Tag: marketing budget

As a business owner, marketing may not be your first priority, but it should be. Today, having a marketing plan for your business is as critical as having a phone number.

Back in 2003, Nick Carr wrote an article for the Havard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter”. This obviously had a lot of headline readers furious. With a worldwide IT spend of $2.6 trillion dollars, it’s no wonder why Nick Carr was labeled a heretic and blasphemer. It seems we live in a day and age where assumptions about IT run rampant. Ever since a young Intel engineer named Ted Hoff, back in 1968, found a way to put the circuits necessary for computer processing onto a tiny piece of silicon, the business world has dubbed IT as the backbone of commerce. And there’s no doubt that this assertion rings true in many ways since it spurred a series of technological breakthroughs—desktop computers, local and wide area networks, enterprise software, and the Internet.

When evaluating the marketing budget of our company, it became apparent that printing was a significant cost. As such, when it came to printing our custom published marketing magazine, it was time to do things a little differently. 

At first, my design department sourced quotes. They ranged from $18,000 up to $33,000 for exactly the same product. I was fine with paying $18,000 but not so fine to find my normal printers quotation significantly higher at $33,000. It literally had me stopping in my tracks and evaluating what I was doing and whether it was worth it.

Then, as if someone was looking down on me, a company was referred to Marketing Eye to do some of their marketing. It was an online print automation company that specialises in reducing the cost of printing so that marketing departments can reinvest the savings back into their marketing campaigns. I personally worked on this account because I was interested in seeing what they did differently. In the end, I became as passionate about their business, as they became of ours. On top of that, they saved us 45% of our printing costs.

Today, I thought I would give the founder of this business, Mark Alioto a call to talk about what they do differently at ECM.