Top Tips for a successful Print Marketing Campaign
Are you currently in the process of planning a printed marketing campaign?
In this blog, we share our top tips to help you get the most out of your print and run a successful campaign.
Print marketing campaigns are a great way for you to improve your brand recognition and awareness, and connect and engage with your target audience.
Effective planning and preparation is vital in ensuring you can reap these benefits and run a successful campaign that will help you achieve your goals.
We have worked with a variety of clients from different sectors to support them in the planning and execution of their printed marketing campaigns.
Here are some of our top tips to help you with your campaign.
Outline your goals
Before you begin thinking about the type of print and design elements, you need to spend time to consider what you want to achieve from a campaign.
Ask yourself the question ‘Why?’.
Why do you want to run a printed campaign?
Once you have considered this, you can begin to set yourself goals. This is an important part of your planning, as it helps you to define the purpose or your campaign.
Your goals need to be specific and measurable, rather than just a vague goal such as ‘increase our sales’.
You should also set an end date for when your goals should be achieved and ensure that they are achievable.
However, you don’t want to make your goals too easily achievable as this will prevent you from moving forward and achieving the best results possible.
It is great to set progressive goals that will challenge you and your team and help take your business to new heights.
As an expert on your own business, only you will know best how to strike the balance between goals that are both achievable and progressive.
It is also important to consider how your printed campaign will align with your other marketing efforts and overall business aims.
Taking digital marketing as a prime example, your printed campaigns should compliment your digital efforts to help you get more out of both these marketing avenues.
Determine your target audience
Who do you want to target with your print?
You need to consider your goals and how the purpose of your campaign may influence who your target audience will be.
Through determining your target audience, you can then utilise the knowledge you have on them, their characteristics and what type of content they interact with to help you decide the type of print for your campaign and the content you will include.
Knowing this will enable you to tailor your print to meet the needs of the intended audience, so you can get the best results possible and provide them with something of value and that they will really engage with.
Key Messages and Content
With your goals and target audience outlined, you can begin deciding on the key messages and content you want to include within your print.
One key thing to remember here is that you do not want to overwhelm the audience with too much content. Even if it is a brochure or leaflet where you have the space to include lots of text, this isn’t always the best approach.
Think intelligently about your content and choose each word wisely.
You also need to ensure that your content speaks the language of your target audience and is relevant to them.
Providing them with content that is clear and informative will make it much more likely that they are going to engage with your print.
Another way to achieve this is also through personalising the print specifically to them.
This could be by including their name, products or services that are specifically recommended for them or maybe even content that is relevant to a conversation you have recently had with them.
Design
When it comes to design, you want your print to be engaging and eye-catching.
You can achieve this through utilising colour, strong headlines and text font that is clear, bold and easy to read.
When deciding on colour, it is important that it ties in with and compliments your logo and branding, to help with your brand recognition, but you could also consider how you can utilise contrasting colours to help make certain parts of the print stand out more than others.
However, it is important to remember the power of white space. It is a great tool in helping to break up your content and help with the flow of how your audience will read and navigate through your printed literature.
Finally, powerful imagery will also be key in creating an engaging piece of print. Your images should be of a high quality and help you to communicate key messages about your business, products or services.
The well known saying ‘A picture can say a thousand words’ is also very true, so be smart about the images you select.
Distribute
After you have designed your print, you can then begin distributing it to your target audience.
In the current climate, exactly how you distribute your printed literature should be a key consideration as you may not be able to distribute it in the traditional ways you were previously, such as handing it out at a conference or expo.
You may need to consider innovative solutions, such as sending your print out directly to your audience either at their place of work or home.
Measure your results
Finally, as with all your marketing efforts you need to measure your results, to evaluate whether you have achieved the goals you outlined and whether the campaign has been a success.
With printed campaigns, measuring the results is often much more difficult than with other marketing avenues such as websites or social media, where traffic and engagement can be very easily tracked.
To measure your results, you could consider adding trackable elements to your printed literature, such as a QR code the reader will scan, a discount code or even contact details that are exclusive to that print and campaign.
These are all great ways to make measuring your results simple, helping you to determine whether or not your goals have been achieved, the return on investment for this campaign and helping to ensure you are getting the most out of your print.
As specialists in print, we have supported a variety of organisations to run successful print campaigns.
Through partnering with an experienced printer like ourselves, we can work with you through each and every step of the planning and running your print campaign. We share our knowledge to help advise on the best print medium to meet both your goals and target audience, how to design a powerful piece of print, methods of distribution, and a whole host of other factors.
