Brands today focus heavily on digital outlets, and rightfully so. The vast majority of the modern audience spends their time exploring a wide array of social media platforms, whereas we all communicate online most of the time. Chances are, we’ll check the location of a restaurant online before we make the reservation (also online), and that we’ll Google pretty much any brand before we trust them with our money. However, in the sea of digital channels that have grown in popularity over the years, print marketing has surprisingly retained its relevance.
Why? Because it now has a chance to genuinely stand out and become the key way to personalize and reach out to each individual customer. Print media certainly hasn’t become obsolete, on the contrary, it’s a chance to revive our marketing and give it a new level of significance. In 2020, print will once again become a vital segment of entire marketing campaigns, and you should certainly find yourself exploring these options to expand your own market reach.
Sustainability front and center
Print has often been “attacked” for its lack of effort to achieve a lower carbon footprint, not to mention deforestation and other issues of wastefulness. This year, and in the years to come, print will gain a greener look with the help of advanced tech solutions, smarter approach to recycling paper, and more sustainable ink practices for those who regularly use print outlets to promote their business. These are considered just the beginning of what print needs to achieve in the future, but it’s a great start for any marketer who wishes to add a sustainable edge to their initiatives.
That said, you can consider using recycled paper for your efforts, which means you should rethink your print partnerships to find a new, sustainable supplier. Moreover, you can look into soy-based ink to replace your standard petroleum-based substance which is known to be damaging to the environment.
Brand consistency for better engagement
Too many companies tend to get overly excited about their print and they end up losing their brand voice when crafting a product catalog for their potential partner vendors or flyers for their networking event. In 2020, a greater focus will be on brand consistency through print media, so experts including Infostarters provide print design revolving around the brand’s key voice and visuals.
This translates to using the same color palette, the same fonts, the same tone of voice, and the same, recognizable illustrations that follow your brand in the digital realm. Consistency in print and digital allows for greater brand recognition, memorability, and awareness, all of which becomes stronger when your print outlets reflect the same identity as your digital presence.
Minimalism in the spotlight
Branded design might be the focus of print in 2020, but it’s sharing its spotlight with the idea of minimalism. This is relevant simply because people will often check their mail on the go and they have little time or patience for too much information, clutter, and data, even if it’s visually appealing. That said, they’ll likely focus on flyers and other materials that offer more through less: with simple illustrations, less written content, and to-the-point guidelines.
Mixing print and digital outlets
The best way to maximize each of these opposites is to treat them as complementary strategies to one another because their greatest power indeed lies in unifying them into a single strategy. Simply put: you can add QR codes to your flyers and brochures to send your customers to specific landing pages, you can embed social buttons to inspire more people to follow your brand on these profiles, and you can add discount codes that can only be applied in your online store.
The same can be done with your digital stores: you can empower customers to collect and pick up print materials in order to find the right coupon.
Customer content in print media
Sometimes, customers just don’t have the patience or the time to scroll through what you firmly believe is an impressive collection of customer testimonials. They’ll leave their purchase for a later date, or they’ll forget all about their idea to buy your product in the first place. Based on the data you have on each customer, you can get a sense of what kind of reviews they’ll find to be most impressive: hand-pick them, print them, and send them straight to their doorstep.
A single review might be all it takes to inspire your customer to go back to their shopping cart, or to remind them why they should try out your brand in the first place. This is a very unique way to personalize your print content and to ensure that you can truly impress each reader with your reviews.
Much like all other segments of marketing, print is not falling behind in innovation and evolution to embrace what customers deem worthy and to help brands rise to greater prominence. Diversity in every sense, a greener approach, and a more personalized way to reach out are becoming key endeavors in print, which gives you so much to work with and further strengthen your 2020 marketing campaigns.
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