When Done Right, Print Advertising Can Pay Dividends for Your Brand
With all the focus on digital marketing these days, it’s easy to forget or neglect traditional marketing when it comes to capturing your audience’s attention and setting your brand apart. Once a darling of marketing, print advertising especially has taken a backseat to online advertising, which is often more effective and less expensive. However, while print advertising can be a larger investment and lacks the full power it used to have, it can still be a highly effective tool for brands to reach consumers and persuade them to consider their product or service.
The flyers, letters, and postcards that get delivered to your physical mailbox are what most people think of when it comes to print advertising; however, print advertising encompasses a wide range of different mediums, including:
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Basically, if it’s advertising that’s not on a screen or through a speaker, it’s most likely print advertising, which offers several brand-boosting benefits over digital, such as better personalization and greater perceived authenticity. There’s just something about a physical mailer, billboard, magazine ad, or billboard that commands attention and seems more “real.”
Whether you’ve utilized the power of print for years or you’re just thinking about starting to, there are a number of best practices to incorporate into your print advertising for maximum impact. At the same time, there are plenty of mistakes to avoid, with these five being at the top of the list:
1. Poor Design Choices
As with most marketing pieces, design is arguably the most essential factor in your print ad’s overall effectiveness. With print, many of the usual design best practices come into play, such as consistent branding, concise copy, high-quality images/graphics, and proper use of white space. Conversely, overly busy layouts, hard-to-read fonts, or mismatched colors can get in the way of your message.
Compared to other marketing channels, the nature of print presents unique opportunities and challenges. For handheld print like direct mail, there are seemingly countless format options, including postcards, bifolds, trifolds, letters, booklets, catalogs, and so on, which allow for more creativity and design choices but also more potential poor decisions.
Unlike digital and broadcast, you have to account for such things as bleed, which is the surrounding area of your design that goes beyond the edges of your mailer, sign, or other print piece, which, when done wrong, can lead to trimming or distortion issues. You also have to ensure that your graphics and images are crisp and sharp, not low-quality jpegs or pngs, and that your images convert properly from RGB (for screens) to CMYK (for printers). Unprofessional design choices can result in miscues between the on-screen appearance and the printed one, which can lead to extra money and time wasted to get it right.
2. Missing Your Target
Because print involves printing costs and often mailing costs that digital and broadcast channels do not, it’s essential that you do not send your mailers to the wrong people or post your billboards in the wrong places. While in-depth audience research is critical to crafting any marketing campaign, it’s even more critical with print as mistargeting can come at a bigger price.
By knowing exactly who your target audience is, along with their wants, needs, and behaviors, you can know just how to tailor your message to them and exactly when and where to send or place that mailer, billboard, or magazine. Failing to do so often leads to uninspiring campaigns, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.
3. Using Inferior Materials & Technology
Unlike digital and broadcast channels, print marketing consists of physical materials that must be chosen carefully to produce an attractive, durable canvas. From paper and cardboard to vinyl and canvas, there is a wide range of mediums to choose from. Meanwhile, there are different choices and levels of quality within those categories, e.g. paper stock and its many weights, colors, finishes, and textures. Furthermore, there are different types and qualities of printing machines that can affect the final piece.
With all these choices, it’s important that you pick the right combination for the intended application. For instance, if it’s something that will be outside, it needs to be on material that can withstand moisture and sunlight. If it’s a mailer, you want the material and appearance to be sturdy and high-quality. Choosing the wrong material, stock, or printer can send out the wrong message and be distracting rather than enticing. Consequently, this can result in ineffective marketing campaigns that reflect poorly on your company’s reputation.
4. Neglecting Quality Control
Quality control measures are important in all your marketing and communications in order to appear professional and clearly get your message across. With print, not only do you have to proof the content in its digital form but you also have to proof the print before initiating a full run to make sure the transfer was accurate and it’s ready to go.
With digital, if a typo or two get by on your website or social post, you can easily and quickly make the appropriate changes, with little harm or foul. With print, any major mistakes that sneak into the final print are, well, final, unless you scrap it all and reprint, which can be extremely costly. You must make sure everything is error-free before finalizing the print.
5. No Clear CTAs
One of the main goals of marketing is to get your audience to take some sort of action, which means you must incorporate strong and clear calls to action (CTAs) in all your content. Though scannable QR codes do provide a virtual link between print and digital, consumers can’t “click” a link on mailers, billboards, and other print advertising to move forward through the sales funnel. This makes it even more important that your CTAs in print connect to your omni-channel campaign. Whether it’s to get them to visit your website or brick-and-mortar, call you by phone, or follow your social media pages, your print CTAs should be explicit, simple, and obvious in encouraging consumers to take action.
From mailers and billboards to brochures and signage, print is far from dead. But if you want to take advantage of the many benefits it still has to offer, you have to avoid these costliest print advertising mistakes. To explore the many benefits of print, read our earlier entry: how print advertising can reinvigorate your marketing strategy.
For help elevating your print campaigns, M:7 Agency is ready to assist you with everything from strategy and creative to the printing itself through M:7 Shop. Reach out to us today with your unique marketing needs and goals.