Do you have hundreds or thousands of pieces of old marketing materials lying around?  Perhaps you designed them a few years ago, and got a great deal on printing if you printed a huge amount.  Are they doing you much good now? 

It used to be that small businesses would redesign their marketing materials every so many years, and then print thousands of copies.  This way you could get a good per piece price break.  Unfortunately, this also meant companies were limited in their flexibility to change their materials, whether a wholesale redesign or simply tweaking them to work better.  It also means that a lot of companies end up not as enthusiastically marketing their company because, as one client recently told me about some old postcards, “We’re just tired of looking at those things.”

In today’s business world, it doesn’t make sense to print huge quantities of materials.  Say you put out a piece and find it isn’t working.  Or perhaps it is working really well with one market and now you need to tweak it for another market.  Or maybe the piece worked well six months ago, but the marketplace has now changed and you need to be able to adapt to it.

Sure, it might cost you a little more per piece to print a reasonable amount of marketing materials, but honestly, how much do you really save if boxes of those old marketing materials end up doing nothing more than taking up storage space, or maybe balancing a crooked table?

How long do you think your marketing materials should last?  How long before they’re outdated or you’re tired of them?

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