Branding Information

By Carla San Gaspar

If you think availing of the services of a printing company is out of your budget, think again. With all the products and services competing for your customers, what you can’t afford is to be penny pinching on your marketing. You will save on cost, but you might miss out on profits.

Nothing can take the place of good old reliable print media. Some people think online marketing makes printing obsolete. After all, what can be cheaper than free media? Think again, for even as the online media becomes popular, the more too has the need for prints increased.

Print Advertisements vs. Online Marketing

• Initial Cost: Websites have cost. Web developers can charge a lot of money even for a basic website. And depending on the deal, you may still have to pay for hosting, the domain name and certain maintenance costs. In addition, placing banners on different sites for marketing may cost you a fortune even for just one day.

Print advertisements on the other hand can be had at very low costs. Having a thousand brochures printed can cost less than a hundred dollars. You can have five thousand pieces printed for under a couple of hundred of dollars, and it can last you a number of days and weeks.

• Media Mileage: You are competing with a global market and billions of web pages that continue to grow every day. With the deluge of information, it is so easy for your own website and advertisements to be drowned out to the back pages of the search engine.

With print advertisements, you can place your print ads in so many places it will be hard to miss them. You can place posters in streets and other high traffic areas advertising to more people. If you want to be accessible to your target demographic, display your posters in areas they frequent.

• Direct-mail-marketing: How many people actually spend time even reading email ads. It’s so easy to delete the mail with a single click. At these times, the computer does the sorting for you, unsolicited marketing emails often end up in the bulk section.

Mailing postcards, greeting cards, and brochures on the other hand has higher readability than other advertisements. The full colored prints attract more attention and are far more interesting than a single sine in the subject box. Mail them out to your target demographic using a mailing list. This way, you have a higher chance of getting response from your advertisements.

• Marketing your Marketing: Pay-per-click advertising on the other hand is paying money to direct your customers to your advertisement. Search Engine Optimization or getting your website to rank higher takes more effort or is more costly than you think.

Placing your marketing materials in public bulletin boards is usually free. Handing out flyers doesn’t cost anything and is a great way for you to start a conversation with a potential client. Other than this, you can generate more loyalty with regular newsletters and catalogs you send out.

• Viewing Time: Once you get them to view your website, you have 8 seconds to convince them to stay or to move on. This means you need a really good graphic artist to work with you.

Flyers and brochures on the other hand are more likely than websites to get more time. Once the flyer is handed out to them, they will have to carry it with them to wherever they are going, and casually read them and even pass them on.

You can use both advertising strategies simultaneously. You can even use postcards to drive up online traffic. But for any business, neglecting your commercial printing needs can have disastrous results. Make sure you have a printing company as your ally for your marketing plans.