on an assignment from a client who claims to have most all the artwork “ready to go” and all I have to do is do the final “sprucing up” to get the project ready for the printer.

So the client uploads the files and lets me know the project is “ready to go.”

It never takes long after opening files to realize that the “ready to go” artwork has photography and logos that have been plucked from a website. Any designer worth his salt knows that (in most cases) it’s not possible to repurpose artwork designed for web use to print. There are a couple of occassions where this isn’t entirely the case, but these aren’t the norm, we’ll get to those later. There are, however, many factors that make this task of repurposing fruitless; in this take, we’re going to discuss resolution:

Resolution
No, I’m not talking about the things you avoid making and end up not doing at the first of the year. This time we’re talking image size…

Artwork can be “measured” in a variety of ways. When talking about images displayed on your computer, an image’s resolution is described in PPI, or pixels per inch. A pixel is the smallest single complete sample of an image and is made up of three smaller color emiters; one red, one green, on blue… More on that later.

Most monitors display images at 72 ppi, meaning for every inch of image you see, there are 72 pixels of image in each line. Some newer monitors are capable of displaying images at 96 ppi or even up to 160 ppi. The vast majority, however, are only capable of reproducing at a lowly 72 ppi, which to the naked eye can appear jagged and gradients look choppy and not so smooth.

However, despite being not as good a reproduction, web graphics are made at 72 ppi in order to keep the file size to a minimum to keep you from waiting for them to load while you visit a website.

In print, images are measured in DPI, or dots per inch. Commercial printers will usually require that all art submitted for a print project be a minimum of 300 dpi at finished print size. This simply means that if you’d like a photograph printed at 8 x 10″, the file you submit needs to be at least 8 x 10″ big at a resolution of 300 dpi. Simple enough, right?

Well, it should be… Only problem is, that graphic you love on such and such’s website is 4 x 3″ at 72 ppi, which when coverted to you printer’s specs of 300 dpi shrinks to a measly .96 x .72.” Barely the size of a postage stamp!

Why is this? Print resolution is nearly quadruple that which is required for the Internet, so when you transpose an image for use from the web to a print media, it’s physical size is effectively quartered…

Here’s a 4 x 3″ sample of a web graphic like I mentioned above:

Now here is the same image after it’s been converted to print resolution:

Ok, surely a number of you are saying, “whatever Chris, all I have to do is stretch it out to fill the space I need.”

Sure you can do that, but what you’ll end up printing will look something like this:

Yuck…

The simple way to avoid this? Start with high resolution (300 dpi) images that are the size you want them to be printed, or larger.

Image Scalers:
Yes there are some ways to enlarge an image to larger than its original size, but understand that all pixel-based images contain a finite amount of data, regardless of whether they were shot with a digital camera or scanned from hard copy. When you enlarge an image, you’re essentially making up data to fill the gaps where new pixels will be created. You may be able to acheive an enlarged version of the image you want to have printed at the required 300 dpi, but no enlarged image will ever look as clear or sharp or has as smooth a color range as the original.

You can always go smaller and retain all your image clarity, but not the other way ’round.

So, long story short. If you’ve found art you want to reproduce in print, or you’re developing a website that contains elements you may want to incorporate into a print advertising campaign, remember resolution!

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