Looking ahead: A year of storytelling in print

Can you believe the year is almost over? In 2014, we took you inside the world of personalized print. We’ve learned:

• How a brand, creative team, and printer can collaborate on a personalized campaign
• How to build a mailing list that works for your business
• …and how to divide that list into meaningful categories
• How nonprofits can use personalization to increase donations
• How to design personalized mail pieces that people will actually read
• How checklists can make a mail campaign a success

I hope you found this year’s posts helpful. The personalization theme was born with our new mailing house, which we opened in October 2013. In the year since then, we’ve been helping customers with all kinds of campaigns, many using variable data, with great results.

Now, with a whole new set of capabilities we have in our HP Indigo 5600, a digital press so versatile and powerful, our focus will be to help companies tell their stories and share their brands at a new level. We jokingly called it our “storytelling machine”, which  sounded good, but we also realize the necessity of great content along with great printing to make the story complete.

That leads us to our blog theme for 2015: the power of storytelling. Humans have connected through stories for millennia, so it makes sense that stories remain one of the most effective ways to communicate. Organizations of all kinds can use stories to explain who they are and connect with their customers. We want to show how you can tell stories with print.

I think the addition of Amanda Pond will be a big help in pulling our blogs together and improving them this year. Not only will we be helping customers tell their stories, but she’s been tasked with helping us tell our story to you. Like starting with the 12 Days of Substrates, the right approach allows us to demonstrate how substrates like magnets and static clings can help communicate the right story on a higher level. I honestly can’t wait to see what else we come up this year.

So look forward to a year’s worth of blogs on turning ink and paper into engaging, persuasive stories. We’re excited to share what we know and to learn along with you in 2015.