With the last few years having seen more and more businesses increasingly digitize their marketing operations, it’s easy to think that printed marketing materials like leaflets and flyers have surely had their day. However, your business could actually gain its best marketing results by combining print and digital efforts.
According to one statistic cited by SME News, 82% of people trust printed over online advertisements. Hence, adding a print component to your digital marketing through the following ways could help you to instill trust in your brand.
Include web links on your print materials
Before you start posting leaflets and flyers through your target customers’ letterboxes, you should make sure those print materials include your company’s social media handles and website address.
Of course, such details placed on your online ads would have the advantage of being clickable and thus easy to use. However, whereas people are often oblivious to online ads as a result of having becoming over-familiar with them, it’s harder for these people to ignore printed materials that have reached them through the post.
Place QR codes on your print materials
This is one trusty way you can overcome the problem of including web details the recipients can’t literally click. You could still include those details, but also put them next to a QR code with instructions to scan it – which people can these days do through using their smartphones – and consequently load the website.
It helps that, as this Business 2 Community article attests, QR codes afford you a generous rein of creativity and “can be printed onto practically anything”.
Create your own magazine to advertise online
One risk of resting too heavily on print marketing is that, often, it can look a little too obviously like, well, marketing. This doesn’t have to be the case if your brand creates its own magazine, though. In fact, various big-name brands, including Airbnb and CNET, have done exactly that.
You could more easily print your brand’s magazine yourself if you invest in a specialist printing machine from Duplo International. Then, you could get on with marketing that periodical online…
Use social media to promote print offerings
As previously mentioned, you can draw many people to your company’s social media pages by including the handles for those on print materials. However, you might not have realized just how effectively your brand’s social media presence can act as a springboard for launching print campaigns.
For example, as a new issue of your magazine arrives, you could publicize this news on social media and invite your followers there to subscribe for their copy.
Don’t forget to include CTAs on both your print and digital materials
What are CTAs? They are calls to action, and you probably already customarily include them in your digital marketing campaigns. However, printed marketing campaigns are often more passive in nature – leaving relatively untapped an opportunity to encourage readers to consume the brand’s digital content, too. In your magazine’s pages, encourage readers to also visit your website or social media pages.