Is print dead? Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today, we have Jessica Embree from Tulip Media Group, where they help businesses differentiate with easy and effective print and digital marketing campaigns. Jessica, I love your entrepreneurial background. Your first business selling blueberries at age 10 and your first job at age 12 as an ice cream scooper. And now look at you, you're a creative director leveraging print. So tell me, has the print world come back from the dead?
Jessica Embree: It never left, Drew. And that's a common misconception we have. We see more and more businesses leaning back into print because they see the tangibility, the trust that comes with it, the credibility and the longevity of it. We live in a digital world these days and we get so lost through the noise, that print's a great way to cut through that. And that's why my favorite saying is, your emptiest inbox is your physical mailbox outside.
Drew: Oh, that is so true. Long gone are the days of getting mail by the pound. Now, our listeners are both B2B and B2C. How does print get leveraged differently between these two markets?
Jessica: Yeah, in B2C, we see often luxury products or community magazines, so luxury products like jewelry, handbags. But with B2B, we see more services than products. And that's why at Tulip Media, we work with a lot of insurance agencies who need to gain trust from their buyers before they can make a buying decision. It creates that trust that you're looking for, that credibility and that tangibility. And that's why we love it so much here at Tulip.
Drew: Oh, that's very true. We've both written books and have seen the credibility boost it brings. Now, when planning to leverage print, what do most people miss?
Jessica: Just like any marketing campaign, it starts with strategy. What is your end goal? What are you trying to achieve? And next, you have to create engaging content. And when you look at these two features, you have to look at where your buyer is in the buyer's journey. And a great example of that is a firetruck manufacturer that we work with at Tulip Media. And we looked at their buyer's journey and where their fire chiefs were having trouble buying these firetrucks. These firetrucks are million dollar firetrucks. They're niche products that last 10 years. And we found that when we did this buyer's journey exercise, that they were having issues writing RFPs to buy these trucks. So why not create content around that? So that's why we did an eight-page newsletter that goes out quarterly to all the fire chiefs in North America. That includes three easy ways to write RFPs, three things you need on your next tanker or rescue truck. And of course, you have to add engaging content to that. And that includes things like recipes or other things that fire chiefs can use within their fire department.
Drew: Where strategic content meets engaging content. Now that is where possibilities expand. The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com where business leaders gain confidence in their marketing efforts and marketers turn into high-performing leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.