Why Commercial Printing Still Matters in the Internet Age

How many advertisements have you seen today while scrolling through the Internet? Whether you are on Facebook, YouTube, or a simple Google search, you’ve probably seen dozens if not hundreds of advertisements.

But what can you say about those advertisements? Do you even remember which ones you’ve seen?

These days, digital advertisements are a dime a dozen. You see them everywhere, constantly, and they tend to only be effective if you want or need the product or service they advertise immediately. Otherwise, they disappear into the online ether and barely make an impact on your mind.

That’s why printing physical media is still so effective for business marketing efforts. Allowing your customers to see and hold something your business has created simply has more impact on their minds than a digital advertisement. This is not to say that digital marketing is a poor strategy – quite the contrary, really. So today, let’s discuss why a marriage of both printed marketing materials and digital marketing materials is the ideal solution for your business’s advertising strategies.

Disadvantages of Digital Marketing

• Constant competition. If you want to create an advertisement through Google Ads, you’ll be competing with businesses from across the country and the globe for space on each web page or app you appear on. This also means that prices will constantly vary based on demand – even on websites, advertising spaces can be pretty small, and getting yours up in the right spot can be pretty expensive.
• Ephemerality. Many websites are structured in such a way that by simply refreshing a page, all the advertisements on that page disappear and are replaced with new ones. This means that while your carefully crafted advertisement may show up for a few minutes, your potential customers might not be able to find it again to let the message truly sink in.
• Over-saturation. As we mentioned before, there are just too many advertisements online for yours to ever really stick out. Even if a potential customer is looking for exactly what your business offers, they may find dozens of ads for those services. The Internet is a pretty busy place, after all.
• Scams and misleading content. You know to be wary of what you see online, and so do your potential customers. Sometimes, they won’t even look at a digital ad because they’ve learned not to trust anything they see online.

Why You Should Combine Digital Marketing and Commercial Print Marketing

Time and time again, research has shown that commercial print advertising creates a longer lasting impression in the minds of potential customers. Simply put, people just trust print ads more when deciding on their purchases.

However, digital strategies like email marketing, social media marketing, video creation, Google My Business, and more are definitely capable of showing tremendous ROI – as long as you handle them correctly.

That’s why for you to get the most bang for your marketing buck, it’s best to have a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B. Finding the right balance is up to you, but your ultimate takeaway from this post should be that the future is not entirely digital. Print marketing isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

For more discussions like these, check out the Linemark blog each week!