Nutshell Creative Marketing has launched a new arm, Nutshell Trade Services, to offer marketing services to the print trade, aiming both to help printers promote themselves better and to provide a suite of ‘bolt-on’ creative services to expand the portfolio they can offer their customers.
According to Nutshell MD Lucy Swanston, the aim of the new trade service is to act as an extension to the printer’s own marketing resource, firstly to help printers to market themselves, which can involve defining the company’s value proposition and developing a marketing plan to be implemented over time, or via more task-focused consultancy such as helping define and develop an online presence or e-commerce capability.
The second strand to the initiative is for Nutshell to act as a value-added service that printers can add to their existing offering, based on the agency’s understanding of the print industry, in which it already has a number of high-profile clients. Ms Swanston says Nutshell can be as visible to the end-client as required in these situations, and its work is charged either on retainer or project basis, as appropriate.
‘Printers have had the stigma of being bad at marketing themselves, not being able to communicate what they do, for a long time,’ Ms Swanston told Digital Printer, ‘but there is a real appetite to change now, a sense that ‘we know we need to address this’. The new services are effectively something that we’ve done for years through our experience in the industry but never put a name on.’
To support and introduce the service, Nutshell Trade Services has created a freely downloadable guide, The A–Z of winning new business, a compendium of marketing tips for printers, available from the company’s website.
