[bonedaddy68]

We do plastinal transfers and our epson for more personal stuff. We operate out of our house so we do not have a storefront. We do have a website but it hardly ever gets hits no matter what I do to up them. There were 2 big screen printers in the small town of 20,000 that we live in. The biggest just swapped hands but is still there. The other smaller one actually offered us there book of clients and there storefront before deciding to close up a succesful shop to pursue other things. We couldnt afford what they were asking so we are back to just doing out of our house. We do business but just not enough, its hit or miss if we even have a job a week. With the other place closing down you would think we would have tons of business. The biggest problem is no one knows about us. The only business we do is word of mouth really. We have done work for the 3 biggest corporations in town and they loved what we did. We arent in the phone book, its to expensive to pay for and takes like 2 years to get in for free. We need advice on how to get the word out about us. We have tried the newspaper but it is expensive as well and we only got one job out of like 3 ads we have placed. Any advice would be great. We know that the one screen printer that closed did all the work for one of the local schools. Should I contact that athletic director and tell them about us? Thanks ahead of time for the info...

Jonathan
Tee Shirt Express, LLC.
http://www.teeshirtx.com

 

[Rodney]

Hi Jon, take a few moments and read here:

local marketing related topics at T-Shirt Forums

You'll find lots of great suggestions and tips that have been posted on how to get the word out about your local printing business.

 

[brentonchad]

Jonathan,

We run the same type of structure through our home and using only word of mouth. However we have chose not advertise through the yellowpages, etc due to not being able to handle much more than what we have since this is an part time nightly deal.

However I have picked up lots of business by just stopping by various places (gyms, gymnastics, karate, dance, hair salons - anything that would have a need) and dropped my card off. I have no idea what the conversion rate is but I have received calls back. I also send samples to coaches and athletic directors. If I could do this during the day I would definitely stop by and personally drop stuff off at the schools.

I have also made contact with directors of the local sports leagues. I just simply call these people during the evening and find out how I could "help" their teams and organizations out with my products. 90% of the people that run these leagues are doing this on their spare time - so they are very much open when someone can come in and offer them what they need and they don't have to take part of their weekend or lunch hour to go find it.

I have found that t-shirts are a low priority for most companies - but are something they all want. Therefore they never make time to go get prices, etc - but if you come to them then all they have to od is say ok and it's done and everyone's happy.

 

[tigertiger]

Hi Jon, take a few moments and read here:

local marketing related topics at T-Shirt Forums

You'll find lots of great suggestions and tips that have been posted on how to get the word out about your local printing business.

this helped a lot, thank you

 

[bonedaddy68]

Thanks for all the info, gave us lots to go over!

 

[bonedaddy68]

Thanks for the great post, your set up sounds just like ours and your post helped a lot. I have a quick question that may be pretty stupid but when you say you send samples to the coaches what kind of samples are you sending?

 

[bonedaddy68]

That last post was for brentonchad, kinda messed that up..

 

[brentonchad]

Most of the time I send just artwork samples. Sometimes though I have actually sent shirts over. I always watermark the artwork or at least put some type of copyright info.