This is the age of digital marketing. If you want to get your business noticed, it is all about social media engagement, email outreach and boosting your site’s SEO, right? Well, not exactly.

For sure, those things are important, but anyone who thinks they have replaced printed media when it comes to creating a marketing campaign is making a big mistake. The thing about digital marketing is that it is huge, it is growing and it is relatively new, in as much as nobody had even heard of the term 30 years ago. But it has grown up alongside traditional marketing, and there it remains.

Printed media is as important as ever

People still read newspapers and magazines, they still receive mail through the post and they still pick up your marketing brochures at trade shows or when they visit your office. Do they do so as much as they did 30 years ago? Probably not. But even if printed media has half the outreach potential of digital, that is still a third of your target audience.

In addition, there are some things that printed marketing materials still do better than their online equivalents. So fire up the printer, order some new cartridges and toner from Printer Inks and let’s see what printed media can do to drive your business’s marketing campaign to new heights.

A constant reminder

Generation Z has been accused of many things and one of them is a goldfish-like attention span. Today’s consumers see online ads, banners and marketing campaigns all day every day, and they tend to filter them out without even knowing it. It’s not just the gen-z-ers, though. Research has shown that 80 percent of us have never clicked a banner ad in our lives. Now compare that to a magazine or even a leaflet. There it sits, staring at you. Even if you ignore it and look at something else, it is still there when you look up. Printed media presents a lasting impression that digital alternatives cannot replicate.

Better targeting

If you are placing an ad in a printed publication, you get to target a specific market of loyal readers. The problem with the world wide web for marketers lies in those first two words. Printed media is far more localised geographically, as well as demographically.

Reduced competition

Most web pages have an ad density of four per page. For printed media, this ratio is far lower – the average 50 page magazines, for example, contains 30 ads, or 0.6 per page. The equation is a simple one. Fewer ads per page means less competition for the reader’s attention and that means a better conversion rate.

A blended approach

Digital marketing is hugely important to every business, and is certainly something that you need to invest in. But it is only one part of the overall marketing mix, and should complement traditional printed media as part of an overall marketing strategy that hits your target demographic with a uniform and on-brand message across every format and platform