How to determine if self-printing your marketing materials is financially smart

Everybody knows that marketing materials is what helps to increase your business. By having a good marketing plan you can reach thousands of potential customers, whether new or returning, which can increase your sales and will in the end increase the profit your company is making. Everybody also knows that printing marketing materials can get expensive, so the next question they ask themselves is would self-printing my marketing materials be financially smart. Unfortunately there is no direct answer to this question, the answer lies in what you are capable of doing and how much money you have to do it.

The best way to determine if self-printing your marketing materials is financially smart is to do some price comparison. You should go to places like FedEx/Kinko's and other printing places to see what kinds of prices they offer for printing marketing materials, usually mass printings get you a better price and then compare it to what it would cost you to print them yourself, along with the benefits you can achieve if you print your own marketing materials.

Benefits of printing your own materials:
If you have a small marketing budget printing your own materials is probably the cheapest and easiest way to stay in or under budget, but it also offers other benefits. If you were to take your marketing materials to a publisher you will have to place high orders to get the best deals on printing. Now not only will you have to store this stuff, but what happens if your company moves or you change your phone number or members of your staff or even create your own website? The answer to this is you will have to get rid of all of your old stuff and have new stuff printed; this alone can get rather expensive. But if you print your own materials you can make changes any time you need to and only print what you need.

Items needed to print your own materials:
While many of you might think that in order to print your own materials you are going to need a really expensive laser printer this is not true, you should only invest in a laser printer if you are going to be constantly using it and doing a lot of high volume jobs. But you can always start off small and invest in a laser printer after you get your company up and running. You can invest in a dot matrix printer, which are rather inexpensive and provide high quality printing. Along with the printer you are going to want to buy some ink cartridges, both color and black. While these can average between thirty and forty dollars per cartridge they also tend to last for a very long time so it is a great investment.

Most of all you are going to need to buy paper for your marketing materials. Prices on paper vary greatly depending on what kind of paper you are going to need to use. For newsletters and flyers you can use regular paper. But if you are going to want to have stationary and other things like that you are going to need a higher quality paper for this type of printing. You should also invest in some photo paper so you can print your own ads. Going to an office supply store you can usually find pre-printed sets that you can purchase to get all your paper to look similar.

Most importantly though you are going to need templates to help you create your own marketing materials. You can buy computer software that provides templates for various marketing materials, and sometimes when you buy specialty printing materials at your local office supply store you can get free software that will help make your printing look professional. But most important of all is the use of templates in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Works. Both of these programs come with templates or "wizards" for creating marketing materials for your business. You can also download additional templates from the Microsoft Office website sometimes at no additional charge. You can also find templates for free or low cost on various websites. All you need to do is spend a little time doing your research.