integrate with major trade print suppliers to fulfil orders, with companies including Tradeprint, its sister company Venture Banners, and Solopress – all of which are connectable as integrated APIs. VB Media has also released a number of blogs, how-to guides, and other resources for printers wishing to boost their marketing output in the modern online world, including an article detailing marketing tactics to help you drive buyers to your website. For De Boos, a key part of marketing will always be to find out where your audience resides, either online or in-person, and target that specifically. “It’s vital to think about where your customers are,” he says, “and what motivates their purchases. Like most of us today, they’re increasingly online, and with the volume of online print and signage sales growing every year, setting up your website for success should be a big part of your marketing plan.” According to De Boos, a key reason that VB set up its platform was to create a central hub for marketing activity, making it easier to set up branding across websites from a master dashboard. “Even if you’re not a branding expert,” he asserts, “when you keep bringing every channel back to your website, that can help you to build a consistent experience for customers and potential customers alike.” De Boos continues with a set of questions to consider that can inform your marketing, saying: “Ultimately, it comes down to putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and thinking about how they engage with your company and your brand. How and where do they find information about your products? How do they typically place, manage, and receive their orders? By walking through their experience in this way, you can easily identify all of the marketing ‘touchpoints’ that need to reflect your brand and what you stand for.” In his opinion, modern marketing plans need to encompass a plethora of promotional tactics, not least of which being a robust website which operates as its own buying channel. VB’s platform is designed with that in mind, with orders and payments going directly to the individual company using it, allowing the flexibility to fulfil orders in-house or to easily send all or part of an order to a supplier. “Beyond the basics, your website has to be much more than an online version of your brochure,” De Boos posits. “It is also an essential utility that can facilitate user-friendly print buying. Even more importantly, it should be an active selling channel to which you drive traffic through your social media, videos, email marketing, printed direct marketing, event branding, and paid advertising, as well as with tactics such as SEO and blogging.” With limited time and resources available, signage and graphics professionals may be hesitant to spend so much of it on marketing rather than on maximising output quality, but De Boos insists that having strong and consistent marketing is of particular importance in an increasingly online world. As he deftly puts it: “The idea of ‘build it and they will come’ just doesn’t work in the world of ecommerce.” The idea of ‘build it and they will come’ just doesn’t work in the world of ecommerce ▲ VB Media is an ecommerce platform built specifically for the print industry Marketing budgets dropped to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024, according to the Annual CMO Spend Survey from research firm, Gartner Factoid MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS | JONATHAN PERT 67 www.signlink.co.uk Issue 260 - August / September 2025
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