Advertising has a long history in print. For most of the industry’s existence, it’s been the best and primary way to get information out to your audience. With the dawn of television, everything changed. And now with the internet, it has changed again. Armed with powerful analytical tools and the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime, digital marketing revolutionized the way we do business. But print hasn’t become obsolete. It is still an important tool that businesses can use to reach their customers. By incorporating it into your existing marketing strategy, you can further grow your reach.
But with digital marketing taking up so much of the limelight, what is print advertising in the modern age? Keep reading to learn how print has evolved alongside digital in modern marketing.
Unique Advantages
There’s no question that digital marketing has made a lot of marketers dial back their print advertising efforts. With the ability to reach such a vast audience across the world for a lower cost, it’s hard to beat the math. That being said, print advertising still has some unique advantages that digital media can’t touch.
For one thing, the digital space is bustling and crowded. People are bombarded by ads everywhere they go online, and it’s easy for your ad to get lost in the noise. Print advertising can help you break through the crowd. It’s physical, tangible, and attention grabbing. As an added benefit, your audience is likely to spend more than a half-second looking at it before scrolling on. And unlike digital ads, which can be easily skipped or ignored, print ads still exist long after you turn the page, so there’s a potential for customers to see them more than once.
Print advertising can also be seen as more trustworthy than digital ads. Because the bar for entry in the digital space is so low, it’s not hard for people with less-than-honest intentions to run deceptive ads or, worse yet, ads that lead users to sites that may infect their devices with malware. What is print advertising? Dependable, reliable, and regulated. When you can put a high-quality, well-designed print ad in your audience’s hands, you can prove your legitimacy as a business.
Increasing Brand Visibility
Brand visibility is a key component of your marketing strategy. It gauges how often you’re able to reach your target audience and your ability to expand beyond it and into new audiences. Print ads can do wonders to help you stay top of mind for your audience.
One of print advertising’s biggest strengths is the tangibility, which makes the ad stick in a customer’s mind. In a study by Temple University, in collaboration with the US Postal Service, researchers found that physical ads had a much stronger impact on audiences than their digital counterparts. Participants reported that, not only did they have a stronger emotional response to print ads, but they were also able to recall information from the ads more effectively. Your brand visibility hinges on your ability to have a strong presence in the mind of the consumer. Print ads can help you do just that.
Reaching Diverse Audiences
Your target audience should have one key thing in common: a likely chance that they’ll convert. Beyond that, you should be trying to capture a diverse collection of people. One of the best ways to reach diverse audiences is through print ads.
Let’s say for example that you’re a golf supply retailer. You want to appeal to a broad swath of people, from high-powered C-suite professionals who are cutting deals on the course to the casual group of friends who have played nine holes at the same course every week for the last 20 years. Aside from the hobby, there’s not a lot to connect those two audiences. That’s where print advertising can be useful. By placing ads in publications dedicated to golf, you can reach both audiences with the same strategy.
InnoVision, a San Diego-based marketing group, has found that by strategically buying print ads, companies can reach diverse new audiences that are already interested in their products. It’s a classic way to meet your audience where they are.
Integrating Print With Digital Strategies
Print advertising can also effectively dovetail with your existing digital strategies. Instead of keeping both strategies separate, you can and should let them support each other. To boost your social media following, include your handles in print ads so people know where to find you online.
If you want to get your audience back to your website, include a QR code that they can easily scan to find their way there. If you create a landing page for that QR code that is only for people who saw the print ad, you can even make your print ads benefit from the powerful analytics and insights of digital marketing.
You can further incentivize people to make the jump from print to the digital space by educating them about online-only sales or promotions. On the flip side, you can use information from your digital marketing efforts to inform print marketing strategies. For example, if your customers can make a profile on your site and include their birthday, you can send them a mailer with a special promotion to celebrate the day. By using both methods in tandem, you can further cement your presence in your audience’s mind.
Implementing Print Advertising
So, what is print advertising? At the end of the day, it remains an effective method for reaching your audience. Your marketing strategies should be as diverse and varied as the people you’re trying to reach. Print advertising is just another avenue you can pursue to reach everybody you can. While it may need to share the spotlight with digital marketing now, completely omitting print ads would just be leaving money on the table. If you’re not already utilizing print ads, it’s definitely worth considering it. You never know who you might be able to reach.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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