Whether you are the owner of a small real estate agency or a photographer, print marketing is one of the most important mediums to grow your brand awareness and bring in new customers, . You can read about a great restaurant online, but until you’re there, experience the atmosphere, smell the food, and start eating you won’t know whether it’s good or not. Reading about food and actually tasting it are two very different ways of experiencing the restaurant; one is just visual through a screen and the other is a physical experience. Print media is a more physical medium that is closer to the actual experience than just reading about it. It forces customers to physically connect with your brand and studies have shown that haptic (touch memory) can be the type of memory that resonates best in our minds.
Print marketing registers on a customer’s haptic memory to create brand awareness and bring in more customers. Even when digital marketing continues to grow, we often forget the cost effectiveness and impact that print marketing can have on people. If your company’s goal is to improve its digital presence, print marketing can actually give you a big boost. It’s cheap and now you can track the ROI directly of flyers, stickers, posters, or any type of media your business wants to distribute. Below are a few ways that you can use print to raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and create trust with customers.
1. Stickers
Do not underestimate the power of the sticker! Stickers get politicians elected. Also, stickers raise brand awareness. Stickers turn clients into advocates, and best of all they are cheap! They are simple and people will actually use them. Give them away at events or even with receipts to customers. If you have a great design and a loyal customer base, these customers become brand ambassadors for you. They’ll display them proudly on their cars, laptops, toolboxes, and wherever to show their brand loyalty. Think back to how apple gave away stickers with every laptop and iPod sold. Customers would proudly display these in their homes, offices, and even on their cars becoming free publicity for the company. Now you probably aren’t Apple (yet), but when you have a loyal customer base these clients can be your best weapon to grow your business.
2. Flyers
For any promotion or event, flyers are one of the first things that come to mind. Flyers are simple and offer a great ROI. Once you tailor your message, you just have to figure out the distribution strategy. Maybe it’s at a convention or a technology fair. The strength of flyers is that once you figure out where you want to hand them out, you have a huge amount of specific targeted customers. Flyers don’t always have to be focused on a sale or special you are offering. Think of them as an effective way to connect with a segmented group of potential customers. If you want to know how to create a great flyer, we break it down for you in this article.
3. Bulk Posters
Bulk posters can be the perfect tool for your business especially when you’re on a tight budget. Graphic designers are in high demand and one of the reasons is that a great designer is able to use this classic form of advertising to promote your company’s value effectively. Posters these days aren’t just about announcing events, they’re able to visually attract customers and businesses are able to get all the key information across in a small amount of space. Great posters are able to influence and really resonate with anyone who comes across them. Posters are used most to bring people into events, but don’t let that stop you from being creative.
Companies also use posters to transform space and connect with potential customers for increased brand awareness. Get Creative! Take a look at how NASA was able to connect with the public with this set of posters they released in 2015. Obviously they weren’t selling rockets to the public, but they were able to get huge amounts of traffic online and get people talking about them again. Here are some tips and guidelines to jumpstart your poster creativity and really add impact to your business through posters.
4. Letterhead
Adding a professional letterhead on any outgoing correspondence is a cost effective way of showing customers that your company wants their business. A simple high quality envelope and design on each letter you send out reminds customers of your attention to detail and how important their business is to you.
5. Business Cards
An absolutely essential tool for growth not just for your business but your personal brand as well. Business cards are an often overlooked medium that your employees will hand out at professional meetings and even in their personal lives. Most people do not just throw business cards away, they store them and will look at them in the future. With business cards, your entire team of employees are now brand ambassadors any time they meet someone new so be sure that they always have some available to hand out.
6. Calendars
A calendar is an opportunity to showcase your brand or products 365 days a year. A great way to ensure that your customers hang them up is to use specific content that is relevant to them or even content that they create. A great way to do this is crowdsourcing through a customer contest. Set a criteria and theme then ask clients to submit art and images that they feel are calendar-worthy. To make sure you’re getting quality entries, incentivize it and tell your customers that winning entries will get their contact information printed as well. This can also start relationships between your existing clients and you are remembered as the common link. Now you have companies that will be looking at your calendar year round. Don’t stop there. A calendar is also marketing tool that you can give away to segmented potential customers at events.
7. Bookmarks
A simple promotional tool that can go a long way with resonating in your customers daily lives. A bookmark is functional and something that people do not throw away. They put them in books and they’ll see your brand every time they open it. They might use them in business books or even take them home to use in their personal lives. Give them out at events or even include them in quarterly mails. Like stickers and calendars, a bookmark can be a great tool that a customer will physically see and use as an accessory in their daily lives.
8. Newsletters
A quarterly or bi-annual newsletter is a great way of informing your customers of new products and services. Most companies already send out digital newsletters, but how often do customers drop what they’re doing and read them? Clients open them during working hours and overlook them because they are working and prefer to read them later, then forget. A physical newsletter almost ensures that they will open and read it. Combine the physical newsletter with a promotional code to enter at your website and this way you can track the ROI on newsletter mailings and guarantee that they’ll be browsing around your website as well.
9. Catalogs
Customers will look over your catalog of products and services when they need it. Catalogs are still a great physical way of connecting because potential customers will rarely throw them out. Remember that touch memory is stronger than just reading about your company. Clients will continue to refer to them when they are looking to buy something.
10. Brochures
One of the quickest and most traditional ways to remind customers of what you have to offer. Don’t try to put absolutely all of your information into one brochure if it isn’t necessary. A client can have your general brochure and also a few others for specific services that you offer. Customers often organize and keep brochures around for future reference because they are easy to read and you may win more business just because of a physical outline of your business in the customer’s hands. Even as small businesses are becoming more digital, a physical brochure in a customer’s hands always outlines what you want the customer to know.
What About you?
Print marketing is one of the best ways to bring in customers and it’s still the cheapest. The most overlooked benefit is that print marketing creates more digital traffic and interaction between potential customers and your website. These are just a few ideas of what you can do with print. Do you have any other print marketing ideas or experiences?