Renovate Your Showroom, Tune Up Your Machines, and More September/October To-Dos for Print Pros

SEPT. 2-8

FACILITIES Consider renovating or rearranging your lobby or showroom so you can fit more examples of your work for customers to see up close.

CUSTOMERS Call some of your top customers just to catch up. Forget business; simply ask them how they are. It will be a refreshing moment for both of you.

SEPT. 9-15

EMPLOYEES Remind staff to use all vacation hours before the end of the year.

MARKETING If you have great reviews, have won an industry award, etc., don’t be modest. Blast it all over your social, compile a video of your amazing project and share, share, share.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

SEPT. 16-22

MAINTENANCE Britt Hoff of H N H Sign Company in Nucla, CO prepares for the busy season with “full machine maintenance/tune ups”. And the company then perform them again in February.
SERVICE Institute a post-sale follow-up procedure for thank-you notes (“Hope you’re enjoying the heck out of your new vehicle wrap … ”)  This is too important to leave up to each salesperson to do or not do their own thing.

SEPT. 23-29

ONLINE Your company should show up in the top three results for a Google search of “signs near me.” If not, get busy working on your search engine optimization (SEO).

SEPT. 30 – OCT. 6

MARKETING Email your retail customers in early October with ideas for in-store graphics for the 2024 holiday season. Send an email with big photos showing the different kind of work you do. Few things can energize or change the ambience of a store or restaurant more than a new front-window graphic or a big, beautiful wall graphic. Plant that seed in the minds of your customers as the all-important holiday season approaches.
SERVICE CALLS Shops often see an uptick in service calls starting in October. Ahead of that, start steering your marketing efforts toward scheduling maintenance calls.

OCT. 7-13

RECYCLING Clear out your various scrap metal piles. Some may have been sitting around for a while. Steel, stainless steel, aluminum, copper and brass can all be recycled.

OCT. 14-20

TRAINING Do you have a fancy DSLR camera that no longer gets much use because you use your phone for everything? As good as phone cameras are, you likely could get better with the right skills. Sign up for a course that teaches you how to take better product and social media pics.

MONTHLY PROJECT

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

Get Fun Feedback 
With Instagram Polls

For business owners, Instagram polls are a valuable tool for everything from brand education to researching your market to creating buzz. According to ConvertKit, Instagram Stories and polls have never been more popular — over 500 million Instagram users  now use Stories every day — and over 60 percent of businesses on Instagram Stories use interactive Stickers like hashtags, @mentions, or polls every month.

One of the easiest to use for small businesses is the classic Poll sticker, which lets viewers vote on one of two different answers. The default answers are Yes or No, but can be customized. A few examples of Instagram Story poll questions you could ask:

• Do you enjoy X? Yes / No
• Should I share more about Y? Yes / No
• Do you struggle with Z? Yes / No
• Which sign looks better? X / Y
• Which style vehicle wrap do you prefer? X / Y