Advertising has taken a more digital turn in recent years, and as a result, print advertising has taken a back seat. However, more companies realise they don’t have to focus on one medium exclusively when designing a campaign and that reaching customers through omnichannel or multi-channel marketing often results in better engagement than utilising only one approach.
Incorporating print advertising in your next campaign can help drive customers’ perception of brand value and may help you reach a wider audience than just those potential customers who are online. But creating effective print ads that tie in with your digital marketing campaigns can be a challenge.
In this article, we offer advice on the best ways to use print advertising and how to incorporate it into your next digital campaign.
How can you create effective print ads?
1. Keep the branding consistent
When building a campaign across multiple mediums, it’s important to remember to keep branding consistent so that customers recognise all elements as one congruous whole that compliment each other. Ensuring that your brand and campaign is easily recognisable will ensure the next time a consumer is flipping through a magazine and sees your print ad, they will remember the unique, catchy ad they saw online and tie it all together easily. This creates awareness of the whole campaign story instead of just each part individually.
Unique features like using the brand’s identifying colours in a print ad, or similar design elements in the overall campaign, as well as incorporating the campaign hashtag both online and offline can help tie everything together.
2. Know your audience
This may seem obvious, but it can be the difference between a successful campaign and a flop. If you know your audience, what they want and where they are it’ll be easier to know how and where to target them.
Often, when people think about print, they think of magazines or newspapers, but it’s so much more than that. Print includes billboards, posters, and trade publications and weeklies. Doing your research will help you determine where to best target potential customers. Because even the best marketing campaign, perfectly targeted to its audience, won’t return any results if it isn’t being seen.
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3. Make your print ads interactive
Utilising omni-channel or cross-channel marketing doesn’t just mean spreading the campaign across various formats; each element also needs to link to the other. Using QR codes that link to dedicated campaign micro-sites, can encourage customer interaction, merging the print world with the digital one.
Discount codes provided on a print ad to be used online or in-store is another great way to ensure synchronicity.
4. Include an interactive call to action
Whether it’s directing customers to the brand’s website or telling them to go and check out their latest collection in a physical store, ensuring that your call to action draws them to another element of the campaign and forces them to interact with the brand differently is tantamount to creating a memorable brand experience.
Another great way to encourage customers to engage is to provide them with incentives such as a discount that can be redeemed on a different platform or the offer of a free gift on a print ad that can be claimed in-store etc.
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5. Only tell part of the story
As already mentioned, it’s important that all parts of a campaign, no matter the channel, tie together. But it’s also important not to reveal too much in the print campaign. By not giving away the whole story, you can tease your audience and leave them on tenterhooks with the goal of leaving them wanting to find out more. Which makes making the customer journey clear just as important.
Remember the seven exposures rule - the more your audience is exposed to your product or campaign, the more likely they are to make a purchase. So, driving them from your print ad to your website and so on is creating more impressions, which will hopefully eventually lead to a conversion.
6. Incorporate augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR)
Incorporating AR into your print campaign can be a great way to boost interaction and create a memorable experience. While AR and VR technology is still in its nascence, it’s evolving rapidly and has great potential to change the advertising and marketing landscape. AR/VR can help brands create personalised experiences, specifically tailored to each brand or client.
VR headsets, such as the Google Cardboard are relatively inexpensive and are foldable, which makes it easy to include as a freebie with the magazine that your ad is published in. With the pandemic still limiting social interaction to some extent, AR/VR, if incorporated correctly, can be a great way to replace in-person events.
Additionally, customers could use AR/VR to virtually visit the brand’s store or venue and get a sense of the products on offer and the type of atmosphere they can expect.
Why you should include print advertising in your next digital campaign
Print advertising is one of the oldest and most basic forms of mass communication. Although a lot of our lives have shifted online, incorporating the tangible world of print into your campaign has numerous benefits, including enforcing brand value and trust, telling a more in-depth story using more than one medium and encouraging interaction through different channels both online and offline.
The world of print is evolving and the print media you were exposed to a couple of years ago is a far cry from today’s print ads. This is enforced by the many new technologies and ways of encouraging customer interaction, as mentioned above. Printing technology itself, as well as graphic design has improved significantly as well, making for better imagery and more bold and eye-catching colour. So, the next time you’re developing a digital campaign, consider print as well.
If you’re looking for a way to fuse your digital marketing strategies with print advertising, then click here to get in touch with us, we’d love to help you.
