If you’re looking for ways to reach a wider audience, complementing digital marketing techniques with more traditional communication channels can help. Printed materials can enhance your marketing efforts.
Even though the death of the print media was announced with the emergence of the internet, its days are far from being numbered especially for marketing. Print still has a lot to offer. Its unique nature and effects are difficult to replicate.
Below you’ll find six good reasons to use print marketing in your next marketing campaign.
1. Print Is Palpable
There is something about holding a physical item in your hands.
Brochures, publications, business cards, and other printed materials tend to stay longer in our possession, in our offices and homes, as they are perceived as items far more valuable and permanent than the digital ones.
Social media, digital ads, and email have become pervasive and somewhat pushy, and your potential customers will most likely ignore them.
Banner blindness has become a real thing.
If you’re into B2B business or if you’re targeting luxury consumers, make sure you’ve included some high-quality printed materials into your marketing strategy like a catalogue your prospects can spend some time flipping through or a flyer promoting a product.
2. Print Is Credible
Consumers seem to still value printed materials more than any other media – a study by MarketingSherpa has shown that out of all marketing channels, 82% of the consumers trust ads in newspapers and magazines the most when making a purchasing decision.
Consumers don’t have that kind of trust in digital media. Some see digital efforts as the source of false information, viruses, and spam.
If your brand is recognizable online, and customers can engage with printed media, your trustworthiness and credibility can get a nice boost.
3. Print Can Help You With Branding
Printed materials are a great way to position and establish your brand.
As neuro marketers claim, brands that appeal to multiple senses will be more successful than those that focus on just one or two.
Print usually engages two of our senses – touch and sight. We can learn a lot about the brand from the way it satisfies our sense of touch – the texture used, the weight of paper, and how luxurious the item feels. The design of the print is incredibly important too, and how well it communicates with the viewer and keeps them intrigued.
Still, with the latest technology developments, printed materials can be a great way to activate our other senses in a subtle way too.
The smell is our most emotional sense, as aromas are tied to our memory and our experience. Scientific research proves the effects the smell has on our memory. Infusing branded pencils with the scent of the tea tree significantly increased the subjects’ ability to remember the brand. Those who had scented pencils experienced an 8% decline in the information they could recall after two weeks, while the subjects who were given the unscented ones experienced a 73% decline.
With the use of scented paper and scented ink, your brand can now communicate with your clients on a more personal, unconscious level, and literally, become an experience that is hard to forget.
4. Print Boosts Engagement
Although consumers tend to spend a large portion of their free time browsing the internet on their smartphones, the truth is that they are not very engaged with the content they’re consuming. With statistics showing that users spend an average of 5.59 seconds interacting with the written content on a website, no wonder that most digital marketing efforts go unnoticed.
Consumers are so overwhelmed with digital ads that they are often choosing to consciously ignore them.
Another behavioral study found that print advertisements engaged readers for a longer period of time than the digital ones, causing more activity in the brain related to desire and value. After a week, subjects had more intensive emotional responses to and better memory of the physical ads. But, not only consumers spend more time engaging with printed materials but they are also less likely to multitask while they’re reading a magazine or a brochure.
Furthermore, by leveraging tech-savvy print, such as QR codes and augmented reality features, you can use print media to boost your online engagement too and bring more traffic to your website and your landing pages.
A good example of how far a company can go to make a print ad engaging can be seen in one of IKEA’s latest advertising campaigns. The famous Scandinavian furniture giant put an ad with a built-in pregnancy test in Amelia, Sweden's most popular magazine for women. Bizarre as it may sound, the ad encouraged women to use the pregnancy test, and claim their reward if the results turned out to be positive.
5. Print Can Help You Reach Your Target Audience
With printed materials, you can easily reach your target audiences, including the ones that don’t spend much time online. For example, elderly people still prefer good old traditional newspapers and marketing channels.
By printing your ads in newspapers and magazines that are targeting general or niche audiences, or various brochures, catalogs, and banners, you’ll boost your brand awareness. In other words, you’ll make sure that your advertising efforts reach the right people, at the right moment.
If your customers mostly come from your local community, it’s highly possible that you’ll spread the news about your business much faster by distributing fliers or discount coupons.
6. Print Makes for Perfect Freebies
Everybody loves freebies, especially when they’re beautifully designed and useful. From coffee mugs to travel bags, blankets, and umbrellas, you can put your logo on almost any item you choose, reaching a wider audience.
You can use branded merch in various ways–hand them out at your promo events or have a giveaway on your social media channels and boost the engagement of your customers. Even old-school vouchers will do the job well when they’re implemented strategically.
Print can be a missing link in your marketing strategy, and just the right ingredient you need to build brand awareness and increase the trust and credibility of your brand. Make it an integral part of your marketing strategy and see just how effective the combination of digital media and print can be.
About the Author
Michael Deane has been working in marketing for almost a decade with a large range of clients. He’s knowledgeable on a variety of traditional and digital strategies. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.
