The HP Graphic Arts Capture Business Success Kit

If you’re interested in buying a large-format digital printer, now’s the time to join the club. Depending on your technology choice – and your shop’s specialties – a digital-print machine can add new products and increase your shop’s production. Additionally, it can leverage existing clients and land some new ones. However, if you don’t have a game plan, you may find yourself holding an expensive dust collector.

To succeed, you must announce your shop’s new capabilities to your customers. The word-of-mouth method works until you’ve saturated your customer network. So, what’s next? A marketing program that comprises ads, websites, brochures, mailers and press releases? Sure. You can hire a PR firm to do the work.

However, if you’re like us, you probably spent your last nickel to buy a printer and, now, must roll up your sleeves to tackle the marketing work, which soon becomes a time-consuming and daunting task. Luckily, the Hewlett-Packard (HP) marketing planners recognized this and assembled a program – the HP Graphics Arts Capture Business Success Kit – to help signshops jump into digital printing, without too much midnight oil. Sound interesting?

The kit

Available to HP’s large-format printer customers is a colorful folder that contains instructional booklets, a media guide and a DVD of customizable templates for everything from business forms to direct mail to posters. It also holds a practical marketing – “how to” – plan. To fully use the plan, you may need Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. You could also apply CorelDraw and QuarkExpress to create ads and posters, or to add to the kit’s ideas. We assume you already own and use first-rate, signmaking software.

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Where to begin

We’ll dip into the kit to show you how it works. For additional information (and tools), visit HP’s dedicated website, www.hp.com/go/capture.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably justified your digital-printer purchase by now. Perhaps you want to market digitally printed signs and banners … or have artistic and photographic skills and want to sell canvas prints. However, if you’re unsure, or hungry for additional ideas, a great starting place is HP’s, 55-page Building Your Large-Format Business Guide. It’s in the kit.

This six-section guide begins with an introduction, followed by an overview of sign-market opportunities. The fun begins in the third section, where the guide covers step-by-step instructions on the production of large-format signage and graphics.

Section four’s topics encompass RIPs, scanning, resolution, page sizes and dimensioning. Section six covers numerous, large-format, marketing aspects and the final section, seven, is a comprehensive reference guide that covers media, tools and hardware. It also offers useful web links.

Producing large-format prints is great, but the essential, and difficult, part is figuring out how. We’re expe¬rienced digital printmakers, but, still, certain sections impressed us, especially pages six through 13, where HP’s writers provide step-by-step instructions for making large-format, digital prints, banners and more.

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These pages cover five, popular, digital-print products, including banners, posters and stretched-canvas prints, which, until now, have been a mystery to us. It also lists other materials that may be required and HP’s recommended media.

After you choose the product type, the guide’s technical information section, beginning on page 20, explains various procedures to master. On page 24, the writers offer scanning and resolution tips, and also discuss the relationship of source (image-file) resolution to output (printer) resolution, so your scaled-up images retain sharpness. Additionally, it includes a useful, digital-camera resolution chart.

Color issues begin on page 26, and, on page 27, the color-management section speaks, generally, of ICC profiles, as well as Pantone® colors. It answers numerous questions and provides websites for more information.

Pages 30 thru 34 examine oft-forgotten matters – cast versus calendered vinyl, lamination, finishes, UV protectors and mounting adhesives. Page 33 suggests oversized-banner printing methods.

Page 35 introduces a product-marketing section that covers restaurants, tradeshows, nonprofits, service professionals and more. It includes a market-group overview and types of commonly purchased signage. Interestingly, it also defines key buying motivations, contact information and sales techniques.

Alone, this guide is a valuable tool, but the kit’s other tools take you even further. They’re designed to help you market your new printer’s output.

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Marketing tools

You now know how to operate the new printer, what to produce and your customer’s profile – how do you convince them you’re the guy? Easy. Pick up HP’s 12-page Marketing Guide and its companion DVD. It’s part of the kit.

As you surely suspect, mailings and brochures are effective marketing tools, but who has time to design and produce such pieces? HP’s staff. The kit includes numerous, pre-formatted marketing pieces. The guide allows you to preview the concepts, and the DVD (or HP’s website) provides working templates, including fonts.

Want to mail a sales postcard to real-estate agents? Select a postcard type (there are eight) from the guide that talks to that audience, then open the file, edit the text and save. Carry the electronic file to your local copy shop or printer, to have color copies made. Slap a stamp on them, and drop them in the mail box.

Easy.

A caveat. The templates are preserved in Adobe InDesign format (.indd), so, to edit the text, you’ll need a compatible version of Adobe InDesign or Adobe Creative Suite. Further, the DVD images are filed in Adobe Photoshop’s, native PSD format, so you’ll need related software to read and edit them.

In other good news, the guide includes a web-marketing section that describes leverage processes for such sites as Google and Yahoo. It details setup, rankings, pay-per-click, search-market sponsoring and keyword payments.

Conclusion

Wow! This is quite a jump-start for your HP printer. The kit is free and, even better, HP often updates its www.hp.com/go/capture website. Soon, you’ll find business-card, brochure and press-release templates. If you plan to buy an HP large-format printer, ask for the HP Graphic Arts Capture Business Success Kit. It’s like having your own marketing department.

Key Information

Hewlett-Packard, 3000 Hanover St., Palo Alto, CA 94304, www.hp.com.

Contact: Kristine Snyder, kristine.snyder@hp.com, (949) 548-4995

Company Profile: In 1939, inside a Palo Alto, CA garage, William (Bill) Hewlett and David (Dave) Packard, both with recent electrical-engineering degrees from Stanford University, founded the Hewlett-Packard Co. HP’s 2007 revenue reached $104 billion. Today, the company offers a complete technology-product portfolio that ranges from handheld devices to powerful, super-computer installations. It offers varying products and services – digital photography to digital entertainment, personal desk and laptop computers to business computing systems, home-based photo printing to grand-format print systems – all designed to match the right products, services and solutions to its customers’ specific needs.

At a Glance: Hewlett Packard’s Graphic Arts Capture Business Success Kit, available to its print-machine buyers, includes instructional marketing booklets, a media guide, customizable templates and a practical, “how-to” marketing plan for large-format, digital printing.