Ronak Kothari is the founder of RONKOT, a full-service digital marketing agency.
Many of you might have assumed print marketing is on the verge of being extinct. However, the reality is far from what it seems to be.
Print marketing & advertising is a form where brands use printed media such as magazines, business cards, banners, newspapers, brochures, direct mail, and more.
Despite the odds like the rise in digital marketing and Covid, print marketing is still alive and plays a vital role for many brands to get in front of their customers. It’s a powerful way to connect with your readers on an emotional level and turn them into brand advocates.
Being a timeless marketing strategy, print marketing can feel relaxing for many users who are saturated from the highly targeted online advertisements. Still, many businesses haven’t really understood the significance of print media and are reluctant to try it out.
So, let’s first understand the vitality of print marketing in today’s age and then understand some reasons why brands should adopt it.
Significance of Print Marketing for Brands
Print media is a catalyst for offering your target market and prospects a brand experience that can’t be replicated through online advertising. It helps break the barriers of communication between you and your loyal customers to convey your values in a meaningful way.
Since print media feels more natural and tactile, the significance & benefits of print marketing services are immense. And it can be proven from the below statistics:
- As per one report, 7 out of 10 Americans find print direct mails more personal than online ads.
- The same report also mentions 56% of consumers trust print marketing more than other means of advertising.
- As per one survey, 82% of consumers said they trust print ads more when making a purchase decision.
(Source)
- The strategic implementation of print media along with digital ads can help drive more traffic and improve the effectiveness of the campaign by 400%.
- With a 13-to-1 return on investment ratio, brands have realized its importance and started adopting print advertising into their marketing strategies.
- As per Print Is Big, the Global Print Industry stands at $898 billion and drives $3.8 trillion in related services.
That’s massive and impressive! Right?
If these statistics are not convincing enough for you, here are a few reasons why your brand should leverage print marketing.
6 Reasons Why Brands Should Leverage Print Marketing
1. Boosts Your Brand Visibility
Try answering this question, ‘Does your brand stand out from the rest?’
Maybe!
Not so sure about it?
Print marketing is a fantastic way to go beyond just leveraging digital tools to improve brand awareness and visibility. With effectively marketed print campaigns, brands can penetrate many blind spots that were previously untouched by your digital campaigns.
Here’s what more you can do with print marketing to boost your brand visibility:
- Present your brand in a value additional way by streamlining the communication with a personal touch.
- Customers tend to engage more with print media as it allows them to physically interact and respond to your print materials.
- Based on the type of channel or placement of print media, brands can target specific target audiences to increase brand awareness.
- Print marketing is an excellent way to add weight to word-of-mouth or referral marketing.
2. Gives Competitive Edge to Your Business
With print, there comes a sense of satisfaction and a feeling of legitimacy for your readers.
In digital ways, the chances of readers returning to your content pieces are slim. Also, in the age of information explosion, much of the information on digital platforms goes unnoticed. However, print media comes in handy for readers to pay attention & absorb information.
It requires real estate, meaning it takes a certain space in your surroundings. Thus, the printed media will remain at its place until someone picks it up again to view and resume reading. This gives a certain credibility to print marketing and a competitive advantage to your business.
Here’s how businesses can have a competitive edge with print marketing:
- Through print, your brand can bypass the online noise and reach customers in more intriguing ways to grab their attention.
- Imagine the feeling of getting quirky, entertaining, and captivating direct mail on your doorstep. It’ll delight your customers and leave them wanting more of such prints.
- A well-designed print media that doesn’t scream ‘Junk Mail’ will work like a charm for customers as well as help you stand out from the rest to easily get noticed.
3. Improves Trust in Customers
Employing a notch-higher quality print media for boosting your brand visibility is also an indication of being authentic. Printed text has a unique ability that enables users to grasp information faster and easier.
We can go deep into the concept to understand the information clearly. As per the Marketing Profs report, 92% of 18 to 23-year-olds said reading and understanding the print content over digital one is easier.
(Source)
And as we learn something more clearly, trust and reliability start to build up. Through channelizing resources available, brands can target a specific group of users to build trust among them.
Here’s more what you can do to build trust:
- Showcase your company values throughout your product creation and distribution channels.
- Build open & meaningful relationships with your customers by writing on relevant topics users can resonate with.
- Be consistent in your effort to sustain the trust you’ve built with your print readers.
- Trusting your brand for customers boils down to not what you say but what you do. Walk the talk and do what you preach about in your print media.
4. Helps in Reaching Unexplored Target Market
As mentioned earlier, the unification of digital and print marketing campaigns tends to be more effective in driving traffic to your web or brick-and-mortar stores. The digital tools target more tech-savvy users. However, there’s still a segment of the target audience left unexplored.
Through print marketing, you can target a specific segment of the audience that is loyal to reading print materials.
A perfectly crafted piece of content published in newspapers, magazines, or other print media can even reach a niche as well as general audiences.
Here’s how you can become hit with a new target market:
- Research about your target audiences first and analyze what are their preferred channels or publications in terms of reading print materials.
- Include those print channels & publications in your print marketing strategy to leverage the target audience that was unexplored before.
- Once you have selected the publications, prepare an editorial content calendar to target and place your print ads to get high attention and readership.
- If possible, then select the placement of your advertisement near to the start so that readers can remember your print media.
5. The Tactile Nature of Print is Perceived as Real
Print media particularly the high-quality and visually elegant designs entice the human senses. Since we are sensory living creatures, we get inspired by things that feel, read, smell good.
We are naturally drawn towards that quirky and thought-provoking print or digital content. However, such material in the physical format appeals more as proven by various researches.
Thus, avid readers prefer physical print media over digital or electronic prints due to their tactile nature and are perceived as real. This real experience is better at becoming a part of our memory.
Print media such as flyers, banners, magazine ads, or a postcard can stick around longer in the minds of interested users to remember your ads. Also, they provide tangibility to your print campaigns as they occupy a certain ‘real estate’ as we mentioned earlier.
Brands can benefit from such sort of print dynamics and the tactical nature of the media to improve brand awareness and benefit from additional revenue it brings.
6. Print Media is Better at Information Retention
User attention span when surfing online is a bit short. We get easily distracted from reading a marketing copy or skim through it without retaining much data. However, print media is better at information retention as we tend to be more concentrated while reading printed materials.
This enables us to retain as much information as possible and access them from memory whenever needed. This is because the brain parts utilized for reading online vs print material are different as per neuroscience research.
(Source)
Our brain uses the deep-reading parts to become more immersive and receptive to the information described in the print materials. Thus, brands that want users to absorb the information should bet their money on print marketing.
It’s taken that you’ll have to spend a bit of time to perfect your print media crafts, but neat and sleek designs would help you get better results.
Conclusion
One thing I know for a fact is that print marketing is not going to disappear anytime soon. It’s still relevant today and the six reasons & statistics mentioned above clearly delve into why print marketing is still an important channel for brands to drive growth.
It can be a highly effective and solid strategy to bring users through targeted campaigns. Moreover, print media campaigns are easy to personalize and customize for tailoring the user experience.
If you are ready to utilize the potential of print marketing, a full-scale printing services company like Ronkot can help you out. We have mastered the art to convey your messaging in a more customer-friendly and cost-effective fashion. Get in touch with us today for your print media designs & marketing services needs and get a complimentary beverage from us.