All-in-One

If I ask most of my customers (and marketing prospects) what they prefer in a communications partner, the answer is a unanimous "one vendor." It's a good thing BPI Media Group is an all-in-one partner. However, BPI didn't always have the all the tools to help our customers in all their communication media; it took time, excellent leadership and the ongoing evolution of our industry to aide BPI in becoming the one vendor who can help in so many ways.

How exactly can BPI help customers with various media? It takes a skilled, talented and dedicated team. The ways in which we assist customers in executing campaigns and delivering to channel partners are:

• Graphic Design
• Web Design & Development (including SEO, adwords, etc.)
• Cross-Media Marketing (PURLs and custom landing pages)
• Soft Proofing via Insite
• Specialty Products
• Digital Printing w/Variable Data
• Offset Printing
• Wide-Format Printing
• Coating/Finishing Options
• Complete In-House Bindery
• Mailing Services</li>
• Online Portal for Channel Partners (Storefront)
• Reporting & Analytics for Fulfillment Orders
• Pick and Pack Services
• Warehousing/Distribution

We at BPI want to be your one partner. We have the tools, the team and the technology to take your marketing to the next level. Join us as we continue to grow to offer you, our customers, all the tools needed to get your message across loud and clear...and with tools to track ROI.

Until next time...Elizabeth

Are You Ready?

As I got ready for a run this morning, I was reminded how prepared you have to be each time you head out the door. Since I was getting up early, I even laid out my running gear last night, so I could quickly get ready and be on my way without delay. Shoes: check. Running attire: check. Hat: check. Windbreaker: check. iPhone case for arm: check. Water: check. Running buddy: check. Even though I use the same type of gear every time I run, there have been improvements in gear, shoes, and even technology with all the super-cool running apps out there to track your run with maps, time, calories, etc.

As a marketer, are you ready to help your company grow its sales? BPI Media Group has the "gear" to help you get out the door and capture those sales. If you need the help of a "buddy," BPI would gladly help. We can help you choose the gear that you need whether it's deciding if print on demand with digital printing could help you save cost and provide an efficient solution for your distribution channels or aid in creating design or even just templates for personalized options. Our technology with Kodak Insite proofing system can help you shave time off your production schedule, and our cross media campaigns (including purls, sms text, email, direct mail and QR codes) can help you track the results of your campaign in real time.

So as you plan your next marketing campaign, let us help you with get prepared. Working together, we can help you have a better campaign or project to execute and assist your company in boosting sales.

Until next time...Elizabeth

Worth the Trip

It's been a busy week with travel and meetings with potential customers. These are the kind of weeks I absolutely love and remind me that making the phone calls and doing the follow up are so important...and worthwhile. Yesterday, we were fortunate to have potential customers visit BPI Media Group's plant in Boaz, AL from the Atlanta area. I was reminded of how much we really can do under one roof, and the prospects seemed quite impressed as well.

Sometimes, it takes seeing to believe that we really can do all the design, prepress, print, bindery, mail and fulfillment from BPI's primary location in Boaz. As we made our way through the plant from department to department following the work flow, the faces of the employees were welcoming and confident. They're confident because most of them have been there for 10+ years...some even 20+ years. That's a lot of experience, and a lot of technology to keep up with as it is ever changing in our industry.

Having our Kodak Insite proofing system in place makes those who are hours (even states) away be able to proof immediately upon uploading files. Just because we're in Boaz doesn't mean it will take longer to get your proof. In fact, you'll get it faster through Insite. Seeing our conventional presses in motion and how a 40" 6-color offset press works is impressive if you haven't seen it before. The technology of our Kodak Nexpress digital press is also something to see. If you have custom pantone color needs, our pantone mixing system will knock your socks off. When we added 20,000+ square feet to the existing building in 2002, we allowed for room to grow and added room for a warehouse to hold fulfillment materials. Bindery was able to grow by added additional folders and fugutive glue features. This added space also allowed us to set up our own mail room with 2 inkjetters/tabbers in the mail department.

You don't have to take my word for it that we do it all at BPI in Boaz, come visit. I promise, it's worth the trip, and we'd love to have you!

Until next time...Elizabeth

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Need a Little Insite?

If you are one of the many, super-busy people in this world, you need your print project printed yesterday, and you don't have time to wait hours or days for a proof. If you missed BPI Media Group's webinar last week presented by BPI University, don't fret. You can watch in two short segments (about 25 minutes total)an Introduction to Insite presented by Jan Spears, BPI's prepress director.

Introduction to Insite: Part 1

Introduction to Insite: Part 2

First, let me tell you a little about this proofing system and what makes it so great. Trust me, you'll want to join this bandwagon and speed up your proofing time like many other users have done.

What is Prinergy and Kodak Insite?

• Prinergy—Kodak workflow with full automation with soft proofing.
• Insite is a part of Prinergy where customers can be set up with a custom ftp site. Once their files are uploaded, Insite will perform tasks based on rules-based automation. Rules-based automation is set up for each customer based on their needs and type of product to print.

Why should I use Insite?

• Increase automation and efficiency of the proofing system.
• Take advantage of the state-of-the-art online tools in the system.
• Utilize the reliable, color-accurate soft proofing.
• Allow multiple proofers in your company to review the document before it goes to print.
• Allow for notations to be made on the proof for other reviewers to see.
• Enable the uploading of replacement pages on the fly.
• Be able to proof your document within a matter of minutes after it's uploaded.
• See quickly any file problems that the preflight manager may find (i.e., inadequate bleed, rgb images, low-res images, font issues, etc.)
• View your proof in a "page-turn" format just as if you were turning the pages of a hard-copy proof with smart-review.

If you want to read more about Insite, click here. If you want to sign up for BPI University's next webinar or watch previous webinar's you may have missed, click here.

Until next time...Elizabeth

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Give Me Your Top 4...

While making TONS of prospecting calls over the past three weeks to help grow my business in 2012, I'm asking a pretty loaded question. Before I ask this question to prospects, I had to make sure I was ready to provide answers. After all, my credibility as a solutions partner is on the line here. The question I'm asking is this, "What's your top four marketing challenges you face in your company right now?"

Curious to know what others are saying? Keep reading...

The challenges I'm hearing that most marketers are facing are some with which BPI Media Group can certainly help. And as always, we are glad to help because "Our success is measured by the success of our customers." -Alan Davis, President of BPI Media Group.

Challenge #1: How to produce all the necessary materials on a reduced marketing budget.

BPI solution: With BPI's digital printing technology, you can take advantage of reduced costs by lowered print quantities thus resulting in less waste (hooray for the environment too!). Other advantages of digital printing include: fast turn-around times, no minimum quantity orders, incorporation of variable data or personalization and in-line addressing (our digital press allows us to address/barcode each piece as it's being printed). We can also assist with mailing database clean up to help reduce your postage costs.

Challenge #2: How to manage collateral materials and manage corporate branding.

BPI solution: With BPI's storefront solution, we can not only help protect your branding, but we can also help manage your print quantities, orders and inventory levels. Other benefits of using an online storefront include:

• Improve the effectiveness of your sales materials via localization or personalization
• Automated email alerts to confirm order placement and shipping
• Enhanced Reporting (can be downloaded as a csv based on parameters you enter)
• Confirm and track orders
• Query order activity by year, month, or date
• Online approval system for management control of product
• Minimize - or eliminate - storage and waste cost

Challenge #3: How do I increase traffic to my website and boost SEO?

BPI solution: BPI's website specialist, Brandon Rome, can help with your site's look, functionality and work behind the scenes to improve your SEO. We're working with a client who, just this week, realized their web traffic is far less than what it should be, and their site is not coming up on key word searches as one might expect. Our fix: using Google analytics, set up key word searches and tie in with social media to circulate traffic back to the site, blog and e-commerce site. Read more ways BPI can help enhance your website here.

Challenge #4: How to be more efficient with proofing (it takes up too much of the production time which is a narrow timeline anyway)

BPI solution: Using Kodak Insite proofing technology, proofing doesn't have to take days. Instead, it can take minutes. Our customers are raving about how quickly they're able to upload, review and approve files for a project that would take hours to upload and a few days to review a hard-copy proof. The speed with which you can review and approve a proof is amazing. Once files are approved in Insite, the hard-copy proof is output for inplant use even if the client doesn't need to see it. Other benefits of Insite: approval levels (some users can have permission to review only while others have permission to actually give approval), upload only pages that have changes and approve them on the fly, and the detailed pre-flight report flagging any potential problems with files before it goes into production. Read more about BPI's Insite proofing system here.

As I learn more about challenges other marketers are facing, I will keep an updated list here, so we can all continue to learn from one another. It is a bit scary to ask a question like this, but I am confident that BPI has the "tools in our toolbox" to help marketers like you!

Until next time...Elizabeth

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BPI by Design

As I trekked across the state of Georgia toward Alabama, my wheels (in my brain and on my vehicle) were turning quickly. Recent client meetings seemed to circle back to the design phase of the printing process. With budgets and personnel being cut, having a designer on staff seems more like a luxury than a necessity. This trend in marketing departments has led many clients to pose the question to BPI Media Group, "Can you guys do design for my company?" With additional staff being added to BPI, I can answer confidently, "Yes, we can absolutely help with your design projects."

Part of our growth over the past few years has been to assist you, our clients, with as many aspects of the print solution as possible. Some of our clients do have designers on staff or have long-term, existing relationships with freelance designers. For those folks, we definitely will not step on anyone's toes, but for those needing design services, we would be happy to help. We have a team of designers, each with exceptional talents, who can help from a simple typesetting or layout project (such as a form) to a collateral brochure or catalog. We can also create or update logos to help with your branding if needed. Click here for a simple case study from a pleased client for whom we did the print and design. I can gladly share a portfolio of our design capabilities to give you an overview of our work.

I thought this summed it up nicely!

Here I'll share a few links, ideas and resources for designers and those in need of design assistance. Not sure if you need help with design or considering tackling it yourself? Here's a great article about when to reach out to a design professional. The list of top 10 resources are a must read!

Whether you're a new marketer or simply don't have the time or staff to tackle it in house, BPI's design team can help and here's why:

• Our toolbox is full of expertise and experience.
• We know how to design for print (thus eliminating the back and forth of missing fonts, links, low-res images and other common file issues such as insufficient bleed).
• Multiple concepts are provided, so you can find the style that's right for you and your brand.
• Revisions and edits are made upon your suggestions quickly and follow your guidance (after all, it's YOUR brand and YOUR print project.)
• Online proofing through our Kodak Insite proofing system is available where you can "comment" virtually to communicate with our designers. (Click here for more about this fantastic proofing option.)
• Final files of the completed design are available to you in various formats (native files, usually Adobe InDesign, pdf, jpg, etc) to use/share/post.
• Need help with your web design too? With BPI's new on-staff webmaster, we can help with this too. Check out our website review offer.

For the designers out there (of whom I'm immensely jealous because I lack the creative/artistic gene), keep in mind that designing for digital printing is a little different than designing for offset printing. Click here for some tips on successful designing for digital printing.

• If you don't already subscribe to this magazine, it's a good one: Graphic Arts Monthly. Our prepress and design staff find this one full of great info!
• Another cool publication is CMYK Magazine. This one is quite inspiring!
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• Lastly, check out BPI's latest edition of Graphic Advisors (should be in your mailbox this week!). It has a great article about Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 and what's in it for you as a designer.

Please leave a comment if you have a question or would like additional information. If you'd like to subscribe to BPI's Graphic Advisor (a quarterly publication), click here. As always, thanks for reading, following, sharing, commenting and until next time...Elizabeth

Proof, Review & Approve!

For those of you who've read my blog before, you've heard me rave about Kodak Insite. Today, I'd like to tell you a little more about this proofing system and how it can be so helpful, time saving and a cost effective way to proof. Keep reading because you'll be able to sign up for our webinar about Insite at the bottom of this post. Don't miss it! Click here to watch a short video about Insite.

Just last week, one of BPI Media Group's customers in the midwest used this proofing system for the first time. This customer needed to upload a 12 GB file (that's a BIG file), and our standard ftp site didn't have space for this file. This opened the door for me to talk with them about Insite. By uploading their files to Insite, they were able to load the large file (for their 200+ page full-color catalog) in a short time and start proofing it virtually within the hour. Upon reviewing the proof internally among a couple of key staff members, they caught three pages with errors on them that they had not previously noticed. In just a few minutes, they reviewed the proof, replaced the pages with changes and approved the proof online. This particular customer then needed a hard-copy proof, so with the press of a button or two, the online proof was sent to the proof machine to output a hard-copy proof. By taking advantage of Insite's Smart Review, the customer saved the additional cost of a new proof had they not caught these small mistakes until the hard-copy proof. For a budget-conscious company, this was a huge advantage.

Here's a list of some more key features of Insite that help make this an efficient way to proof, not only for our customers, but also for our prepress technicians:

• 24/7 soft proofing in page-turn software
• Preflights files for missing fonts, inadequate bleed, RGB photos, etc and reports back to client
• Rules-based automation for less production time
• PDF workflow
• Personal password login
• History view feature
• Email notification of proof availability, approval, comments, etc.

Just a couple more examples of how using Insite for proofing has saved time and/or money for BPI's customers:

We print a football program with a custom cover and 8 custom interior pages for each home game during the college's football season. The designer uploads files in the wee hours of the morning on Monday, and by the time the office opens at 8 am, the files have already been approved. The designer is able to upload, proof and approve the custom pages at his convenience. Once prepress gets to the office, they send the job to plate, then it's off to press!

For a magazine we print quarterly, the end-customer as well as the designer need to review the proof for content/graphic layout. They use Insite to make notes or comments to one another to check things in this final stage before printing. These notes appear for our prepress techs to see as well, so we can check to make sure all the corrections noted were made.

BPI Media Group will be conducting a free webinar on our Insite product for prepress automation. If you would like to learn more about this product and how it can decrease production time and save money in the proofing stage of projects, click here, and we'll send you an invite to the FREE webinar. The webinar will be next Tuesday, October 18th @ 10 am CST/11 am EST.

We'd love for you to join this webinar and see how this proofing system can help you! Until next time...Elizabeth

1:1 and Other Ways to be Green

Kermit the frog said it best when he said, "It's not easy being green." However, with more options now, being environmentally responsible doesn't have to be difficult. In fact, with BPI Media Group, we make it pretty easy.

Today, I'll share a few ways you can take comfort in knowing that printing isn't as bad as you think for the environment. It's all about partnering with folks like BPI Media Group who care and are willing to do what it takes to make a difference.

"What's your company's environmental policy?" Sure, I hear this from time to time from marketing executives. Sure, every printer more or less has a policy like this in place, so I'm not going to tell you that ours is better, but I will tell you some ways we offer solutions that can make your efforts to protect and conserve go further, and save some green at the same time.

Top 3 ways BPI Media Group can help you go green and save green:

1. Database cleansing. When's the last time you really took a look at your data and purged it, updated it or deduped it? Even if you mail to your entire list, you can save paper, print and postage costs simply by checking for undeliverable addresses or deduping. In a lot of cases, there's no need to send the same direct mail piece or catalog to more than one person at the same address. Deduping by address is a great way to eliminate this extra cost. Many lists we see have incomplete addresses or misspelled names. BPI's mail department has some really great systems in place to help with these common issues. We run all lists through what's called NCOA (national change of address), which automatically updates an address for anyone who has moved and left a forwarding address. We also cass-certify all mailing lists to verify addresses. This same process will dedupe by name, address or exact match. All of these are great resources that are FREE when we handle your mailing.

2. Targeted personalization. By pairing down your main catalog or book to only include what is appealing to an individual or a targeted group can help your ROI and efficiency tremendously. Not only are you saving on print costs, but you're also sending a focused message to that customer or prospect of relevant material. Here's a great example of this: a small college prints a full catalog listing all majors, courses, extra curriculars, etc. This 200+ page catalog can be awfully pricey, and consume a lot of raw materials, to print and mail to all students. Instead, this college reduces their consumption of paper, ink, chemicals, etc by approx 75% simply by narrowing down the material that is relative to that particular student or group of students. This is essentially called versioning, and we'll cover this indepth in a future blog. BPI's digital print department can effectively handle this type of project when you wan to print various versions of the same piece. The info you need to narrow down a catalog like this can be gleaned from your database, online surveys, sales team, etc. Use this info to reduce waste and be more effective in your communications pieces. There's a trickle-down effect here too: elimination of energy used to produce excess/unread pages, gas and/or postage to distribute them, and not to mention all the raw materials saved during the production process.

3. 1:1 Mailing. Along the same lines as #2, you can get even more focused on your list by personalizing your direct mail pieces. Printing a 1:1 message engages your customer or prospect in ways that weren't possible a few years ago or cost effective for that matter. With the addition of our Kodak Nexpress and prinergy workflow, BPI can handle variable data printing (VDP) in a multitude of ways from graphics to messaging. These personalized mail campaigns tend to be to a tighter group of recipients, thus having a direct decrease in your print and mailing costs. More green saved!

Here are some of the technologies that BPI has in place to help make us all better stewards of our environment:

-Kodak Insite Proofing System: Offers soft proofing instead of hard-copy proofs. (We know there are times when color is critical and a hard-copy proof is needed, but for the times that you can soft proof, this is a great alternative!) You can also use this for your internal proofing without having to print out multiple copies of proofs every time changes are made.

-Storefront Solution: Set up this online ordering site where your internal staff, sales team, etc. can order collateral and stationery on an as-needed basis rather than printing and storing tons of materials that will become obsolete a few months from now anyway. This is a huge time/energy-saver for your team as well as a way to reduce print and storage costs. You'll also be saving paper and other raw materials as well.

-Database Analysis: We can help in cleansing your database, so you can do more targeted mailings, save on print and postage costs. Our mail department has been trained on ways to help mail more efficiently. We can even suggest some parameters at the design phase of your project that could help. (Size, shape, paper really does matter.)

Here are steps BPI takes to make sure we are preserving the environment:

• Recycling all plates, ink, wooden pallets and paper
• Using vegetable-based inks
• Using a soft proofing system
• Cleaning mail lists to reduce bad addresses (wasted print and mail costs)
• Providing options for recycled-content paper
• Using papers (both digital and conventional) that is 100% biodegradable
• Using a digital press with consumables that are 100% biodegradable
• Using only paper that comes from sustainable forests.

Interesting stats about print vs digital media:

• It takes 500 kilowatt hrs of electricity to produce 440 lbs of paper (average amount we each consume annually). This equates to powering one computer continuously for 5 months.

• 20% less CO2 is used/yr by a person reading a daily newspaper (print!) vs that person reading web-based news for 30 min/day.

• Print is a renewable resource, on average 5 million trees are planted ea day in the U.S.

• According to the EPA, paper is recycled at a much higher rate than any other materials at 57%, with glass at 24%, plastics at 7%, electronics at 18%.

-Source: DOWN TO EARTH, A Practical Look at Environmental Issues and Trends, The Print Council

So, printing isn't the environment's worst enemy after all and paper isn't the only way you can save money on your print budget. I'd love to talk with you and explore ways our environmental measures can mesh with yours to help us preserve this beautiful planet we call home. Here's a great resource for learning "Why Print is Green."

Until next week...Elizabeth