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Marketing Smarter With Digital Print
August 20, 2007

Many of the marketing options open to small and mid-sized marketers these days utilize the capabilities of digital presses. What is a digital press? How is it different from a color copier? How does it impact your marketing?

A digital press is a press that utilizes toner, rather than ink, to produce the image. The technology is very similar to that used in color copiers, except that it is far more robust and the imaging is optimized for commercial production. Digital presses range in quality, from “better than copier” quality to output that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a conventional offset press. Common names for these presses include 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.

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

•    Like color copiers, the per-piece cost is constant, regardless of the length of the run. This means you can print four-color marketing collateral at the same price for 25 copies as you can for 2,500 copies.

•    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 completely different from the other, while the per-page production cost is the same.

The consequences of these two seemingly simple facts are enormous. It means that you can break down your marketing campaigns into versions, or even personalize every piece, without impacting the printer’s production cost of each piece (this isn’t the same as the price of the piece, which will depend on all of the associated costs—see below).

It also means that you can print unique, one-off pieces at the same per-piece cost as a larger run. Say you wanted to create a follow-up brochure for every customer who enters your store to browse. By letting your printer set up a specialized Web portal for your business, your salespeople can create four-color, 100% personalized brochures at the click of a mouse the minute prospects walk out the door. Typically, these pieces go out within 24 to 48 hours.

Again, there are front-end costs to these applications, and that is where your costs will be—the development of the program, the design of the templates or the mailers, and the development of the database, if one is involved (taking us back to Richard’s point from last week about the importance of the database and some of the steps that can be taken to ensure that you get the most for your money), but the more widely adopted these applications become, the less expensive they are. New software is being released, seemingly on a weekly basis, to simplify and automate that process and drive prices down even more.

More on the impact of toner-based technologies on your marketing campaign next time.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your comments and questions as they relate to digital printing or any other topic I've blogged on. Blogs function best when there is dialog with readers, so Richard and I would love your feedback on Making Marketing Work and will gladly respond to questions or comments in future posts.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on August 20, 2007 | Comments (0)