Written by Howard Fenton
Senior Technology Consultant
NAPL
The NAPL 2012 Digital Services Study—our fourth white paper on Digital Services—examines the fastest growing services and most important digital services and what differentiates leaders from the rest. The study participants reflected the industry. It included 173 companies with annual sales ranging from under $1 million to over $600 million. Nearly 30% had annual sales of $2 million or less and over half have annual sales of $5 million or less.
All were deeply involved in digital, offering a broad range of digital services: 95% run a PDF workflow, 93% offer static-content digital printing and 87% offer variable-content digital printing. The majority offered digital services such as web-to-print, cross-media marketing, wide-format printing, and about half were using a web-to-print solution.
One of the new questions we asked our participants was “What will you do to make 2012 better than 2011? The results were very encouraging, because as it turns out, 9 out of 10 said they are taking a new approach to marketing. That includes:
- transforming the company website from an electronic brochure to an interactive resource that engages and educates clients and prospects, facilitates business, etc.;
- increased use of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.)—nearly 44% plan to try social media this year;
- e-mail marketing with landing pages and pURLS;
- educational events, such as open houses, webinars, and seminars, and greater community involvement.
How are you going to market your services differently this year?
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Howard Fenton is a Senior Consultant at NAPL. Howie advises commercial printers and in-plants on benchmarking performance against industry leaders, increasing productivity through workflow management, adding and integrating new digital services, and adding value through customer research.
