In the age of digital media, it’s often a misconception that all business marketing needs to be online and there’s no need to spend money on print advertising these days. However, simply just having an online presence, social media profile and an email marketing system won’t necessarily mean that you’ll achieve your business goals.
A good marketing strategy will involve many different campaigns over many different mediums to fully engage with the target customer.
It’s said that a customer has to see your brand 19 times before they’re ready to purchase from you, so it’s important that your business uses a variety of mediums to get your message out there.
Using print is one medium, in particular, that is often overlooked as we delve further into online technology. But print is still an important part of the marketing mix and shouldn’t be ignored.
There are many different ways you can use print in your business and here we outline some of them:
- Local Magazines
If your business is local, then a regular advert in a local magazine can be really cost-effective. People read magazines that are local to them and often pick them up to look for a local company or to know what’s going on in their community.
- Van Wraps
Wrapping your work van is a fantastic way to advertise your company to your target market. You can get your marketing message out there for everyone to see when you’re driving to and from existing clients.
- Letterheads, brochures, business cards
Even with the digital age taking over, customers do still expect to see physical letters, brochures and business cards in most industries. A salesperson pitching up without a brochure or business card, doesn’t give a great impression of the company they’re representing!
- Exhibition artwork
Chances are that your business will need to attend some industry-specific exhibitions as part of your marketing mix, so it’s important that your expo stand looks fantastic enough for people to want to come onto it.
There are many other reasons why we should be using print as part of our marketing strategy. Ignore it at your peril, we say!!
Some businesses have opted for email campaigns over the use of printed marketing material. We believe you should be using both mediums! Let’s face it, email marketing is only really successful if you have a huge email customer and prospect list. Why? Because the average open rate of an email is between 12-25%. Now, that sounds quite reasonable really, but remember that this is only an ‘open rate’, not a ‘click through’ rate.
Chances are that your email is opened and deleted immediately, but will still register in your CRM system as an ‘open’. The actual click-through rate of a typical email campaign is somewhere nearer to 2-5%. So now we have a prospect that’s actually clicked on the link in your email to find out more – whether it be your website, landing page or Facebook page, they’ve clicked through to it. But that’s not to say they’re actually going to do anything more than taking a quick peek and leave again!
So, you can see that email campaigns work only when you’ve built up a huge prospect list. As an example, if you take an email list of 100 prospects, the most you could ask for is around 17 people opened your email and 2 people clicked through to your advert. However, if you had 100,000 prospects on your list, email campaigns would give a better return because the numbers are bigger to work with!
So, in conclusion, a businesses’ marketing strategy should include a mix of both print and digital disciplines to get the best return possible from their marketing budget.
We are Link Directories – Gloucester’s leading local independent directory. If you want any more information regarding what we do and how we help local businesses and the community, take a look at our website www.thelinkdirectories.co.uk, or call us on 01452 621 496.
