Cost-Effective Small Business Communications
Early in my career, a $20-million/year company (which will remain nameless) had a CEO who fell in love with a stationery sample from my paper supplier. He wanted everything high end: expensive paper, six coats of metallic inks, varnishes, die cuts, and custom watermarks. In the end his stationery cost over $20,000 (I took $1,500 as a design fee — the rest was spent on production.) The client was thrilled with his company’s new look. The printer got an award and I got a sexy portfolio piece. But potential clients were less than impressed — they were scared off because the stationery looked too expensive and over the top.
Contrast this with the advice I now give my clients: Buy very high quality business cards on heavy stock — not those $35 Quick Print cards — because everyone you meet forms a “first impression” from the design and heft of your card. Your business cards are at least as important as the suit you might wear. But bypass the expense of using printed stationery. Instead, have stationery templates designed and print your letters on better quality paper using a desktop printer.
I’ll go a step further and venture that for a lot of small businesses — especially single person professionals, start-ups, and B2B operations — you don’t even need a logo at all. Seriously. We’re overwhelmed by logos and most of them are meaningless, worthless clutter. It’s not like a small firm is going to launch an identity awareness campaign like a big consumer brand (Nike, GM, Kodak). Nobody really cares whether you have swoosh or an orb for a logo…. Instead, have your company’s name and a descriptive tag line typeset by an experienced designer, then saved as a graphic file.
(Please note that I do not advise retail and service companies to do this! They need a great logo and signage is one of the most important investments they can make.)
Take a small portion of the money you save and use it to buy proper fonts (i.e. not the default fonts on your PC). That alone will make your letters stand out from most. Get training and learn how to use the simple page layout capabilities of your word processing software so you can give your documents a consistent, professional layout. Furthermore, if you invest in a photo library — placed on your network server so that everyone can access it — you can incorporate your existing photos into your everyday business letters. Shouldn’t writing and formatting a good business letter be a common expectation from every professional employee?
Indeed this approach verges into “Print-On-Demand” territory because you can now “cut-and-paste” your brochure and catalog content directly into a custom, personalized letter. You can dramatically reduce the amount of print materials — catalogs, sell sheets, flyers, brochures— that you need to maintain. If your customers are internet savvy — and who isn’t? — you can bypass most printing (and mailing) altogether and email a PDF complete with live hyperlinks and multimedia.
What I am really talking about is saving money on the production of your mundane business communications so that there is more of a budget to apply towards quality content. By increasing the attention placed on the words and pictures representing your company — and backing off on the clutter and “chrome” — you’ll differentiate yourselves from your clumsier competitors. Especially in a tight economy, people appreciate smarts over glitz.