Print Marketing

With the ascension of social media and the Internet, it’s easy to forget that printed marketing materials can work just as well as online media to generate sales leads for your business. In fact, with so much attention on new media, marketing using more traditional media can actually make your business stand out. So here’s a guide to developing a great printed marketing strategy for your business, without spending a fortune.

First Things First

The first thing you have to work out when developing a printed marketing campaign is which tools will work best for you. Let’s say you run a well-established Chinese restaurant in your local area and you want to increase the number of customers who come in for lunch. First, think about who’s likely to come in for lunch. It’s likely to be people from local offices, as well as people who live in the area who probably don’t go to work — for example, local mums and retirees. The two latter groups are also less likely to use computers regularly, which make them ideal targets for a printed marketing campaign.

So, which printed marketing tools are likely to attract the attention of local workers, mums and retirees? For local workers, why not hand out fliers at the local train station and bus stops when people are arriving and leaving for work? For local mums, why not print some posters for the local day care centre and baby health clinic? For retirees, posters at the local bowling club might do the trick.

From this analysis, you can see you need to develop some fliers to hand out, as well as posters to put up in areas your prospective customers frequent. These tools will be the backbone of your printed marketing campaign.

Putting Together Material

When it comes time to developing printed marketing material, it’s a good idea to work with an experienced designer and possibly a copywriter to make sure your fliers and posters look as good as they can. Don’t try to design and write your own marketing materials. What you produce will look amateurish and will reflect poorly on your business.

For the content you include in the flier and poster, it’s a good idea to include a special offer or promotion to bring people into your business. In the case of the Chinese restaurant above, they might think about offering a ‘buy one lunch, get the second free’ promotion for a month to get customers coming in the door. Another idea might be to offer a free lunch every Friday to people who have eaten lunch at the restaurant three times during the week.

Getting Feedback

Once you have put together your printed marketing materials, you need to test them. Don’t make the mistake of having a thousand fliers printed, only to find that the offer or promotion printed in the flier isn’t of interest to your target market, or your target market isn’t keen on the design of the flier.

Before distribution, it’s a good idea to ask five or ten people what they think of the flier and poster. You might find during this process, for example, that the typeface on the poster is too small for retirees to read. By testing the document, you can change it to make it more appealing to your target audience.

Measure the Results

Even in a small business, it’s important to measure the results of your marketing program so you know what worked and the types of things that you will spend your marketing dollars on in the future.

In the case of the Chinese restaurant, to measure how successful the fliers and posters are at generating sales for the business, it’s a good idea to ask every new customer about how they came across the business. To make this happen, you’ll need to train frontline staff to prompt customers about how they found out about the business. If your flier includes a coupon for a promotion, it’s easy to measure how many people used the promotion, by counting the redeemed coupons.

You can use the results of the marketing evaluation process to decide which marketing activities to use next. If you find the fliers were great at producing initial business, but haven’t produced any repeat business, you might try a different marketing tactic to generate repeat business — a loyalty card, for example. But if, say, you find that posters have been fantastic at bringing people in the door, you might decide to extend your poster campaign to other target markets.

Above all, it’s important to remember that a printed marketing strategy should complement your online strategy. So make sure you include information on the fliers and posters about your Web site and e-mail address. That way, you’ll have your online and offline marketing in synch.