In today's digital world it can be easy to dismiss the needs for traditional printed marketing materials to promote your brand. I mean, you can save a fortune by going all in on digital, can't you? Well, yes, maybe you can, but it could also result in you losing out on new customers.

In this video, you will learn how traditional marketing materials still have their place in promoting your business brand and how, by combining traditional marketing with digital marketing you'll be king of the marketing hill.

If you think great service is enough to win business and you don't need marketing materials, it's time to rethink that.

Hi everyone, It's Col here from Pixels Ink. I'm pretty sure we'd all like to get by day-to-day winning business on great service alone. Unfortunately that's not how it works. We also need to have great marketing materials too. I'm going to tell you a very quick story about a client that came to see me and issues that they had with their marketing. This client was a ground maintenance company so they did landscaping and garden work for residential homes. The client was frustrated because they felt they offered the best service in the local area and the best rates but they were not winning much business. There was a competitor in the area who was scooping up 90-95% of the business over this last summer.

We had a chat and I asked my client what they thought the other company was doing better than them. They had said, "Nothing, we do everything better in all areas. We offer the best service, the best after care. We just do it better." I dug a little bit deeper and I asked, "How do you promote your business? Do you use flyers? Do you use Facebook? Do you use Google Ad Words?" "Oh, no, we don't use any of that. We get our business through word of mouth."

I thought, okay. I said, "Do you know how the other business is winning contracts from clients?" "Oh, they have these brochures," and he brought out one of the brochures and it was a 16pg A4 glossy brochure. It was very, very well done. In fact, it was incredibly well done. I would have been very proud if it was a piece of my work. I said to my client, I said, "This is very good. This is why they're winning the work," and my client said, "Yeah, but their service is poor."

As a customer, if you're looking for a service and you're not being referred to the service by a friend or a colleague, and you haven't seen any testimonials, then you generally will judge a service by its marketing materials. In this case, my client was producing their own marketing materials in Microsoft Word with just basic text and printing it out at Home on A4 sheets of paper and posting it through letter boxes. This other company, who were offering less of a quality as the service part, were producing fantastic looking promotional materials and putting those through people's letter boxes. When they land on the doormat you have 12-16pg glossy brochure; crumpled piece of A4 paper. The customer is going to judge your service on what they see there and unfortunately my client was losing out 9 out of 10 times to the glossy brochure.

After having a discussion with my client, a little light bulb went off in their head and they could see that they'd missed a trick and they didn't understand the thoughts that went through people's heads when they were looking for a service. After a little chat, we got down to it. We talked about a budget and we created them a new brochure. We worked on some Facebook adverts, and we redid their Facebook graphics. Wouldn't you know it, their customer level started to rise. They were now competing on great marketing and great service. It's the combination of the two which will make your business successful.

You will still have businesses whose service isn't great and they've got great marketing materials, and they will still win business but they won't get repeat business. If you've got great service and great promotion, and you can bring a customer in for the first time, you will then build a customer for life because they will then be into the great service that you offer.

I hope you find this useful. If you have, I'd love it if you could subscribe to my channel. I've got more of these little stories that I could tell you, which highlight different areas of design and where it could be powerful for your business. Until next time, stay creative.