You may think that physical marketing is on it's way out and is of no good to anyone anymore. However, there are several reasons that printed materials are in fact still worth thinking about for any business owner.
1. Exposure
How many times have you been sat in a coffee shop, waiting room or various forms of public transport and been reading the flyers or magazines that have been left there? They may have been left for a specific person or aimed at a specific audience but when there's nothing better to be doing mos people would at least give it a cursory glance. This is the beauty of printed advertising, it can be picked up and left in random places to be seen by random people, this may not appeal to an up market business who are looking for a more sophisticated clientele but the average business would be reminisce to turn their noses up so quickly.
2. Targeting
With the advances of technology, you can now directly target mail so much more effectively. A generic letter can seem much less generic through a simple mail merge. Insert the client's name, the products they are interested in, the date of their last visit to your premises and a discount code for the above-mentioned product and your generic letter now seems more personalised to this client. Yes, this can be done through email campaigns but isn't it nice to have a letter every now and again, to know that someone's gone to the effort of writing, printing and enveloping it?
3. Enforcing your brand identity
Branding should be something you can see, you can feel and you can connect with. You may not notice it but when you touch and feel something it gives it more credibility than something you have only seen on the internet. For example, if you had a website designer that only advertised online and another one who also handed out flyers and leaflets explaining the exact services they offered, the flyer would make them seem like a more legitimate business as they had money to spend on the flyers and then took the time to distribute them. So therefore you are more likely to go for the business with the printed materials.
4. Integration with technology
We've all seen QR codes in places, the little squares you scan with your phone to bring up a web page or voucher code. But has anyone thought about using them to gain more of a reach with their printed materials? Going back to the waiting room scenario mentioned in point one, imaging everyone scanned the flyer with their phone and everyone waiting had seen your website, wouldn't that be good? Unfortunately it does seem that QR codes are dying out, however this could mean that some other technology will step up to the mark and take it's place.
In conclusion, print marketing may seem old fashioned compared to some of the technology out in the World now, but don't rule it out completely. It's still relevant and still advancing in terms of what it can do.
