Facebook launched Facebook Shops and what does this have to do with printing companies?
Everything!
In a world where (almost) everything is digital, a printed product is a powerful marketing tool, it is the link between the digital and the physical world. The importance of printing companies is so high that Facebook chose small typography as the motto of its promotional campaign to publicize its Facebook Shop Ink Meets Paper . This is not just “small typography” but a successful online brand that creates value for the end-user.
With the current business landscape, companies need to reinvent themselves and the graphic market mainly needs new ideas and new strategies. I don’t mean that Facebook should be your main online sales channel, but Facebook Shop is just another sales channel, just like Instagram, WooCommerce, Shopify, and many others.
But anyway, to survive and even succeed in the pro-pandemic world, you must capture orders coming from social networks, and other online sales channels. You can’t miss a single opportunity of making a sale
Without a doubt, printers with traditional systems for online sales, the so-called “web-to-print”, in which you have to learn a language and a proprietary environment, which in practice is something closed, expensive and difficult to interconnect to other existing systems. It will become complicated to attract new customers to your “page” online as it is very difficult to compete with Facebook or Instagram. To give you an idea, Facebook users spend an average of 40 minutes on the social network per day, while on your online page, with a lot of marketing effort, people will stay for a few seconds and all your marketing budget will go down the drain.
Perhaps for this reason most companies in the printing industry are unsuccessful in implementing systems for online sales, especially B2C sites for sale to the final consumer.
In my view, your printing company should simply focus on what it does best, which is to print, without having to worry about maintaining online sales channels and making big investments in digital marketing. Let resellers, digital entrepreneurs, influencers and content creators in general, with several online followers, manage the website and sell to their target audience and the print shop receives orders and produces the prints.
Luis Diniz
That simple!
But how to sell on multiple online channels? This would become a logistical nightmare for my printing company, right?
Wrong!
We at Red Panda are developing the alternative to everything that has already been seen and talked about in terms of online sales for printing companies. We are ecommerce-to-print you web-to-print on steroids!
So it’s time to start taking advantage of multiple online sales channels. We know how and what to do and we can help your company on this journey.
Luis Diniz is CEO and co-founder of Red Panda Graphic Solutions, developers of the #ecommercetoprint solution Arando. We are a startup from Lisbon that is revolutionizing the way print is sold online and changing the industry in the process.
