Running a small business can feel like a never-ending uphill climb.
From navigating market competition with limited resources to building your products the right way, there’s a lot that small business owners need to balance.
This pressure becomes even worse when you have to make sense of the ambiguity inherent to the business world.
There’s so much advice and speculation out there that sticking to your gut becomes almost impossible at times.
The drama surrounding the supposed death of print design is a great example of the same.
Recently, plenty of digital marketing zealots have announced the redundancy of print design and made flamboyant claims about the ever-encompassing superiority of digital mediums.
Granted that digital tools are essential to business growth in today’s day and age, they are not the be-all and end-all solutions that extremists make them out to be.
Print design is still relevant and will continue to be so in the future.
So, it’s quite useful for business owners to know print marketing strategies that are effective as well as economical.
But, before we explore such strategies some other day, let’s discuss four outcomes that print design helps you achieve.
Print Design Improves Trust
As a small business, running lean is often touted as the mantra for rapid success.
But, when taken to the extreme, this principle can render brands stale and uninspiring.
After all, there’s a limit to how many corners you can cut without crashing headfirst into the wall of mediocrity.
For instance, think about how several digital marketing campaigns look and feel the same, often recycling ubiquitous visual assets and buzzword-filled ad copy.
In such a landscape, utilizing print marketing is an act of defiance that shows your intent to go the extra mile for your customers.
It shows that you’re willing to earn customer trust by extending goodwill outside the realm of screens, mouse clicks, and finger taps.
In short, print design exposes customers to a more personal interaction than digital mediums.
Resultantly, it breeds greater trust.
Print Design Helps You Stand Out
Digital advertising mediums have an unprecedented ability to market products & services at scale.
After all, experts claim that the average person is exposed to 6000-10000 ads in a single day.
However, exposing customers to such a heavy frequency of digital ads is not a perfect solution.
Apart from ethical concerns, online ads also build a sense of over-familiarity with being advertised.
So, companies now contest with a much greater pressure to infuse creativity into their digital marketing efforts.
But, despite so many digital marketing campaigns resulting in epic failure, the dialogue online rarely addresses these misgivings.
In fact, 59% of B2B marketers can’t even put a finger on what content marketing success looks like.
Unaware of these nuances, small business owners give in to the hype surrounding digital advertising mediums and start viewing them with rose-colored glasses.
Now, we’re not saying that digital ads have not revolutionized the face of marketing. We’re merely trying to address that they’re not immune to failure.
Moreover, we’re trying to shed light on the fact that digital has not overtaken print. If anything, the former has elevated the sense of luxury associated with the latter.
That’s why supplementing your digital marketing efforts with print ads can help you stand out.
Instead of being yet another brand going bullish on online ads, you can choose to take a more balanced approach and do both.
Print Design Crafts Intimate Customer Experiences
We love the cost-effectiveness and reach of digital ads as much as the advertiser next door.
However, we’re also cognizant of the barrier that exists between the physical and the digital world.
Well, with developments in AR and VR, this distinction may cease to exist soon. But, as of now, its factuality is undeniable.
Under these circumstances, print design makes for some pretty intimate customer-brand interactions.
For starters, customers experience print ads with a sense of tactility. Unlike ads experienced on screens, print ads can be touched and held.
They can be stored for longer durations of time, and age like people do.
So, in this case, the immortality of digital mediums (arguably one of their greatest strengths) becomes an impediment.
Print Design makes Digital Better
At the end of the day, design thinking is all about solving problems using design.
So, no wonder modern designers have now rendered the rivalry between print and digital mediums futile.
Thanks to the emergence of integrated print-digital interactions, small business owners no longer need to worry about which medium to marry, and which to reject.
Let’s consider an example of how such solutions work.
When launching a new digital product, brands usually leverage social media, PPC, and email marketing to direct potential customers to a landing page.
However, despite the results that such a strategy brings, brands can take an alternative approach (or rather supplement these tactics with one more).
On top of emails, brands can also use direct mail (4-9x more effective than email) to guide customers through different stages of a campaign.
In the direct mail stage of the campaign, brands can use subliminal imagery (that requires very little cognitive effort) to grab attention.
From thereon, they can use QR codes to take customers to persuasive, detail-oriented landing pages.
The possibilities here are endless, giving brands the ability to combine the trust, uniqueness, and intimacy of print design with the scale of digital mediums.
CONCLUSION
Print design is not an obsolete marketing tool that only purists use.
It is a pristine design tradition that not only has a rich history but also a promising future.
Thus, the four outcomes we’ve detailed above don’t form an exhaustive list.
They’re just a starting point to convince you to start reaping the rewards that print design has to offer.
Now, we understand that doing so will be much easier when you have some print design expertise to rely on.
So, allow Creaa Designs to extend a helping hand, and ensure that your small business harnesses the true power of print marketing.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
