This article was authored by Posterboy Printing account manager Daniel Edwards

The marketing funnel is a concept that has been around for nearly a century, initially published in 1924 by door-to-door salesman William Townsend in his book Bond Salesmanship. The book was a manual for door-to-door sales intended to take customers to purchase in a single conversation using the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) model.

There have been fresh takes on the Townsends funnel model that reflect more accurately actual customer journeys. For example, there is the Hankins Hexagon, designed by James Hankins. Google took a swing at it with what they called The Messy Middle.

Each re-imaging of the customer journey is a re-evaluation of the original Townsend sales funnel. What they all have in common is they are planning tools that marketers. Using the models, they can map out their marketing ecosystems and look for weaknesses in their array of potential customer touchpoints. For its simplicity, I will stick with the Townsend funnel:

Where does print sit within the funnel?

Let’s look at the strengths of the print medium and let them dictate how to make the most significant impact and deliver the best return.

Print is genuinely good at three things.

Directing traffic

Rewind the clock 50 odd years to the mail order catalogue days; print was good at closing sales. Arnold Schwarzenegger built his first million with a mail-order business in the 1970s. But today, that doesn’t happen. Print marketing doesn’t close deals, but it is good at creating and directing traffic for both real-world and internet traffic.

UK advertising agency MC&C managed advertising for the Salvation Army from 2007 to 2012. In its first year, it ran an omni channel campaign and poured a lot of effort into attribution to make smarter decisions on where to invest the budget the following year. The online platform took most of the donations.

A surface look at this would have attributed the conversions to the online platform. However, it dug deeper and found many donations inspired by their campaigns’ print element. So, the following year, it invested more in print, which resulted in a consistent rise in donation levels. All of which is to say, print generates traffic, not sales.

A silver lining of the pandemic was the rise of the QR code. Methods or systems for getting people from the age to the screen have been fighting a format war for years, diluting the idea’s effectiveness because there was no dominant system.

The pandemic changed that and forced QR codes on everyone, fast-tracking QR code familiarity across all demographics. QR codes make the transition from page to screen easy and increasing prints’ ability to send traffic from the page to the screen.

Direct traffic also applies to the physical world and makes people walk and move. A directional poster will tell people which way to walk. A shelf top sign will tell people which shelf to approach. Significant research also shows that print will inspire people to go to a bricks-and-mortar store.

The Aldi catalogue is a shining example of how this can work. Aldi frequently carries small amounts of unusual goods. I’ve seen everything from snow gear to TVs pop up at Aldi, and I’ve also seen the crowds waiting for the store to open to grab one of these things. Groups generated by the letterbox dropped catalogue. Print makes people move.

Increased dwell time

Grabbing and keeping the customer’s attention is one of the significant challenges of advertising. Print is excellent at maintaining people’s attention and has greater potential for dwell time than other forms of advertising. There is something relaxing about ink on paper that sets it apart from different kinds of advertising.

Print demands nothing and waits passively, while audio and video demand the audience’s attention. People resent that. Many will actively avoid video advertising. One study showed that 94 per cent of people will skip pre-roll ads on YouTube when given the option, and 81 per cent of people mute them.

My seven-year-old son, on his own bat, figured out how to avoid the pre-roll commercials on YouTube.

But no one is tearing pages out of magazines because they have ads on them. Yes, people will throw away a direct mail piece, but they will look at it first. The discreet way that print presents means people are more likely to engage with it for longer times.

Extended dwell time is significant for low-frequency, high-value purchases. People like to ‘settle down’ and read ink on paper particularly if they are about to spend a lot of money on something they don’t often buy.

Every household has an area designated for short-term storage and sorting of paper for a print that enters the home, often in the hallway or kitchen. Some few pieces are elevated to the fridge for longer-term storage and increased visibility. Studies have shown that print stays in this spot for two to four weeks.

Even households that think they throw direct mail away tend to keep more than they think. The potential in-household life span extends to 12 months for business-to-business catalogues. The critical detail is that every adult household member will view the prints multiple times. Numerous viewings offer the opportunity to say more with the content, to go into detail about a product or an offer. You don’t have to do it all at once. Every day that a print stays within the household, it has a chance to inspire the reader to make an action.

Print can go anywhere

It really can. It doesn’t need power, doesn’t need Wi-Fi, it just needs enough light to see it by. Reception is always good for ink on paper. There are exceptions to this, looking at you lightboxes, but generally speaking, print can go anywhere, including on the ground.

Positionality is vital in retail spaces where infrastructure may not be available in the right spot. Print needs little more than something to put it on, allowing marketers and visual merchandisers to position it exactly where it can do the most good.

The best time to tell a customer about your product is when within arms reach of it. Many of our purchasing choices are impulsive, and we purchase the product that catches our eye at the final moment.

When a customer stops in front of a shelf and reaches point-of-sale signage can increase the visibility of one product and increase the chance it is chosen.

Print can go anywhere and be targeted at the moments and positions where it can have the most impact. This ability to be in the right place at the right time works outside retail spaces. Metal recyclers put flyers on rusty old cars, glaziers put stickers on smashed windows, real-estate agents drop leaflets in the letterboxes of houses they hope to sell, and builders put up signs at their building sites.

Considering these three strengths, print is best used in two different formats.

Top of the funnel

Prints’ ability to direct traffic and be positioned anywhere makes it a good choice for the top of the funnel. This looks like flyer handouts, direct mail, posters on a wall, catalogues, point of sale or shelf top signage. The graphic design should be heavy on direction and light on details. It essentially says ‘you can get this product over there’. 

Bottom of the funnel

Print is good at communicating relatively large amounts of information and can be positioned anywhere, so highly targeted when customers are close to the purchase or have just made the purchase. They want to learn more about the product, and print is an excellent way for people to absorb a lot of information and details. This would be a text-heavy direct mail, a catalogue, a product description booklet, or a business card. The graphic design is heavy on details and light on direction. It says ‘you can get answers to all your questions.

I have four ladders in my house, a footstool, a three-step, a five-step and an extendable one.

The footstool helps my kids to reach the top shelf of the fridge. The three-step lets me reach the top shelf of the pantry. The five-step helps me get down the Christmas tree. The extendable gets me onto the roof to rescue Frisby’s.

There is an argument that I only need the extendable one; it can get me everywhere I need to go. But it’s big and heavy and a real pain to move inside the house. And while my smaller ladders can’t get me on the roof, they are small, light, and sufficient to access other places. The same is true when including print as part of a campaign. Consider the strengths of the medium, and design your pieces to leverage them. Don’t expect it to do things it can’t do and don’t discard it because of what it can’t do.

Multi-channel campaigns, like multi-ladder households, consistently perform better than single-channel, and clever print executions will improve the performance of a campaign.

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