Let’s face it – we’ve become a society where a huge proportion of our lives are reliant on online whether it’s our banking, organizing our calendars, booking trains, or using social media.
This is reflected in the amount of ads people are targeted with when they go online, be it Facebook ads, pop up ads on news sites or cookies that track your browsing activity you make to try to encourage you to finalise that purchase.
As a result, digital space has become incredibly saturated with ads and people can often question the integrity of online ads, worrying they’re spam. Customers can often be wary of clicking on anything they’re not fully trusting of in fear of having their data stolen or downloading viruses.
It’s become complicated to navigate an online world unless it’s brands you’re 100% familiar with and trust and trust is vital when it comes to persuading someone to make that all important buy.
Like most things in life, marketing is at its most successful when a multimedia strategy is in place. Print marketing is an effective way to reach, engage and build that all-important trust. Print adverts often lead a customer online to gather more info, either from their website or their social media accounts and ultimately to make a purchase. Research proves that combining a full marketing-mix makes for the most successful campaigns. They drive higher response rates rather than using digital-exclusive adverts.
Research shows that people read more slowly when it’s on paper, they retain more and have higher recall rates of what they’ve seen or read.
Web pages often have as little as 15 seconds of people’s attention before they go elsewhere compared to an average of 43 minutes spent reading a magazine. That’s a TINY window of opportunity to make a big impression!
In print, you’ve got the readers time and a bigger space than your typical digital ad to explain your business’s USPs and engage the reader with detailed information in easy-to-read chunks.
The same can’t be said for online where we’re literally bombarded from left, right and centre with words, photos, ads, pop-ups; our eyes and brains struggle to know what to focus on. There one second and gone the next! Ask yourself – can you remember an ad you recently saw whilst scrolling on Facebook? No, me neither.
Print is tangible; I can hold it, spend time deciding whether this is a company who can fulfil my needs as a customer, do I trust them with my money? Unlike online reading magazines/brochures etc evokes all the emotions, from seeing the bright colours, smelling the ink, hearing the pages turn and even feeling the weight of the paper as you hold it.
Creating a cohesive portfolio of printed publications integrated with a strong digital presence ensures your campaigns are as strong as possible.
Using print doesn’t mean you abandon online – use interactive elements on your literature such as QR codes, include social media icons and bring stats to life with infographics.
So when you’re considering where to invest your next advertising budget, make it print.