Images_Digital_Edition_July_2019

www.images-magazine.com JULY 2019 images 25 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ■ Be patient The results from using influencer marketing are very rarely instant. Trust must be built between you and the influencer, but also between that person and their audience. It is more a brand awareness-building campaign than a direct sales campaign. ■ Build relationships You are more than likely to achieve success using this type of marketing when a lasting relationship is created. Working alongside someone long- term will establish trust and help you tap into their influence. Manage the costs by starting with small personalities and establish a manageable, cost-effective working relationship. ■ Think outside ‘sponsored’ Influencer marketing is not all about sponsored posts and plugging your business and its product. It gives you the chance to collaborate with them on curated and tailored content; they understand their audience better than anyone. It may involve competitions or perhaps them designing their own promotional products – whatever you decide, it will help you establish a deeper, more meaningful, long-term relationship. Andrew Langridge is from ETrader, one of the industry’s leading suppliers of websites to garment decorators across the UK. www.etraderwebsites.co.uk W hether you print digitally or are a screen printer, the process of workflow automation requires attention. We see an increasing cohort of printers harnessing web-to-print solutions either built by themselves and their own coding teams or by connecting to a service such as Amazon Merch. There are many tools available from developers, and some of them are extremely polished. The MCP (mass customisation platform) by Cimpress, owners of Vistaprint, offers the opportunity to add a host of new products to your inventory without producing a single item in-house in return for a sales commission. In the case of Amazon Merch, a typical income of £5.20 per T-shirt selling at £19.99 can be achieved based on DTG prints made on Kornit Avalanche machines. This system provides a full platform by which you just upload the design content and select from a decent range of garments. If you’re thinking of creating your own platform, take a look at Enfocus Switch with its app store full of APIs. It allows you to build a perfectly customised platform by interconnecting your existing software such as Office, Adobe CC and whatever accounts system you prefer. The start point is to map out the desired workflow and be clear that it offers your clients the right quality of experience. Nintex is another software automation/integration system that is worth looking at. While it sounds easy, you’ll need programming and coding skills to create these solutions, but if you know your audience and achieve a good fit on price and product marketing, you’ll have the chance to see orders coming in 24/7 without having to manually process each one individually. Automation is all around us; it really is worth gaining a better understanding of how it affects your market. T he rise of influencing personalities on social media, otherwise known as ‘influencers’, has led to the rise of influencer marketing. It’s an area that has grown rapidly and involves big brands working alongside prominent social media personalities, mainly on Instagram and YouTube, to help promote their products and/or services, with some huge brands paying millions per post. You might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with the garment decoration industry? Well, influencer marketing is filtering down to smaller brands and companies, so it might very well be something your business will consider in the near future. To help get you started here are a few simple tips to consider if you are going to undertake influencer marketing: ■ Do your research and checks Carry out due diligence when researching influencers. Look carefully at their personal brand and persona and personality to see if their values align with yours – and ensure their followers are your target audience. ■ Research fees Do not bow to paying over the odds just because someone has a huge number of followers. Whether it’s unwitting or not, there are bound to be fake followers inflating their numbers. Besides, influencers who have a small band of loyal followers who are your potential customers can often be a better bet anyway. ■ It is out of your hands The second you get involved with an influencer, things are taken out of your control. Regardless of what you pay you have no control over what they think. Credible influencers want to provide their customers with an authentic experience; work alongside them and deliver a quality product and customer experience. Influencer marketing FESPA: AUTOMATION – THE BUSINESS CASE Graeme Richardson- Locke is technical support manager at Fespa, a global federation of national associations for the screen printing, digital printing and textile printing community. If you have a question for Fespa, please email editorial@images- magazine.com with ‘Fespa’ in the subject line. www.fespa.com