If you are the first printer in Baltimore to be positioned as a newsletter printer for doctors, you have first shot at that specific market. Now let’s try “newsletter printing for doctors” and we come up with 0 listings for exact match and 1 listing for ‘best match.’ Your competition has virtually disappeared. Now the apparent competition is thinning-that’s a long, long way from 548 competitors. Let’s go back to Baltimore and narrow our search, looking for a ‘niche.’ Let’s stay on Superpages and search for “newsletter printing”, and we come up with 31 results. One of the most effective strategies we’ve seen implemented is this: niche the product you are selling-in this case, printing. Yes, they all put ink (or toner) on paper, but that is not what their customers are buying-they are buying something that is making their lives easier, simpler, richer, better. One thing that stands out among the winners is how they position themselves in a market. How do they do it? The list is long, and we’ll cover more of these in future articles. So we can’t help but get something of an inside scoop on strategies that are working well. Over the past several years at Technifold USA, we’ve grown a customer base of nearly 4,000 printing companies throughout North America, many of whom are doing well in a poor economy. That’s what we’re going to look at today.
But whether you have 548 competitors or 18, you still need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
The plus side to this is that lots of competition means there is probably lots of work available.
A search in a small-town rural area like Lafayette, NJ shows 18 results. I did a quick Google search for “commercial printers Baltimore, MD” and the top listing was a Superpages directory showing 548 results. Let’s take a look and see what that’s like. But the customer didn’t really care about our capabilities…he wanted to know how I was going to make his life easier, save him money, save him time, or make him additional money.įor starters, your competition is narrowed considerably in that you are probably working a defined geographic territory. Fortunately we had a specialty (short-run books and manuals) that gave us some unique capabilities. That’s the kind of response I heard in my years on the street. Instead of the 7 other guys on this street…” Give me one good reason I should do business with you “You’re the third printer to stop in this morning…