Newsletter
| May 2007 Greening up your marketing materials Have you considered the environmental impact your marketing materials have? If you're concerned over what your environmental footprint is and you try to reduce it in other areas of your life, you may consider reviewing your marketing collateral. In a lot of cases you don't need to produce printed collateral at all. Email marketing, web sites and downloadable documents have replaced a lot of what was printed onto paper–making information cheaper to distribute and easier to access. Digital vs. paper Do you remember the promise of the paperless office? That promise never did really pan out. In fact, because of computers we now use more paper than we ever did. One survivor of that promise however has become the champion of digital formats and most of us use it every day. The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created for the paperless office but instead of going the way of that concept it was saved by the advent of the internet. The PDF is a great way to send your information to clients. It's a read-only format that can be protected but it can also be read by search engines. Additionally copyright information and keywords can be embedded into the meta-data of the file. For your web site You can create PDFs for data-sheets, price-sheets, white papers or brochures and post them on your web site. Since a PDF can be read by search engines, it's a great format for this kind of information. Attachments vs. envelopes and stamps A proposal or price sheet in PDF saves time, money and resources. At Pylon Studios we use PDFs for our invoices, price sheets and proposals. We then send them via email rather than by post. This saves time as well as postage costs. Speaking of email Email marketing is a very effective means of direct marketing and although it hasn't completely replaced direct mail it can certainly reduce the need for it. Use an email campaign to announce a new product or stay in touch with clients. Web sites Your web site is the place to send potential clients and for them to find you. Your web site is your brochure, business card, telephone directory ad and repository of customer directed content. It does all these things and more and is available 24/7 anywhere there is an internet connection. Of course you still need... Well, yeah, we do need to have business cards, that goes without saying. And some businesses still need some of the things mentioned above like brochures or other printed collateral. You can still reduce your footprint by using recycled paper stock and vegetable based inks. It takes less energy and resources to produce recycled paper than stock made of virgin materials–in other words trees. As an alternative, there are other fibers that are much more renewable than trees like: hemp, flax, kenaf and bagass. Unfortunately many of them are not as available as tree-based paper. Do some research or ask your printer or designer about using recycled or non-tree paper. Look for office paper that has recycled post-consumer content. I like to look for percentages of over 30%, preferably 100% post-consumer content. Check out these resources for more information: Earth 911: www.earth911.org Ideal Bite: www.idealbite.com SustainLane: www.sustainlane.com CoOp America: www.coopamerica.org Twin Cities Green Guide: www.thegreenguide.org SF Green Biz program: www.sfgreenbiz.com At Pylon Studios we always use digital, recycled or non-tree materials. Call us @ 415 775-4126 for your marketing collateral with a smaller footprint or go to our web site for more information. Back to the Newsletter page Sign up to get your copy of the Pylon Page |
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