Look deep into the Multi Sports Trophies, my young Padawan.

It’s much easier to explain in person, with the use of a few props, but the gist of the multi sports trophies is that they can be altered to suit pretty much any sport. The problem is though that when a lot of people see the picture which has a figure on it, they assume it’s for that particular sport – which really isn’t the case.

More than just a bowling trophy...

These gold colour figures can be taken off and replaced with a figure that is made for nearly any type of sport. So what may first appear to just be a bowling trophy – as pictured – can be anything you want it to be.

If you’re worried we won’t have an award for you, or angry that your sport isn’t properly catered for then give us a call. We’ll tell you what figures we have and what we can do for you. If it isn’t to be found in the Multi Sport Trophies (which it almost will be) we can always engrave a piece of glass with a sports scene, have a cup, plaque or medal with a custom centre or make a bespoke trophy from scratch.

And if none of these options work, then you are simply too hard to please! But we’ll still think of an alternative.

For us at Bullseye the times have been a’changin’ non stop over the past 5 years, and we don’t think the times will slow down any time soon. Amongst all the numerous printing machines we’ve collected over the years, we’re taking a side step and investing in a large Kongsberg i-XL44 cutter.

It’s pretty common practice for print companies to only think of bigger and better printers. It makes sense – new printer = new products / new products = more money. But we wanted to go against our natural instincts and see how we can improve our production capacity whilst still adding something extra for our customers.

And this is where the Kongsberg makes an appearance.

A large part of our time is spent cutting by hand. This could be cutting a vinyl banner before hemming and eyeleting it, trimming a pull up banner to size before adding it to the cartridge or cropping down foam boards to shape. All done by hand and taking up a lot of our time.

This new cutter of ours will cut anything we put on it and at a tremendous speed that will put our hand cutting to shame. The great advantage being that the faster we can finish our products, the higher our capacity is and the quicker we can turn around printed products.

In addition to this we will be able to cut literally anything to any shape. Human cut-outs made of foam board and metal, heraldic shields, full colour printed boxes in quantities from 1 – all of this and more will be possible. (So we have still managed to get new products with this investment!)

So at the moment we’re preparing the space for this beast of a machine – 2 metres wide by 3 metres long – and getting ready for a much smoother production flow.

That’s all folks, more what we’re up to next week!

One of the things I’ve come to learn about working on a website is that the job is never done. All you can do is keep planning further and further into the future. Here’s a few lessons I’ve learnt that ring true for any ecommerce website:

- Your product range is never complete

No matter how many products you upload, there will always be more to be added. And if not added, then edited. We’re currently going through the process of rewriting all of our product descriptions and we’re already seeing great results because our customers understand more about the products without having to ask questions.

- Static pages shouldn’t remain static

Your static pages – about us, our approach, machinery etc – are a great way to give your potential customers a bit of background about you. This is why they should never be left to their own devices for too long because they run the risk of becoming outdated.

It’s always worth going over every few months and adding in any new developments, tweaking the content and making sure it still rings true for your business.

- Filter through your feedback

Everyone has an opinion, and I totally support that. And feedback is always helpful because sometimes you can be so close to your website you can’t see what is right in-front of you. But you do need to be objective with any feedback you have because everyone’s opinion is just that: an opinion. If one person hates the colour scheme then that’s not worth acting on. If several people hate the colour scheme it’s worth considering. But if hoards of villagers are coming after you with pitchforks because of the colour scheme, then you’d best change it quickly.

These are my thoughts for the day, I’ll be back with more detail tomorrow.

Jack.

The first people to try out this new feature were the volunteers of S.W.I.P.E charity from Slough. S.W.I.P.E. is a musical charity helping young under privileged people achieve their musical potential by taking them to concerts, throwing concerts for people in Slough and giving them opportunities such as this free trip to the Bullseye Print Department.

A group of four keen young people, and their leader Jamie Green, entered the Bullseye print department with their instruments, designs, and intent of making their passion their own.

With the help of the Bullseye Print department, the young people’s drawings, colours and patterns were brought to life as they rolled out of the machine on vinyl sticker sheets, courtesy of Bullseye Ltd. The designs were stuck onto the various and instruments and almost instantaneously were ready to play in the shop!

The young volunteers were delighted with their newly customised instruments and you can be too! Just visit www.BullseyePrint.co.uk to submit your designs today. However, remember we do not just do musical instruments, call us today to find out what else we can print onto! Whether it be your car, instrument, child, pet or partner, call today!

And that’s why a lot of people are hesitant to get their shields replaced.

It’s fair enough, there’s a lot of history in those there shields. When you’ve got a club that can date its awards back over 25 years the last thing they want to do is start fresh with 2011.

So what’s the solution?

The best compromise you can sort out is first to start moving the side shields – the little pieces with the names on them – onto the back. Take the very first years and start to gradually move them onto the back of the plaque. This still keeps the plaque together but allows space for those young whippersnappers to get their name recognised.

Not completely satisfied with that? Well what a lot of people do is buy an even bigger shield to mount the first shield onto. Then you get an extra set of names going all around the border. And it means you’ve got a MUCH bigger shield to give out every year. That’s always got to be good, hasn’t it? Isn’t bigger better?

The last option is to draw a line in the sand and buy a new shield. Keep ol’ faithful up in the clubhouse and have a nice new shiny shield, and in another 25 years time you’ll think ‘ah it’s probably time to replace this one too’.

Sounds simple doesn’t it? If you sell one core product great, it could be quite simple.

But if you’re like a lot of companies and you’ve diversified over the years by now you’ll have quite a wide portfolio of work. All of your staff may know what everything is, but your customers may not.

This is easily rectified. Excel is great for organising anything. Products especially. So take all of your products and categorise them into a spreadsheet, if you haven’t already.

Now you have all of those products nicely arranged start to work out the differences, and the similarities between them. Separate them into sections, but always look for cross points between the products so you can offer more to existing clients.

Once everything is arranged it’s time to launch a full scale marketing attack. Look at the categories you have for your products and decide how to work out your promotional material. This can be anything from flyers and posters to booklets and catalogues. The important thing is to make your material cohesive, this is where categorising helps.

Once you’ve got the printed material down, turn to your email and start punting out to your mailing list. When you collect customer information, use it wisely. If they are a football club, you don’t need to send them an e-flyer about hockey.

As always with marketing, follow up all of your work. Don’t just leave it to fly on it’s own. Come back to it within a couple of weeks and see whether it’s working, what needs to be changed etc. So your next campaign can be even better.

So why not jazz it all up a bit?

A blank wall should be an opportunity. Seize it and use it as a chance to completely reinvent your office and get people excited about being in the room.

The quick and effective option to improve your office would be wallpaper. A million different styles available, and you can sit for hours on the internet looking through patterns working out which would suit the company best.

Or you could look at it from the opposite side of the picture. You are a company and you already have a style, so don’t bend to a standard pattern to find what would suit you. You should get printed wallpaper that is made especially for you. Designed to have your branding and whatever you want.

You could take a different approach and have a golf scene, or a picture of a ski lodge and just sneak your logo in the bottom. A picture of a cityscape will brighten the office up and you can get the added bonus of having your logo in as well. If it’s a showroom, then get QR codes printed as well to engage more with your customers.

Just don’t make it too exciting or you’ll find yourself staring at the wall instead of working.

A lot of what we’ve focused our time on this week has been on marketing. There’s our new print website which we’re promoting at the moment, so we’re punting that out to every search engine we can and using Twitter to get the word out.

The new tool we’ve started using this week is HootSuite. It’s a clever little tool for bringing together multiple social networking accounts – so for us its Twitter and WordPress – and has all of the feeds for them. As it’s cloud I can log in wherever I need to with all the information still there, and just pick up where I left off.

The Twitter following is growing nicely. With the use of Klout we see how we’re getting on – it’s important to not get too wrapped up with stats, but it is nice to see positive stats!

We’ve sent out requests to a lot of our current customers to try and create a community that is both past, current and prospective customers. With a bit of luck the responses to those requests will start trickling in and we will continue to grow.

We aren’t desperate to have 100,000 followers hanging onto our every word, but we want a good few followers that find our blogs useful, and vice-versa, so we can start a dialogue with them. Isn’t that what social networking is all about?

In addition to this to try and drive more traffic to the site there are the daily blogs, and also we’ve put out a new coupon – WEB10 for 10% off our print website – which we’ve uploaded to a couple of different voucher websites. We’ve put out the bait, so lets see what comes back!

Printed Golf Tees

When arranging a corporate golf day there are so many things to work out:

-          How many bacon sandwiches do you need for the day – and what to give people that don’t eat bacon?

-          Does John in Accounting get on with Marge in Sales – or would their failed affair ruin their four-ball?

-          Will everyone have enough balls and tees – or will there be a punch up on the 12^th hole again when giving out more tees was the last straw for Kevin in Marketing?

Now there isn’t much you can do about the first two problems – that’s a matter for the caterers and councillors – and if Kevin has had enough, then there isn’t much to be done there. You should probably look for another Marketing Manager. But the tees situation is easily resolved: printed golf tees.

You can get a few thousand sorted out easily enough. Get your company name and website printed on the tees and any leftover can be used for next year, providing you don’t change your company name and website.

At the start of the day distribute 36 to each player – 2 for each hole for those that enjoy taking a ‘practice shot’ or a mulligan. With a bit of luck they’ll have a few more to take with them for their rounds after. And what do you have with that? Free promotion of your business by the people who know it best. If this were Twitter I would say #accidentalbutintentionaladvertising.

It’s tough when you’re in a sales situation and the customer demands a discount, for the only reason that they are a customer. So the question is how to deal with it?

You have two options:

-          Tell them the price is what it is and there’s nothing that can be done

-          Drop the price and hope you can still make a decent margin out of it

Option one may lead you to getting a job at the price agreed and everything is hunky dory. But it can also lead to the customer walking away and you lose the business. So the predicament is: is it worth losing the business, rather than taking a hit on the margin?

The problem is each situation is completely personal to that business. If you are on decent margins, and they are a regular customer, or you spot an account that could grow with a bit of encouragement then you could go with option two, and give them a discount.

However, if the customer is just a chancer – like many are – hoping for a discount, but they won’t be become a regular customer or a solid account, then is it worth it?

To bridge the gap in between the best bet is putting out a special offer for ordering on your website. Many websites are set up to be integrated into an ordering system, so you can offer a discount because you won’t need to spend the time processing the order. 10% off is a gesture to show customers you’ll help them if they help you.

We’re currently running a voucher for ordering on our print website, WORDPRESS10 will give 10% off any product on the site. The idea is to promote the website and entice people in. It’s a nice token that will get customers involved and once they’ve seen the quality and the service, they will be hooked. That’s the plan anyway.

So when your customer is jumping up and down demanding a discount, one option is to send them to your website with a voucher – saving you time, and them money. Everybody’s gotta be happy.

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