Everything’s getting digitised these days. Magazines, newspapers, and radios are struggling to keep up with the versatility and diversity that the internet is offering to modern day audiences. Businesses that don’t have an online presence are being persuaded by experts to develop one. Because of the unbelievable potential of the internet, people’s viewpoints have overcompensated.
According to many people, the fact that the online world is good leads directly to the automatic deduction that the offline world must be bad. Owing to this slight shift in perception, businesses have been focusing more on modern methods of marketing and losing out on the conventional marketing front. However, there some really solid benefits that businesses can leverage by using printed advertisements. What are these benefits? Consider the following.
Printed Advertisements Gain More Traction
We’ve already established that every Tom, Dick, Harry and their aunties are looking to benefit from digital marketing today. This is an on-going trend that is prevalent everywhere, regardless of which market segment, demographic, or geographical location you consider. None of them ever question whether they could get the same kind of impact with printed advertisements or not.
Have you heard of a concept known as banner blindness? Regular visitors to a webpage have this tendency to internalise the placement of ads on that page. The internalisation is so smooth and subtle that they start overlooking that space every time they visit that webpage. There have been eye tracking studies that have proven the phenomenon of banner blindness.
This isn’t a problem that will ever afflict printed advertisements because printed advertisements almost always require the viewer to be active. Even something as simple as picking up a business card or flyer involves the viewer.
Another angle those aunties don’t consider is that if everyone is moving towards digital marketing, won’t competition in conventional marketing methods like printed advertisements be lower? If you were to use printed advertisements in your neighbourhood or city, you are sure to face much less competition because everyone from every corner of the world wouldn’t be able to compete with you.
The combined effect of all this is just that printed advertisements have the potential to gain more traction than digital marketing solutions.
Credibility of Businesses Using Printed Advertisements Is Higher
Digital marketing is scalable. If an online business owner doesn’t have a lot of money, he can still create an extremely small marketing campaign.
This is one of the prime reasons why customers and clients have stopped taking digital advertisements seriously.
In contrast, printed advertisements based on conventional marketing techniques are still highly respected purely because they’ve been around for a long time.
Moreover, printed advertisements are usually implemented by large corporations as a part of even larger marketing campaigns. At the very least, printed advertisements are taken more seriously by viewers than digital advertisements.
This means that if a business is undertaking a printed advertisements campaign then it would be giving its own credibility a boost.
Printed Advertisements Offer More Permanence
One of the biggest differences between printed advertisements and digital advertisements is that one is tangible while the other is not. Printed advertisements are physical in nature which automatically means that they offer the kind of permanence that the virtual digital advertisements cannot.
This permanence is widely accepted in marketing circles as one of the strengths to strive for in any marketing campaign. Permanence means that even if your flyer survives two to three days, it may be seen by more people during that time in addition to the individual it was handed to. In other words, every flyer handed to an individual reaches his family and has the potential to reach his friends and neighbours.
The same is not true with digital advertisements which are targeted at specific individuals more and more often. So, an individual visiting a website will see one banner while another will see another. Still, permanence is respected in the digital world as well. The best digital marketing campaigns are those that go viral. A viral video achieves permanence by staying in circulation as long as possible.
While remaining in circulation is crucial for digital advertisements to gain permanence, printed advertisements gain permanence by just sitting there and subliminally affecting the people in the room.
Printed Advertisements Create Greater Engagement, Recall, and Retention
Permanence is very crucial in the marketing world because it directly leads to other vital elements such as engagement, recall, and retention. None of these things are possible if the advertisement doesn’t stay around long enough to have an impact.
For instance, if printed advertisements remain in one room for an extended period of time, people passing through that room may view them. The more people pass through the room, the more exposure that advertisement gets. Similarly, if an individual passes through the room again and again, the message in the advertisement gains a foothold in his subconscious.
This regular interaction with the printed advertisements is known as engagement. Engaging the audience is one of the things that expert marketers are always striving for and printed advertisements can achieve them almost effortlessly.
Recall and retention are dependent on permanence and engagement both. Greater permanence promotes engagement which, in turn, improves brand or product recall. If an individual sees a flyer for plumbing service again and again, then the next time he needs that service, he may remember the company’s brand or name.
Printed Advertisements Are More Versatile and Flexible
Everyone thinks that digital advertisements are flexible. Are they right? They are in one way but they also aren’t in another way. You have multiple advertising options in the digital world. However, within those options, you’ll find yourself severely limited.
Google ads or Facebook ads are placed in just certain locations and in certain sizes. Those are your options and you can’t customise them outside of the options given to you. Banners can only be so large in the digital world because you can’t cover a whole page with them.
All these are real restrictions that can influence how creative you can be. These restrictions, however, don’t exist when it comes to printed advertisements. With printed advertisements, the world is your playground and there are literally no limitations imposed on you.
You can innovate and be as creative as you want to be with printed advertisements. You have endless options with regard to customising and personalising printed advertisements.
Whether your business stands out from the crowd or not defines how successful your advertising campaign will be. Since innovation and creativity will help you stand out, printed advertisements turn out to be much more effective.
The best part about printed advertisements is that implementing them will not cost you too much. What’s more is that you can handle them internally without the need to hire experts or specialists. In fact, if you own a decent enough printer, you can even print your own advertisements.
Printing internally with your own printer will cost you less money than having the advertisements printed by an external agency. What this will do is improve the ratio between cost and returns.
This ratio can be seen as the value of a marketing effort i.e. how much money is required to have a certain impact. With internally printed advertisements you don’t need much money but the impact of your marketing campaign will remain highly effective.
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