Instant Print & Promo uses Digital Transformation Grant to invest in customer experience
Chatham-Kent’s Instant Print & Promo has witnessed firsthand the effects of the ever-changing digital marketing and advertising landscape. Since 1978, the print shop has worked with small and medium-sized businesses, providing promotional materials like printed advertising, labels, promotional swag, and signage.
The business was quick to adopt digital, spending the 1980s designing on Macintosh computers and investing in new printing technology, says David Dawson, who joined his family’s business in 1993 and took over as owner when his dad retired a few years later. “The things we do today compared to the way we did things when I started are night and day,” says Dawson.
Instant Print & Promo’s success in the digital marketing industry seems to come from making strategic choices in how it employs digital tools within the business. From Dawson's perspective, investing in digital only makes sense when it improves the business in some way. “We still have an old analog offset press that's well suited to a few jobs that we do,” he says. “There are some things that (printer) can do better than the digital stuff can… it’s about using the strengths of both.”
That’s the perspective Dawson held when he connected with Digital Main Street, a program which combines grants and one-to-one support from the Province of Ontario alongside partners to help main street businesses strengthen their online capabilities and plan for the digital future. Dawson had previously received the $2,500 Digital Transformation Grant and digital training through the program, putting the funding towards e-commerce upgrades. This time around he wanted to use the Digital Transformation Grant to improve the human element of the business by investing in PlanProphet, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) engine and automation software specifically for the printing and graphics industry.
“I talked to other print shops around the world who had been using this and they were saying good things about it,” says Dawson. “It integrates with the software that we already use quite seamlessly.” He saw it as a way to augment the customer experience by automating key elements of the business that were also time-consuming, freeing up his team’s time to focus on the more personal elements of interactions with customers. The software helps him update customers on their orders and let them know about other products they might be interested in.
“It's one of those investments that you don’t know how well it’s going to work,” says Dawson. He plans to test it for the next few months and see how it improves the business, something he says the business might not have otherwise invested in. “The grant felt like a great way (invest) and see what's going to work for us.”
Check out Instant Print & Promo sur ce site.
To learn more about how Digital Main Street can help your business, please visit sur ce site.
Digital Main Street a été créé par la Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA) avec le soutien direct de la Ville de Toronto. DMS est également soutenu par un groupe de partenaires commerciaux stratégiques, dont Google, Mastercard, Shopify, Meta, Intuit QuickBooks, Square, Lightspeed, Ebay et Postes Canada.
L'investissement continu de la province de l'Ontario, par l'intermédiaire du Ministère du Développement économique, de la Création d’emplois et du Commerce (MEDJCT), a permis l'expansion continue de la plateforme numérique de la rue principale afin de soutenir davantage d'entreprises qui passent au numérique dans tout l'Ontario.
