Nowadays, it is natural to think about digital alone when someone says marketing. It might be typical for print marketing to slip out of your mind. But, if print marketing is left out of the media mix, you might run into the risk of creating an incomplete, inconsistent, inefficient, and imbalanced marketing strategy.

Science (and Statistics) Say Print is NOT Dying

Without taking away the reach, cost-effectiveness, and measurement benefits of digital, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that print marketing has its perks and benefits. Several studies have shown that printed material is more engaging compared to a website that could be scanned in a few seconds. It is easy to form a quick judgment and delete a marketing emailer from your inbox v/s a flyer or brochure that could keep floating in your home for many months. How many times have you preferred to print out an ebook or a PDF, solely for ease of readability?

Even today, so many professors in university tell their students to take written notes v/s digital because people remember what they read on paper far better than anything they read on the screen. When people consume content on digital screens, they’re using one type of sensory organ, and then if they receive the same message printed on paper, a second sensory channel is activated.

So, apart from several statistics that reinstate our confidence in print marketing, there is also this science behind human psychology and behavior that pushes marketers to continue to take print marketing seriously.

Aligning Digital and Print

To reap optimum benefits, it is essential to factor in print as a part of your campaign right from the go. Also, be aware that digital and print are not competing, instead they are complementary channels set up to enhance the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

Our top three tips to help you achieve maximum alignment between digital and print campaigns would be:

1. Aim for brand governance: adhere to your style guide, logo placement, colors, and font family, stay consistent with the tone and messaging.
2. Align the digital and print goals: try to keep a consistent call-to-action or response you’d like to elicit from both the media
3. Attract online traffic through print: a great way to enhance print marketing efficiency and measure its impact is to drive traffic to your online site using print coupons, discount codes, and promotional offers.

Personalization in Print Marketing

Personalization works. It gets one’s attention. Nowadays, with advanced technologies like a Creative Management Platform, it is easy to adapt, localize, and customize your marketing campaign across media – print, digital, and video. Variable Data Printing or VDP is a method that helps you do more with less. It uses a software to automatically change the output of your printing press to personalize each piece with unique information picked up from something as simple as an excel spreadsheet. Our CMP uses VDP technology to help brands create personalized print material at scale.

Apart from text, our system can also accept graphics, images, and the entire block of text as a variable. Since the CMP is built to cater to all media – print, web, and video, it makes it seamless for brands to align their online and offline goals and messages. With in-built workflow management features, teams from across departments, digital and print, can collaborate on the platform easily. The system works on the principle of one-to-many, allowing brands to adapt, localize, and personalize their marketing campaigns effectively.

One can customize or personalize anything ranging from stickers, flyers, brochures, postcards, coupons with barcodes, proposals, letterheads and visiting cards. We also provide language translation capability that can be built into the system. From a family of creatives, produce multiple sizes and variations in minutes to meet your campaign requirements.

Below are some examples of complementary print and digital marketing material that help enhance the effectiveness of a campaign:

1. A fruit juice brand could use a CMP to produce multiple print labels of 3 different flavors using VDP technology.

2. A marketing agency could easily use a CMP to produce multiple variants of business cards for its employees.

3. A fashion label could use a CMP to produce multiple discount coupon ads for different products, to circulate in all store locations.

With Mediawide’s CMP, you easily create, customize, and distribute your creative assets and ensure your brand is always on point across all media.