Why Printed Flyers Will Always Be Effective Even In A Digital Age
The internet has brought with it a far greater scope for interaction with prospective and pre-existing clients than ever before. Online marketing dwarfs all previous potential for exposure and immediate global responses are now available at a click. You might be thinking that things like custom calendar printing and traditional printed flyers have had their day, but you’d be wrong – and here’s why.
Successful marketing, in whatever form you choose, makes your company stick out from the rest and targets potential interest effectively. The internet offers huge exposure but limits us to the capabilities of computer, tablet and phone screens, whereas offline marketing provides a near-infinite choice of attention-grabbing sizes, colours and textures, making us really only limited by budget, and can also be easily focused to certain target areas or groups. So whether it’s flyers or custom invitations, or anything in between, there are lots of options.
Bulk e-mails are fine if the sole objective is to get the word out to as many people (or rather their inboxes) as possible, but mass e-mailing is easily ignored and most of us have resorted to inbox filtering at some stage. Furthermore, with digital flyers you are relying in the first instance on nothing more than an attention-grabbing subject line, and the wonderful tactile and visual possibilities of a printed flyer are lost.
Bulk e-mails are, of course, extremely cheap, but printed materials have the potential to be personal. Many studies have shown a basic human inclination to appreciate and value the time and work that goes into creating something we can touch, fold and carry around with us (consider the continuing market in paperbacks despite the existence of Kindle) and our response to the printed medium is subsequently greater. Printing techniques are evolving all the time, and flyers remain relatively inexpensive to produce when compared to other mediums.
Yet it’s not really a case of competition – more affordable digital vs better attention-grabbing print – so much as their holistic use together for a successful campaign. Online interaction is often brought about by the printed medium with QR codes, URLs and social media details being potentially first seen offline, and as they can and do work in conjunction with each other it rarely makes sense to limit yourself to just one.
There is certainly a continuing place for traditional printed flyers in any marketing campaign although for best results, a combination of digital and offline campaigns is ideal. While it’s easy to forget about the printed medium in our digital era, its potential is always expanding, and certainly it should never be ignored.
