10 Ways I Am Messing Up My Social Media Efforts (Part I)

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (New Rules Social Media Series)
Our AlphaGraphics Social Media Activities Can Use a Lot of Improvement In Promoting Our Printing Business

I spent the last couple of days reading "Inbound Marketing" by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.  I was attracted to this book because I am a fan of David Meerman Scott and he highly endorsed this book.  I will say that, at first, I thought the book to be a little simplistic since I have been studying this area for awhile.  However, as I got deeper and deeper into the book, I started to think about all the good advice that I was not following. I wish I had read this book a few months ago before I started on my Social Media journey I highly recommend this book to everyone who is trying to figure out how to market their business in this new Web 2.0 age. It does lay out the steps you should take in a very systematic way. Based upon my reading, here are the things I am doing wrong in my inbound marketing activities. These are the first 5 out of 10 items.

1.  My Blog is Hosted by Blogspot
When I initially set up my blog,  I took the easiest route simply because I did not know better. Brian and Dharmesh highly recommend that a blog needs to be hosted with the company website.  There are many reasons for this, but the best reason is that a blog drives activity to the website.  The way I have it set up is that the activity is driven to blogspot, which is a Google entity.  Google does fine on its own, and it does not need to have my activity to help its rankings. The same goes for those who have Wordpress host their blog.  How do I fix this? I really haven't figured it out.  Since the webpage for each of my three centers is a sub-domain of the main AlphaGraphics site and right now AlphaGraphics doesn't have a way to host blogs on their website, I am stuck.  I have considered a separate domain to host my blog outside of the AlphaGraphics website, but I am not convinced that this gets me ahead of where I am now.  Even if AlphaGraphics decides to give us the ability to have our blogs on a sub-domain of the AlphaGraphics site, I don't know how I will be able to cover my three centers with one blog. Someone smarter than me will need to help me with this problem.

2.  My Twitter Name Is Personal and Has Numbers In It
When I set up my Twitter account, I did not do a lot of thinking about the account name.  I did want to make it personal because I did not want to run an account that was an impersonal one of just "AlphaGraphics Arizona". I think people want to follow people and not business names. One of my salespeople posts to a generic AlphaGraphicsAz account, but he is not an avid poster and it really is his personal account. The number in the name was decided upon because there are about 4 million Steve Adams' in the world.  Maybe there is only 3.9 million, but you get my point. The 291 represents the store # for my Mesa center.  I have been using that number for years.  In most of my social media activities, I have been using my full name so I can track my activity on Google. Hence the Stephen Eugene Adams. (I got that advice from David Meerman Scott). So how do I fix this? I think I am pretty well set now but I did change my name on the account to Alphagraphics Steve.  We'll see how that works. I also might start using the AlphaGraphicsAZ account more.

3. I Have Protected My LinkedIn Account Too Much
When I set up my LinkedIn account, I treated it the same as my personal FaceBook account. I only wanted to connect with people I knew and did not allow anyone I did not personally know to connect with me. After reading this book, I figured out that I need to open this thing up.  I need to search for people I want to be connected with and I need to allow connections to people who want to connect with me. I also need to start posting on this channel more often to be able to start more conversations.  Although I have joined some marketing groups over the last couple of months, I need to work this area a little better.

4.  My Website Has Nothing For My Prospects To Do Except Call Me.
Our Alphagraphics site does have a limited CMS feature to it.  I am driving people to my website that may not be ready to buy at that point in time. I am able to control the middle of some of our pages, but not the outside frames.  At this time, I do not know how to put a sign-up form into my web pages and we cannot host a PDF file for download. So our websites lack a call to action.  They can call me, email me, send me a file or place an online order if they are an existing customer. The first thing I believe I should do is to figure out how to put a form onto my site(s) and how to have my PDF's hosted at another server.  Again, this will take someone smarter than myself.

5.  My Content is Not Remarkable
I have been trying to have a blog posting once a week since sometime in December.  Sometimes I go a couple of weeks, but mostly my postings have been weekly. I do not seem to be getting a lot of traction with the number of subscribers to my blog. Using Google Analytics and SiteMeter, I do see that I do get a few hundred people to read my blog each month and the readership does increase each month, but I can't seen to increase my subscribed readership.  So, according to Inbound Marketing, it has to be my content. I am not writing what the industry wants to see.  I think some of this is the paradigm shift that is happening in our industry.  We are printers that have determined that in order to survive going forward, we need to be more marketing and communications consultants.  So I am writing about that stuff and not about our core, legacy businesses. No one expects a printer to write about marketing and communications.  There's not a lot of people who want to read about printing, copying, bindery, mailing services and pre-press design. So what do I do.  I believe that I still need to continue to talk about our shift to marketing and consulting, but I need to figure out how to increase my subscriber base.  If anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Next week, I will give you an analysis of points 6-10.  There just as brutal and will cause me a lot of work to correct.

You can always contact us at the following websites:

AlphaGraphics Mesa Printing and Marketing        FaceBook Fan Page
AlphaGraphics Tempe Printing and Marketing      FaceBook Fan Page
AlphaGraphics Phoenix Printing and Marketing    FaceBook Fan Page

Twitter: @steveadams291
LinkedIn: stepheneugeneadams

Digg This  |   Delicious  |  StumbleUpon  |  Reddit

Who is the Real AlphaGraphics Millennial Customer?

I found this video on YouTube a few days ago.  I think it precisely presents the gap between what a lot of businesses think about Gen Y/Millennials and how the Millennials think about themselves.  Honestly, I think the perception is somewhere in between, slanted toward the latter view.


The reality of the matter is that a lot of the Millennials have not ventured into an AlphaGraphics Printing Facility unless they have been trained for a design background.  We are also finding out that the trained designers are being trained for all things Internet and very little print.  In a lot of cases, we have to train our young customers on what it takes to have something printed on an offset press or that things need to be presented differently if they want to take an Internet page and convert it into a printed piece.

The Millennials are not only a significant portion of today's market but they will be the dominate portion of the overrall market in the future. So we will need to learn how to promote ourselves to them.  They will eventually learn the value of the printed piece so we must be patient in teaching them the benefits of print, combined with the digital presentation.

Previously, I published a Blog post on this subject.  You can find my thoughts at: http://stepheneugeneadams.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-alphagraphics-customer.html

At AlphaGraphics Printing in Mesa, Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona, we do more than just print.  We are also marketing and communications consultants familiar with annual marketing plans, website design, SEO, SEM, Email marketing, direct mail campaigns, news releases and blogging.  We can be reached at the following websites:

Alphagraphics Mesa Printing and Marketing
Alphagraphics Tempe Printing and Marketing
AlphaGraphics Phoenix Printing and Marketing

Follow us on Twitter at:  @steveadams291

The Future of Your Neighborhood Print Shop

As you can imagine, revenues are down and continue to decline in the quick print environment. This decline started in 2008 and continued through 2009. Everyone is hopeful that 2010 will be a growth year, but hardly anyone expects revenues to return to the 2007 levels anytime soon. Print industry experts are predicting a continuing overall decline in the traditional revenue streams that have been the stalwart of the quick printing industry for years, namely: offset printing, high-speed duplicating, digital printing, bindery and graphic design. Products such as letterhead, envelopes, business cards, fliers, newsletters, brochures, manuals, postcards, forms and direct mail have all seen declines due to the conversion to Internet marketing, the rise of Internet printing companies, or from companies purchasing equipment at the user level sufficient to produce these items in-house. Because of the overall decline of traditional printed items, there also is significant price pressure on those print shops that have survived this economic decline.

So, what is the future of your neighborhood print shop? Dr. Joseph Webb, a contributor to one of the industry's think tanks, What They Think, has written a book entitled "Renewing the Printing Industry". In addition, Barb Pellow, a contributor to InfoTrends, has also written many articles about the condition of print overall. Both of these individuals have analyzed the printing industry and have concluded that changes need to be made in order for all printing entities to survive.

There are several avenues that a quick print owner can consider. I will discuss two of them. The first is to fight the trend by being the best marketer of their service, to become more efficient than their competitors so they can compete on price, to implement on-line ordering to the general public, to acquire the business of closing print shops, and to, in fact, significantly reduce their pricing. I refer to this business plan as the commodity approach. Be the best in the traditional printing environment. There is still money to be made in the traditional printing environment for those who continue down this path. The biggest downside is that this market will continue to decline. The last maker of buggy whips was the most efficient of the bunch.

The second avenue of approach, and the one that most quick print franchisors are pushing is the conversion to becoming marketing and communications experts while milking the traditional printing area as much as possible. This approach also has significant risk for many reasons. At this point, there are few profit models to duplicate, there is little, to no recognition from outside the industry that a former quick printer can provide this expertise, there is a diverse expertise of franchise owners that does not include marketing training, and people that are already providing this service to businesses are also struggling to survive.

A couple of years ago, many in the quick printing industry developed personalized communications expertise. This allowed them to sell a 1-to-1 marketing piece for their customers, many of which were connected to personalized url's (purl's). This technique, combined with a targeted, well defined list allowed response rates to balloon from 1-3% to as much as 35%. What many in the industry found out is that the lead time to sell these projects were significantly extended over the time it took to sell traditional printed items and that not all customers could make the cost/benefit leap of faith. However, the ability to sell and produce these types of items led people to believe that they were now marketing and communications experts.

I personally believe that the second approach is the way to go for our industry. It will be a difficult road to travel and will probably see a lot of failed attempts along the way. Owners of these operations will need to commit to learning the marketing and communication business, will need to circulate within the marketing, advertising and public relations communities and will need to promote themselves as marketing experts within the business environment. It will be a long and slow path to profitability so the quick printer will need to rely on its traditional printing revenue to survive before the marketing area takes off.

So what is the future of your neighborhood print shop? It will depend on the path they take. If you are a customer, you should have a conversation with them to find out what road they are taking. A commodity printer or a marketing and communication expert. The downhill road or the uphill road.

You can reach us at AlphaGraphics at the following websites:
AlphaGraphics Mesa on Baseline 480-844-2222
AlphaGraphics Tempe on Elliot 480-413-1900
AlphaGraphics Phoenix - Northwest Valley 602-234-2944

Follow me on Twitter at: Steve's Twitter Account

Digg This ... del.icio.us