Why You Should Still Be Advertising In Print!

While it’s true that digital platforms have become the shiny new home of just about everything we like to look at, entertainment, news media, shopping, and more, what a lot of people seem to forget is that we still have paper, and yes, it is still very much in use as a vehicle for all of those sectors! The danger for modern businesses is to become so focused on the screens that they forget the pages and miss out on the huge potential for profits that print advertising still promises.

Print advertising is very much a going concern, and has also benefited from the digital revolution, a business can now simply contact a printing company online and have business cards, brochures, flyers, posters, stickers, and a wealth of other promotional materials printed up and sent directly to their office!

The printed page, no matter what form it takes, is attractive to the human brain, we still like to hold a newspaper in front of us and turn pages in a book, so much so that handheld ‘readers’ try to imitate that experience on a screen and come up short, it’s missing the tactile side of the experience. Despite all the digital bells and whistles, many readers prefer to hold printed materials physically in their hands instead of viewing words and art on a screen.

Research has shown that people are better able to take in and retain information when they are manually turning pages, the physical act more thoroughly engages the brain, which means that printed materials have a stronger impact on their audience- isn’t that what advertising is all about, impacting an audience?

When your information is in print it remains in physical circulation, it is never shut down or turned off and doesn’t need to be recharged. Printed matter can indefinitely sit on a desk, be hung from a magazine and newspaper rack, posted on a wall, handed out to people passing by, or kept on a shelf, it has a permanence that digital formats aren’t able to achieve. If you post an article online it will likely vanish among millions of other articles and drown in a sea of plenty, if you publish it in a physical paper magazine the chances are it will be around for a while, and that at least someone sitting in a waiting room will get to read it!

Research has also shown that people demonstrate a deeper emotional response to, and better remember print advertisements than they do when viewing them digitally. To put it in layman’s terms, the brain gets more excited about an ad it sees in print than it does the same ad seen on a screen, and is thus more likely to buy the thing they saw on paper! Print media is more stimulating to the desire to purchase than digital advertising!

So, the next time you hear someone tell you that “print is dead”, they are welcome to their opinion, but it is not an informed one, in fact, print media is going strong and despite predictions of doom, is bigger than ever and shows no signs of stopping. Bottom line? Advertise in both print and digital formats for best results.