This article was authored by Posterboy Printing account manager Daniel Edwards

One of the great strengths of print marketing is its simplicity. From design, to supply, to execution, to the message, print marketing is an intuitive medium for a marketer to use. It is a simple and elegant solution for communicating and directing traffic.

Design

For smaller brands who don’t have a full-time designer, design has often been a challenge. Over the years as a printer, I’ve worked with the full range of customer design setups, from ‘my niece/nephew’ has inDesign, through to a low-res scan of a black and white letterheads.

Today, graphic design has never been easier to access.

Online freelance sites like Fiverr or Upwork offer easy access to contract graphic designers from around the world for any budget. Posting a brief and a budget is easy. The contractors succeed based largely on positive reviews, so will do their best to give their clients a positive result. If you’re getting started with one of these sites, the ‘threelancer’ approach is good one. Post your project, then hire three likely looking contractors, and usually one will rise to the top, and you will know who to use next time.

For people who want to do it themselves there are free and low-cost options. Free design software Gimp doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it is free, and has all the most regularly used tools from the professional software. For a marketer or small business owner that is putting something together occasionally, or on the fly, Gimp is a valid and affordable choice, and much better than using Word, Publisher, or Powerpoint.

Then there are the online design tools. Canva is the market leader in this space. Launched by an Australian printer with big ideas and the courage to seek venture capital in Silicon Valley, Canva is an excellent design tool that requires nothing more than a web browser to work. It has all the tools most people need to produce something themselves and easy access to a vast library of templates, fonts and images for free or at low cost. Templates make things design so much easier. It cuts out the need for mood boards, colour palettes, and font selection. You can simply scroll through options for the template you like, swap in your details, and you’re good to go. 

Supply

The last 15 years have been tough on the print industry. Beginning with the GFC and then through the massive disruption of the internet, combined with digital screens and on top of that changing print technology.

Simply put, the print industry has taken a beating, which is great for print buyers, because whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Print operators today are highly competent and capable at what they do, it is simply not possible to survive if you are not.

Many trades, like electricians or plumbers, exist in a market where there is a shortage of suppliers. In these markets it is easy for a tradesman to stand out from their competition simply by showing up, even better is showing up on time.

A print supplier can’t operate like that. They are competing directly with the biggest companies in the world in Google and Facebook. To survive they have become very customer focused. High quality print output, fast quotes, and fast supply is a standard in the print industry. They have done everything they can to make ordering print as easy as possible, and delivery of your prints as fast as possible.

Ordering print is often as simple as sending an email and the prints will arrive within days if not hours, it couldn’t be simpler.

Execution

To execute a print campaign, it only needs to be produced and distributed. With low replacement and set up costs, print is often the only practical choice for many locations.

In a talk about visual merchandising, Gwen Morrison, CEO of The Store in the Americas and Australasia said, “instore media is most effective when the advertised product is within reach of the customer”. Brands miss their opportunity to connect with shoppers when the promotional offers for items are seen after shoppers have passed the item. Print requires very little infrastructure, and can go almost anywhere, giving the ability to deliver the right message at the right time.

This works beyond the retail floor. For example, a glazier could put a sticker on a shop front window, a real estate agent or tradesman can do a quick letterbox drop to the houses surrounding their current, a metal recycler can slip a flyer under the windscreen wiper of an old car.

Adhoc highly focused campaigns like this are simple to execute and highly effective at positioning the message to be at the right place at the right time.  There is no better time for a glazier’s phone number to be in sight, than when you are looking at a broken window.

JB Hi-Fi is one of the most successful retailers in Australia and is also a great contradiction when it comes to instore marketing. It is a business built on selling the latest technology, but their stores are absolutely dripping with print.  JB Hi-Fi is going for a specific market bazaar look with all their seemingly ad hoc signage, but they are also a case in point for how easy it is to install print into a retail space. You need little more than a roll of sticky tape and some fishing line to get it done.

Even in cases where print needs to be professionally installed, like on a shopping centre hoarding, a car wrap, or a building sign, there typically is little pre work required beyond a surface clean. Self-adhesive graphics can be applied directly onto most surfaces, building signs bolted directly onto walls. When there is infrastructure required, like a poster frame, or sail tracking, the fittings can be there for years on end, with the graphics frequently changed. So beyond that initial setup, there is little required, certainly no monthly SAAS payments.

The message

In a time of distractibility, with the internet in everyone’s pocket, counter intuitively, one of papers strengths is its lack of connectivity. While the internet gives us access to masses of information, print is just this one thing. Limited, unchanging information. Rather than a liability, this stability gives the reader a focus, and an anchor.

Imagine sitting down to browse a printed catalogue. You see an interesting product and use your smartphone to access the retailer’s website.  Then you navigate to Amazon to check prices, then Google for product reviews, then if you’re like me, you go completely off task. You check your emails, your news feed, social media, then tomorrow’s weather, movie times, then having completely forgotten why you even picked up your phone, you put it down.

And this is where print is the anchor. After you put your phone down, the catalogue is still sitting there in front of you open to the same page, on that same product you liked. Maybe the cycle starts again, except this time you buy it. Because the print stayed there, unchanging, and constant it provided you with a focus and an anchor.

Cognitive scientists from the University of California did a study into the longevity of paper as a communication format. They studied the way that ‘information workers’ at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worked with paper. One of the things they found was that a person can have many sheets of paper full of information on display simultaneously, but they won’t lose mental focus. Paper supported their mental activity and helped them stay focused.

The same is not true for any other form of communication. Imagine being subjected to multiple different audio or video inputs at the same time. It would be incredibly distracting, you could only focus on one at a time, and would have no mental energy left to do any kind of critical thinking left beyond paying attention to that one feed.

There have been multiple studies looking for differences in the ability for young children to learn how to read from tablets.

This finding was echoed by multiple separate studies looking for differences between how young children learn to read from paper books, compared to interactive screens.  other studies done with young children learning to read.

The control group of two- to four-year-old children and parents were given printed board books. The other group was given a tablet with e-books enhanced with interactive animations, videos and games. Parents frequently had to interrupt reading to stop the child from fiddling with buttons and losing track of the narrative. Such distractions ultimately prevented the children from understanding even the gist of the stories, but all the children followed the stories in paper books just fine.

Every other communication channel is full of distraction. Radio and tv ads change every 15 seconds, the internet is a distraction machine. Print by comparison is a single focused message. It is just that one simple solid unchanging physical thing.

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