Print & Digital: Working Better Together

Thinking of trading in your print collateral for a suite of digital assets? Think again. A recent article by the ICEF Monitor offers some interesting insight on the benefits of supplementing your online marketing efforts with quality printed materials. 

Customers who received a printed catalog spent more meaningful time on the company’s website and purchased 28% more on average than customers who did not receive a catalog. And that held for every age category.

Keeping Up With Print

Those are some pretty big numbers for little ol’ print. Not to mention, a well-crafted piece of printed collateral goes a long way towards increasing customer engagement:

At student fairs or other events where institutional representatives can chat with students and their families, well-displayed print collateral is an invitation to stop, chat, and find out more.

People still like talking to people in real life and it’s nice to have an excuse to do so. Moreover, print collateral is in fact more convenient than the web for students attending a trade fair: they simply gather it as they go through the fair; they can’t gather websites that way.

Read the full article here: Integrating Print Collateral with Online Marketing

Why We Love This Article

It’s written by someone with no vested interest in commercial printing. We know, we know… when we talk about integrated marketing, most of the time our ‘print’ is showing. But take it from someone in a completely unrelated industry: print is not dead – in fact, it’s more alive than ever!

The appeal of using the internet to market your services is real, and with every smartphone purchase the internet becomes an increasingly more powerful and more accessible place to market yourself. But for long-lasting brand impressions, digital can’t stand alone. Even social media giant Coca-Cola has admitted that even with over 61 million fans on Facebook (more than any other brand), “we didn’t see any statistically significant relationship between our [social] buzz and our short-term sales.” 

Let us know what you think: in an increasingly digital world, how are you using printed collateral to advance your marketing efforts? Share with us online using the links below. 

-kh