Marketing in the Digital Age comes with a lot of perks. The dynamic appeal of social media, the low cost of email campaigns, and the sheer data on targeted audiences and response rates make it a golden time to widen your reach and get your message out to the world.

But in this article, Freedom Creative Solutions going to share a secret with you.
Printed Marketing will never die.

What’s wrong with digital marketing?

Digital Marketing is big right now because of how technology has changed our lives. We now get most of our information from the screen, so we may as well get most of our ads there as well. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But like anything else, there are advantages and disadvantages to digital marketing. Most prominent among these disadvantages are over-saturation and credibility. As someone reading this article online, you already know what we’re talking about. When you visit most websites, ads line the sides of the screen, play ahead of videos, and sometimes pop up right over the content you’re trying to read.

Ask yourself: what did the last ad you saw actually say?

If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. There are simply so many ads, each one louder and more colorful and more invasive than the last, that the online audience is tuning them out. It doesn’t mean they never work, obviously. It just means the response rate on them is pretty low.

Add to that an online credibility crisis. Scams, false advertising, viruses… and dare I add, Fake News? It’s everywhere. It’s hard to know who or what to trust online, simply because online anonymity makes it so easy to lie. And that makes a deal that’s “too good to be true” seem like an easy-to-spot con game.

So why printed media, then?

Again, there are disadvantages in printed marketing, not the least of which being that you won’t have the same reach as digital marketing. Material costs, shipping, and sheer practicality means you won’t have quite as wide a net to cast.

The main advantage, though, is that you connect with your audience more deeply. And that leads to higher responses and more conversions.

A study by TrueImpact, a Canadian Neuromarketing Firm, discovered that between direct mail and email, their audience was able to recall brands from a postcard more often. (75% with direct mail, 44% with digital media.) Another study by Temple University noted that paper media activated what’s known as the ventral striatum, the part of the brain that science believes controls desire, decision making and reward-related behavior. You can read about both of those studies and more at this link.

This may sound like gobbly gook, but it all boils down to the fact that people, on a subconscious level, enjoy the tactile sensation of holding paper in their hands. Even in today’s digital smorgasbord of stimulus and information, people still connect more reliably with a letter or postcard they receive in the mail than with an email or banner ad.

Even ads people discard have an advantage when printed. If you get an email you don’t want to read, two or three clicks is all it takes to not only delete the email, but to permanently add those emails into a spam filter. With a postcard, even if you don’t want it, it still takes slightly more effort to get rid of. This means longer exposure to the message, and an increased likelihood that the customer won’t try to get off the mailing list. And that increases the odds of getting repeat exposure to the same message.

What do I do with that?

Well, as a composite Print Shop and Digital Marketing Firm, our advice is to learn your way around every tool in your kit. A strong presence on Facebook and a good Email Marketing Campaign can help you immensely. But, so can postcard mailings with targeted mailing lists. If you’ve got a brick and mortar location, well-designed storefront displays can definitely bring you business. It all depends on your business and how you build your strategy.

If you want some help, Freedom Creative Solutions has some tricks to maximize both your digital and printed marketing strategies, and we’d be happy to share them with you. But we’ll tell you here: even in this high-speed digital age, printed media will never stop being valuable.