4 Reasons Why Your Business Still Needs Print Marketing in 2020
If you’ve ever thought that digital and social marketing was a good substitute for print marketing, think again. Even in 2020, print marketing is vitally important for businesses of all sizes to communicate their message to your audience.
A case for the generation gap
Print and mail marketing is still a great way to reach many sectors of the market, especially with more and more young people (Generation Z and Generation Alpha) becoming immune to online ads or installing adblockers and declining ad cookies. Print has the unique ability to be a physical connection between you and your audience.
Here are four reasons why you need to invest in print marketing for your business to thrive.
1. Print appeals to the senses
Human beings are inherently sensory animals. We like to listen, look, smell, and feel our way around the world. Viewing content behind a screen doesn’t allow for the same connection as a physical brochure, flyer, or card does.
Studies have shown that, despite e-readers and tablets being incredibly popular, sales of physical books are still as high as ever, and when a business invests in their print marketing (using luxury papers, interactive images, and engaging copy, etc.) customers feel like they are being treated to something special -not just a generic digital ad invading their time.
2. Digital Ad Blindness
Did you know that the average American is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 pieces of advertising per day? This number is only growing as our reliance on screens grows too, and it’s actually creating a phenomenon known as ad blindness, or the inability to even see an advertisement.
Of course, some adverts are subliminal, and they are meant to just make the audience aware of the product or brand (known as drip advertising). However, for the vast majority of adverts, especially digital ones, they are just not getting the engagement they hoped to get.
Even worse for digital advertising, studies have shown that users get frustrated when adverts invade their time spent social networking or watching videos. Even sponsored content on YouTube is beginning to annoy users, especially when their favourite YouTubers have to use the same scrip as each other to advertise products like website building services.
3. Print increases sales
A study in 2014 showed that customers were more likely to buy a product if they had experienced it in print first, as well as in other ways such as video. Both video and print have a better trust engagement than standard banner ads or email marketing campaigns.
The ability to come back to a brochure at their own leisure and really invest time looking at the pictures and reading the text proved much more alluring than just a simple banner ad on a website landing page. Landing pages are, however, important, as many people will experience print and video as part of the marketing funnel, leading them from awareness to sale to loyal customers.
4. Print appeals to the ‘time-poor’
You’ve heard that phrase ‘time-poor’, it describes most of us perfectly. We have a million and one things to do but never enough hours in the day to get them done. Maybe we should stop sleeping?
All joking aside, print is perfect for the time-poor in society for two reasons:
— It’s less invasive and can be something the user can come back to
— It can also fill up otherwise wasted time, like waiting in a doctor’s surgery where there is inevitably no Wif-Fi
Your audience can receive a piece of print marketing and then decide what to do with it later. They can plan when to interact with it, leading to your audience spending more time thinking about your product or service.
Conclusion
Print marketing has had a rough few years, but it’s been shown time and time again to connect with the audience in a way that purely digital advertising just doesn’t do it. Billboards on the way to work give commuters something to look at during a busy drive, a brochure in hand allows for a full sensory experience of the product, as well as for repeated interactions when it’s inevitably left on the coffee table for everyone to see!
Print has been around for centuries, thanks to Guttenberg’s printing press, from simple pictorial designs on political flyers to rally supporters to a cause, to full immersive books, billboards, brochures, flyers, and leaflets.
There’s no way print is dead; in fact, we’d argue it’s still got many centuries of life in it yet!
