Print Marketing May Still be a Great Choice

As more and more folks are marketing online, as a small business, reviewing your strategy and adding or going back to print marketing could be the edge you need. With small business budgets moving to online spending, which are very effective, for many businesses, there are opportunities to reach your target audience and stand out.

Top 5 things to consider for print marketing:

1. Do you know your target market for print marketing?

Sending out “blanket” advertising from a list is not always the best approach with print marketing. First, you should know exactly who your target market is. Are they male? Female? Make 100,000+ per year? Live within 5 miles? These are very important data points that should be considered before selecting or buying your list. You should also consider your services or product. For instance, you may not be willing to drive 5 extra miles for something that you frequent, such as a restaurant.

However, you may be willing to drive 15 miles or more for a specialist or someone you only see once a year. Another example. If your product is a luxury item that costs a considerable amount of money, you want to target those individuals or families that can afford your product. Sending to someone who can’t afford it simply a waste of your marketing dollars.

Take the time to understand your market or hire professionals who can help you with that part of your business. Once you have the right demographic (folks that are most likely to respond to your offer), then it is time to figure out how to find them. Buying lists is a good solution and can be easy to do. Some advice? Most marketing companies get a discount, so contact your marketing company and ask them to obtain your lists. Odds are you would pay the same amount, but they are the experts and do this every week, so they have insights into what data you should be looking for.

They get to keep the “discount” they receive and that is often the only payment they require. If you do want to manage this yourself, just be sure you are targeting your exact market, with as many qualifiers as you need, such as male, 25-50, yearly income of $125,00 – 200,000 that lives in desired zip code. Yup, the list will cost more but your rate of reply will be higher, driving those costs down and delivering a great ROI (return on your print marketing investment).

2. Is your advertisement / message the right message and worded correctly?

Now you know who to send your print marketing campaigns to, let’s talk about what to send. Let’s face it, you hate to be sold anything. Rather, you want to make an educated decision to purchase and in the end, all you really want to know is what’s in it for me? Your customer is no different. And how you deliver that message in print marketing is vastly important to the success of your print marketing campaign.

When writing your copy for your print marketing piece, keep this mantra in mind. In the end, what does this do in terms of benefits to my client, instead of what does my product or service offer.

3. Is it the right time to send that message?

Would you make a decision the week before Christmas? How about the week before an election? Timing is important in print marketing. Don’t send your print marketing pieces when it will arrive at an inopportune time. Even if your potential customer were interested, they are likely to stash it away “for later.” And we all know what happens to later. In our excitement to get those phone ringing, we tend to want to get it out there as quickly as possible. Think about the best time that someone is likely to make a decision in your market and select your riming wisely.

4. How many print marketing mailings should you send?

In our experiences, repetition is key in print marketing. For example, some of our dental clients send out new resident postcards to a list of potential customers that have just moved into the area. We send out a series of cards and track them. We even changed up the order and time after time, the 3rd , 4th or 5th postcard received the best results. Why? Repetition.

The same rings true of print advertising in newspaper or magazines. The more times someone sees your materials or name, the more likely they are to select you when the time is right. For our example, we cannot know when the last time someone visited their dentist. Perhaps they just had before they moved. So we would send out 5 mailings over a 12-month period to increase the chances of that potential customer selecting our client.

Click here to read a great article on Direct Mail Marketing from our friends at FitSmallBusiness.com

5. What call to action works best with print marketing?

Well, many of them! Of course, it depends on the market, service or product when it comes to print marketing. But hands down, our testing has shown that something of value with little “fine print” works best. For instance, $20 free gift card sounds great, especially when you can use it on something as low as a $20 product! However, take the same $20 and add a condition – such as $20 gift card with minimum of $50 purchase.

That psychologically is a vastly different offer to many people. In many cases, the customer would have spent the $50 anyway or more, but we found a greater response rate and ultimately, more return on the marketing investment keeping the “fine print and conditions” to a minimum

To summarize, the main objective for your print marketing campaign is to make a well informed, precise plan that you can tweak and adjust to get the most out of your marketing budget.