Today’s world is filled with visual content: digital; mobile; print; the variety is endless. We are bombarded with images more than we can even process, so much so that we can’t possibly pay attention to all of it. Despite this constant barrage of visuals, we still find relevance in certain messages. With more and more advertising becoming digital, we wanted to dive deeper and investigate the successes of those messages, seeing where visual content is finding success. Through our research, we’ve found that print is still very much a powerful medium. With that said, today’s Tuesdays With Tukaiz will concentrate on how print plays a part in an effective marketing strategy and the evidence to support this claim.
Here are 7 facts that show the power of print:
- Direct mail is easier to process and therefore remember. It requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital messaging, suggesting that direct mail is both easier to understand and more memorable. Further, when asked to cite the brand (company name) of an advertisement they had just seen, participants’ recall was 70% higher when they were exposed to direct mail (75%) than a digital message (44%).
- People prefer direct mail to email. 40% of consumers, ages 25 to 34, are more likely to read a promotional piece mailed to them physically over an email sent to their inbox.
- Printed materials, such as direct mail, require an action to be made. For example, when people get their mail, they have to decide if each piece of mail is relevant or not. Meaning, do they throw it in the trash or do they keep it to look at later. “Should I keep this message; is it relevant; is it appealing?” These are things that naturally happen every time you go through a stack of mail.
- Along those lines, printed marketing materials facilitate an interaction. Whether it’s physically touching a magazine, feeling premium card stock between your fingers, or standing in front of a backlit poster printed on plastic, people will have some sort of physical interaction with it, invoking an emotional connection to the materials. This can be very powerful, especially when used in point-of-purchase, branded promotions, in-store signage, and other similar forms of printed marketing.
- Print is more “real” to the brain. Since it is tangible, print marketing – direct mail, signage, point-of-purchase, etc. – has a meaning related to a physical place and engages with spatial memory networks, connecting it to more neurons and effectively having a more powerful impact on the person interacting with that printed material.
- People trust printed materials. 56% of all consumers trust print advertising more than any other method.
- But in here lies the beauty of combining both digital and traditional printed marketing. Marketers have found success with mediums working together, for example, QR codes, augmented reality, or using PURLs (Personalized URLs) in print send consumers to take an action in the digital realm (Related: Check out our article Adding Value with Augmenting Print Reality).
In summary, while it is important to use the proven methods of traditional print, realize, it lives in a world where digital combined with print both have their respective places. And better yet, if using both mediums properly, print and digital can actually compliment brands and consumer behavior.
* All statistics courtesy of Keypoint Intelligence.