Understanding the Role of Print in Modern Marketing
Print providers and marketers have always had a natural alliance. The role of the marketer is to communicate; print is one of the world’s oldest communication tools. Marketers need printers and vice versa. But this relationship has been altered by the rise of digital media. How much does digital marketing affect the printer/marketer alliance? Do marketers still need print?
The evidence suggests they do. The authenticity, physicality, and flexibility of print ensure that it won’t be leaving the marketer’s toolbox any time soon. Print producers who understand how marketers use print today will be better at selling print. Let’s take a close look at the role of print in modern marketing.
How Much Print Do Marketers Use?
It’s undeniable that digital marketing has made an impact on how marketers reach their audiences. But there is ample evidence to suggest that digital marketing is supplementing traditional marketing channels, not replacing them.
Print advertising spend in the U.S. has only dropped slightly in the past several years, according to Statista. Projections say this will stabilize at about $24 billion per year past 2021.1 Marketers aren’t abandoning print. They are adapting to modern realities by creating multi- and omni-channel marketing campaigns that synthesize print and digital marketing into one cohesive strategy.
Fittingly, a big factor in how print has remained highly relevant to marketers is digital printing. The flourishing of digital printing has opened up new possibilities for marketers and thus given printers plenty of work to do. This is due to the small, targeted, quick turnaround runs that digital printing uniquely makes possible. Personalization is taking over and marketing materials can now be made more specialized and ordered more frequently, with less time to produce and deliver.
Why Do Marketers Love Print?
Print advertising and marketing have psychological and practical qualities that set them apart from their digital equivalents. These differences translate into significant and measurable results when employed by marketers.
Let’s look at direct mail as an example, one of the most commonly employed forms of print marketing today.
Marketers love print because it delivers a level of authenticity, tangibility, and memorability that can’t be matched by digital means of communication. A brochure, a flyer, a business card, they all have the advantage of being physical objects. These objects often remain in the office or home where they land sometimes for weeks or months. And psychology studies show that communication delivered with print is received and remembered to a greater degree than digital.
This is partially due to the way our memory is linked to our senses. All digital media uses just one or two senses, sight and hearing. Printed goods have weight and texture and can be touched, meaning they tap into our haptic (touch) memory.
Similarly to the physical weight of printed material, people also tend to lend more metaphorical weight to things they can touch and feel. This is why magazines and newspapers remain relevant today. It feels more legitimate and authoritative to interact with printed media rather than communication on a screen displayed with 1s and 0s.
Targeted direct mail has a 4.4% response rate. Email marketing has a response rate of 0.12%.3 This gap exists even though its often easier to act on an email than physical mail. So, simply put, marketers love print because print works.
What Kind of Marketing Materials Work?
To get a better grasp of exactly how modern marketers use print, let’s breakdown the types of print collateral found in many marketing strategies today. Marketers use physical marketing collateral for at least four distinct purposes: establishing brand identity, advertising products and services, educating consumers, and encouraging brand loyalty.
Examples of Each
Brand Identity: letterheads, stationary, business cards
Educational: brochures, flyers, booklets, maps
Advertising: banners, menus, yard signs, table tents
Brand Loyalty: stickers, hats*, pens*, loyalty cards
Marketing collateral comes in many forms. The point of listing all of these common marketing materials out is to show how all of these simple products can come together to form a larger marketing web. Combine all of this with other marketing channels like digital and broadcast media and you’ve got a marketing strategy that’s covering every base.
*While hats and pens are not printed, they are often found in the product listings of commercial printers with large enterprise customers. Any commercial printer who wants to be a competitive choice for large brands needs to be a complete marketing asset producer. This is not just possible, but simple to do with a modern web to print solution.
How Has Print Marketing Changed?
The best marketing campaigns use a multi-channel approach. Integrating digital marketing with print marketing has proven itself as a trusted method for optimizing the power of both. At the most basic level, this looks like making sure messaging and branding is consistent across all channels. That way, customers have their choice of how they want to interact and what medium they prefer.
Taking it to the next level, marketers can use technology to link their offline and online marketing. QR codes are an example of this. These universally-applicable barcodes make it possible to link any printed material to any digital destination with ease. Imagine a flyer or sticker that leads a curious potential customer to a curated landing page or coupon code. That can be a powerful way to immediately get someone’s attention on two mediums.
Of course, as we touched on in the first section, digital printing has absolutely transformed print marketing. Just-in-time fulfillment, highly targeted small runs, and the proliferation of variable data printing all have huge implications for how marketers can adopt print into their marketing strategy. Knowing a producer can get custom flyers to a tradeshow a week in advance gives marketers a lot more flexibility and freedom to utilize print to its fullest extent.
Web to print platforms have had a big impact as well. Marketers can now have 24/7 access to their entire marketing asset catalog, instantly updatable, instantly orderable, from their laptop, tablet, or phone. This increase in accessibility and ease of ordering reduces a lot of friction. It combines the best of both worlds, the persuasive power of print with the effortlessness of digital.
New technology and advancements in the print industry make print a valuable resource for marketers, especially when combined with digital marketing, creating campaigns that are greater than the sum of their parts. Because of this, printers and marketers continue to grow alongside one another as close allies.
