There are so many media available for businesses to advertise their products these days. Some are conventional, while others are more modern. Generally, the business world is getting more and more digitized. Many businesses are running purely over the internet. Social media marketing is getting more and more popular. Even the companies running successfully through brick-and-mortar outlets are placing important and allocating budgets for building an online presence for their brand.
Businessmen and marketers understand the importance of keeping up with the changing trends in marketing. That’s why most of them focus on marketing their brand on digital media (even if they are not selling digital products) rather than on print media. But does that mean print media has become obsolete or useless? Before answering that, let’s discuss what print media is.
What is Print Media?
Print media includes the modes of communication that are controlled by space, not by time. This means of mass communication comes in the form of printed publications. Anything published on print media can be read at any time because it stays in the record. Some of the standard printing media for mass communication are as follows.
- Books
- Newspapers
- Magazines
All these hard copy printing media are actually the printed version of giving out news and information instead of digital media.
Print media has certain advantages for businesses over electronic or digital media. After all, even though digital media has become so common and popular, printing media has not yet ceased to exist. Print media marketing has its own place and value for businesses.
What are the Advantages of Print Media for Businesses?
Following are some of the benefits of print media for both small and large businesses.
1. High Viewing Frequency
One of the most significant benefits of print media is that it has a higher frequency of viewing than the digital press. Online ads can only be viewed at the time when they are played or displayed. But print media advertising is available to be seen at all times once it is published.
A newspaper or magazine can be sitting on a table or rack for months; anyone who puts their eyes on it has a chance to read it. The messages published in printing media do not disappear once the run time of the ad is over. They do not go away after generating an impression. In fact, they keep piling up and creating clutter. They are usually even reviewed once again before being recycled or discarded. There can be a library full of books published years ago, and anyone visiting the library can open up one of the books and read it to get inspiration. Due to the long shelf life of print media, they benefit businesses by keeping the adverts or messages available to be seen by people more often and for a more extended time.
Digital messaging is not like that. Digital ads create impressions and go off. They have to be turned on and off, based on the advertiser’s budget. When the budget is spent, the ads are no longer available to be viewed by the target audience. All the business is left with then is the website analytics, which can give them an idea of how effective or successful the ad campaign was. The image below shows the website statistics of a website built in Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Control Over Appearance
Among the advantages of print media is that the advertiser has more control over the appearance of the message. When a business prepares an advert for print media, they get to choose the exact colors to use, the characteristics of the paper, the contours of the graphics, the aspects of typography, and any other elements of the ad design. This allows the business to create an ad or presentation that matches precisely with what they perceive to be expected by their target audience. An advertisement needs to meet the prospects’ expectations.
Digital media gives the advertiser less of an opportunity to control all these aspects. This is because digital ads, such as banner ads displayed on a website, are subject to browser configurations. Social media ads might be affected by the operating systems used. The quality of television ads is determined by the technology they are presented upon. This lack of control over the quality and appearance of digital media ads makes them more vulnerable to skepticism by mass audiences.
3. Longer Readers’ Attention Span
Have you ever tried to read a very long article online? The digital age has literally killed off the attention span of human beings. People usually surf the internet with multiple tabs open at the same time on their devices. They can be texting their peers, listening to a television show in the background, browsing through an e-commerce store, downloading some music, and skimming through a blog article, all at the same time. With so much stimulation in the environment, it is almost impossible to focus on any single thing for long.
Among the benefits of print media is that when a person is reading on it, they usually have their complete attention. Someone can’t multitask when they are reading something on print media. This means they can maintain focus on what they see and receive. They can absorb the message with a more receptive mind and understand what the advertiser conveys. This is one of the reasons why many large businesses still use print media for advertising their products.
Following is a screenshot of a blog that’s designed very neatly and built-in on Strikingly. It has a brief biography of the blogger written on its landing page. If someone was reading this biography in a book instead of on this website, don’t you think their attention span would be slightly longer?
Image taken from Strikingly user’s blog
4. Encouragement for Action
When people are on the internet, they tend to avoid advertisements at all costs. It is easy to click the ‘Skip’ button after five seconds of viewing a Youtube ad and even easier to click the ‘X’ within seconds of an ad popping up on a web page. Users of the internet literally hate ads. That’s why we see so many apps and tools coming up that are designed specially to block all the ads from showing up on websites.
The situation is different with print media. Most viewers feel motivated to take action in printing media after seeing a newspaper or magazine ad. For example, when a person sees a banner ad on the roadside for a limited-time grocery items sales offer at a local grocery chain, he will be tempted to visit the store and buy his groceries from there right away. He wouldn’t wait until he gets to see the ad a few more times to be convinced enough to go and buy. When put up on sale, he would know that such items go out of stock very fast. This assumption would signal him to take immediate action so that he doesn’t miss out on it.
Seeing an ad on a website or social media is a different story, though. The advertiser even puts up a call-to-action as shown in the image below. The viewer may or may not get enticed to click on the call-to-action button after seeing the ad.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Targeting the Exact Audience
The advantages of print media ads don’t end at their ability to influence the readers to take action. Print media ads also give you complete control as the business owner to choose which section of the magazine or newspaper your ad will be placed in. You can make this decision based on the kind of audience you want to target, and if you are running a business, you would probably know which section your target audience usually touches upon the most.
Print media gives you the benefit of being able to target your audience very specifically. For instance, you can choose a magazine to place your ad that talks about the specific niche that you are targeting. You can also select a particular day of the week to place your ad in a newspaper when you know that your target audience reads the newspaper on that specific day every week. Your campaigns can be tailored to suit your budget by altering the colors and size of the ad.
More so, when you are working on placing your ad in print media, you have to deal with a human being. There are no bots and complex online algorithms involved. This is why you get to customize your ads more in print media than in the digital press.
6. Easy on Thanking Sponsors
When a business runs ads on digital media, the goal is to mention the names (or logos) of the sponsors of the ad (if any). We often see television ads, YouTube ads, and even electronic billboard ads mentioning the names of all the sponsors throughout or at the end of the ad. Below is a screenshot of a web page showing the icons of that company’s sponsors and partners.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Print media is different. Businesses can go easy on mentioning the sponsors, if there are any, for a printing media ad.
Now we know that print media holds its own importance. Yet, any business that wants to be successful these days must have an online presence these days, i.e., a website of its own and social media pages to represent the brand. If you want to build a website and have it launched in just a couple of hours, sign up for a free account in Strikingly today. You can then run your advertisements on both the digital press and print media.
