Your average small business spends roughly 7% of its revenue on marketing every year. In today’s day in age, much of that marketing spend is filtered into digital advertisements, you might see pre-roll on a YouTube video or via a pop-up on a search engine results page.
While digital advertising is all well and good, we’re here to remind you that print marketing still has efficacy and as a matter of fact, may even drive more value for businesses than modern ad mediums when leveraged correctly.
If you scoff when you think about investing your marketing dollars in print, we advise you to keep reading and take in some of what we have to share. Below, our team breaks down 7 reasons why print is still relevant to you and your consumers.
1. Print is Affordable
Have you weighed how much it costs to run off a print at your local paper store? For a single black and white print, you’re looking at about 10 cents… And that’s the non-bulk price.
Several helpful printing companies will not only teach businesses interested in print marketing how to print in different styles but will also extend their printing services at deep discounts so long as you meet certain requirements.
Imagine if you were paying even 5 cents per guaranteed impression on your marketing collateral. That could easily run circles around whatever keywords you’re targeting via digital.
2. It Doesn’t Expire
Eventually, your digital ad budget runs out. When it does, your advertisement disappears.
Print doesn’t expire. The second that you put a printed piece of marketing collateral out into the world, if its message is evergreen, it will forever float around, informing anyone that glances at it.
That makes it so print marketing has the potential to deliver hundreds or more impressions per item.
3. Tangible Marketing Is Real to Consumers
There’s something to be said about putting a piece of marketing collateral into somebody’s hand. Physical marketing is real to consumers, and that realness often does more to focus their attention on messaging.
The realness of print also has effects on business owners as well.
Try putting out a digital ad and then try printing 100 flyers and handing them out. You’ll almost certainly feel like you’re making more of an impact on your success putting papers into people’s hands than clicking a button and allowing anonymous people to stumble across your digital messaging.
4. Local Targeting Made Simple
If you’re not a national business, print is even more effective. That’s because local businesses that rely on people that work/live in the area need to make sure that their marketing messages make it into the hands of local customers.
One of the chief print marketing benefits is that printed collateral only goes as far as you send it. Compare that to digital ads.
Digital ads have local targeting functions. You never know for sure though if people seeing your ads (and costing you money) are actually in your area. For example, if a consumer was using a VPN, they could theoretically eat up your ad budget from hundreds of miles away.
5. An Instant Aura of Trust
Consumers that get hold of print marketing immediately make assumptions about the business they’re reading about.
For starters, they assume the business is local since print and local tend to go hand in hand. Second, they usually trust that the business is legitimate because no local business would be advertising bogus services since tracking the business owner down and holding them accountable wouldn’t be a challenge.
That trust that you immediately build with consumers via print (that you’re going to have a harder time building online where it’s much easier to cheat buyers) is going to bode well for your conversions. That brings us to our next point…
6. Print Works
Print marketing has been tested time and again. Those tests have yielded massively positive results for those that dive into this medium and lean into its advantages.
For example, one study showed that direct mailing campaigns earned marketers a 1300% return on their investment.
To get that kind of traction for digital ads, your advertisements would need to experience a level of viral spread not often seen in the marketing space.
7. Mediums are Flexible
If all you think about when you consider print marketing ideas is running off flyers, you have to expand your mind! Print marketing extends across more mediums than we have the time to disclose in this post, including business cards, brochures, signage, and so much more.
Maximizing your print ROI largely comes down to investing in a diversity of mediums so you can engage customers in different ways.
If the volume of print avenues you have access to intimidates you, don’t worry. Simply connect with a printing professional that is willing to help guide you through which investments make the most sense for what you’re trying to do.
Print Marketing Is Far From Dead
We hope the combination of insights we’ve shared with you have helped support this post’s core assertion that print marketing is far from dead. The truth is quite the opposite as print continues to serve as a cost-effective medium that entices customers to take action and helps business owners feel like their marketing efforts are real.
So, before you put in another bid on a keyword via a search engine’s ad tools, we implore you to instead head over to a print shop to see what sorts of physical collateral might work for your marketing campaign.
We’re sure you won’t regret having explored that option!
For more insight into marketing and various other business facets, check out the newest content on our blog.