We recently had the opportunity to speak with Paul Strack, President of CustomXM, about how his company has dealt with the rapid transformations in the printing industry. CustomXM, formerly Custom Printing Company, is a family-owned operation in North Little Rock, Arkansas that has successfully transitioned from a traditional offset printing company to a provider of integrated printing and marketing services. Paul will be one of the speakers at the 2013 Integrated Print Forum in May, where he’ll share the story of his company’s successful transition.
When and why did the company change its name? Do you still consider yourself a “printer” today?
The name change occurred in 2007/2008. Our company had been evolving over the years and we wanted to highlight more of our new capabilities. Based on where we thought the industry and our work was going, we felt that we needed to communicate our ability to provide cross-media marketing. Print is still the main engine driving our company and it makes up probably 30-40% of our revenue. However, we are seeing significant growth in other areas like fulfillment and marketing services.
How did your existing customers react to the name change? Did the new name help in attracting new customers?
It’s funny because existing customers were somewhat confused when they received their invoices and the company name and logo had changed. In hindsight, perhaps we could have provided more advance communication about the change. But in a way the change was a door opening opportunity, because it gave us a chance to explain to existing customers that we could do more than they thought.
I think new customers started to become aware of our marketing services when we got involved in social media. Whether it was Twitter or Facebook, it opened us up to a whole new audience who didn’t know us from our “print-only” days. At first, I handled most of the social media outreach. But recently one of our newer hires (a sales rep) has gotten involved on Twitter and Facebook.
How has your work changed over the past five years?
We’ve been doing more and more integrated campaigns for clients. These are primarily direct mail campaigns that incorporate PURLs, landing pages, emails, and social media. We have seen quite a bit of growth in these campaigns over the last two years. Early on, it seemed like we were doing more one-off campaigns for clients. But I felt that this defeated the purpose, because one of the strengths of integrated marketing campaigns is that you gather information about your clients’ customers, which in turn allows you to refine the process in subsequent campaigns. Over the past few years, we have had success with providing multiple campaigns for individual customers.
What are some of the most interesting projects you’ve worked on in the last few years? We’ve recently started to employ augmented reality technology in some of our campaigns. We use a version of the Aurasma platform that is skinned with our logo. We call it VReal.
One memorable VReal application was for a medical company’s trade show booth. A printed piece at the client’s booth had a trigger that, when scanned, brought up a 3D image of a larynx.
We’ve also used VReal for a recruitment campaign for a college. When prospective students scanned the printed mail piece they received, it took them to a fun video of the normally reserved college president screaming while going down a zip line. The idea behind the campaign was “the college can transform you, just look what it did to the president.”
Finally, another unique project we’ve been involved with is The Wall at McCain Mall. Mobile shopping via smartphones is on the rise and continues to grow. So we built The Wall at McCain Mall, which combines mobile technology, QR codes, and retail shopping in Arkansas’s largest indoor mall.
What are some of the challenges with integrating new media technologies in your print business?
There’s a learning curve of course. But there are plenty of providers, and we put in the work to find the ones that are right for us in terms of functionality, complexity, and price. I mentioned that we use Aurasma for augmented reality. We’re also licensed users of MindFire for PURLs. You need a bit of technical competence to work with these solutions, but they aren’t overly complicated in my opinion.
When we first began to transition our business, I did a lot of the work for the campaigns myself. Gradually we’ve trained other team members for these roles. One of the individuals responsible for our digital printing work also does a lot of our PURL design. If it’s heavy HTML work we’ll outsource that. As a legacy printing company, I know I need to look for and find younger talent who can use the new technology.
Do you have any advice for other printers looking to offer integrated marketing campaigns?
I would say make sure you can do it for yourself first. Run a few campaigns promoting your own business before you try to do it for a client. For example, we do a series of learning lunches for our clients and we’ve been marketing them using integrated campaigns.
Thanks for sharing CustomXM’s story with us Paul! We look forward to hearing you speak at the Integrated Print Forum!