# What has worked for marketing your custom screen print shop?



## Steelheader100 (Jan 18, 2007)

Hello,
I'd like to know what marketing has worked for those of you that have custom screen print,embroidery, or ad specialty shops. I don't have a pre print line of shirts. I don't have a brand name I'm trying to build. I just want to get more people into my shop that need custom work done. We recently revamped our webpage and it is still going to be improved. I have a myspace page. We have radio ads running on one station for our shop and we get mentioned on two stations as a sponser of an ongoing event. Our banner is at the event. Often when doing shirts for events that have sponsors we will discount screens or something to have our logo on the shirt somewhere. We have a regular listing in the yellow pages nothing big. We belong to two of our areas chamber of commerce groups. Traditionally we have just relied on word of mouth but we have the capacity to do more. I'd also like to add another automatic press but need to get more work to justify spending the money. What works for you?


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## DirectSupply (Mar 19, 2008)

Hi,

One word of advise I can give you is whatever form of marketing you chose make sure you can always track the response/result of your campaign.

here are some ideas:

What about working with local school district or city contracts.

How about marketing to screen print shops who don't have the capacity to do smaller and custom runs. 

Are you a member of ASI? They have special membership for "decorators" (screen printers, engravers etc..) here is the link :
Join ASI: Embroiderer and Screen Printer Service Providers Benefits


Rod

ps I dont know how that thumbs down got in the subject line.. I didn't mean to put it there at all!


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## Steelheader100 (Jan 18, 2007)

Thanks for the reply. I have the contract for my city and I do some work for individual schools. I find that schools are often hard to keep as customer because every couple years it's a new parent that takes over t-shirt ordering and they either have someone they already work with or they just start calling around. The school district itself may be a good idea. I'm already set up for ad specialty products and I do some contract work for ad agencies and smaller print shops. All good ideas though. As far as tracking results I'm thinking of including a different promotion or coupon for each type of advertising I do. That way I can track which ones seem to attract the most customers.


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## tim3560 (Jan 7, 2007)

We have tried radio and newspaper ads to this point. Neither of those did any good for us. I've gotten a couple of calls recently from our phone book ads, so I think that will start to help shortly. Next weekend we'll be attending a local community market and selling some merchandise to the locals to peak interest and let people know about our store. We're also attending a local festival in 2 weeks for the same reasons. I think these will be our best shots at boosting local awareness.


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