Stop using old style Flyers and Brochures Now! Use digital aware ones instead!

Everyone has a Website, everyone has Social Media, businesses can record videos of their products and services in use putting them online, many businesses are now totally online and never meet a person face to face. In this cloud driven age, what place is there for physical things like flyers and brochures? There is, and they can be designed to work seamlessly with your digital marketing. Let me tell you how.

We won’t cover the migration from print to internet for marketing as we have all gone through it and you don’t need to know the background details. What is important to know is that digital marketing is the primary way you promote your business. So where does physical marketing material fit? It fits in supporting and expanding your marketing efforts in the unique ways that no digital marketing can. We are going to break it down to why physical media marketing is still important to have, and how it can be integrated into your digital side. Let me break it down in a few key points then show you how to make the two formats work with each other.

What can physical marketing do that digital can’t

Perfect for ‘Cold Calling’

Cold Calling is the marketing term for a business initiating direct contact with a potential customer, not the other way around. While it originally meant people going door to door trying to sell things, in this age it’s more putting direct marketing at a limited number of potential customers, instead of blanket coverage of a region. For real world examples, think of the real estate agents ‘Just listed’ flyers they put in mailboxes around a listed property, and not the weekly mailers that came from the supermarkets. Now imagine trying to do that with an email or social media post.

Sure you could try paying for mailing lists, or spending to have a post be put on everyone’s feeds in a region, but as quickly as you put the post out the receivers delete it and potentially put you on a spam or block list. That’s something they can’t do with a physical one. Yes they will likely throw it into the trash, but during that time they have had to look at it and people read things much faster on a printed page than on a screen, increasing your chance that you grab their attention, making it easier to follow up with them in the future.

Be in places you or your website can’t be

You may be surprised at the number of places people don’t realise they can have their marketing in. Depending on the nature of your business you can put brochures and flyers in locations where they can be passive advertising. Talk to businesses which you could have a compatible relationship with to carry marketing for each other. For example a massage studio could have flyers for both a beauty studio and a hair salon, as they each deal with a different area of the beauty industry so there’s no direct competition between them. There are many local business associations that will have stands to promote their members, do you have marketing with your local one? Try community centres or other local non-commercial organisations where you could have a few flyers or pin a small poster on a notice board. There’s the old school notice boards you see in grocery stores, most of them these days will let you buy a space to have a poster or a brochure holder.

It is passive marketing and reliant on people stopping long enough to look at it. It’s also almost minimal cost to use and maintain. By picking the right places you can be sure that people will be more receptive to your marketing.

Provide follow up after the deal is done

In this day and age you can’t assume that customers will return after you’ve completed a sale with them in every case. Unless you have some hook in the product that requires follow up (such as servicing or consumables under a warranty) most consumers have no ‘brand loyalty.’ This can be even worse if it’s something they purchase infrequently meaning they forget where they got it from originally and just go to the most convenient supplier, even if it actually costs them more in the long run. We frequently have this problem at Copy Express as many of our customers are SME’s so only buy printed material very occasionally, as in we might not see them for a year or more.

So how do you reduce the chance of customers going somewhere else? By building in reminders of your business. For us here at Copy Express we always separately wrap a small part of any order and attach a ‘You’re almost out’ reminder sticker with a contact information. For a trade inspection tags with the business name and contacts are always good, especially as we can print it on hard wearing plastic for a long life in hasher conditions. There’s always stickers to put on items or vouchers you can include that have a reminder to come back and get a discount on the follow up sales. Just to name a few examples

What can digital marketing do that physical can’t?

Speed of response

Being able to quickly respond to market changes is the most obvious one. It takes time to print marketing materials and to get it out to people, where you can create social media posts and have it on everyone’s feeds in a few minutes. This makes it great for ‘knee-jerk’ responses to competitors’ marketing allowing you to minimise the chances of your customers going to them on some offer or deal. This is something that physical marketing can not compete with. It takes time to print things, and the more complex the item the longer it takes to make. Add on time to physically deliver the marketing to the client and you can see how it can’t compete with the digital version. That being said, there are ways around this problem which we will cover later in this article.

Very low cost per unit

It’s digital so unless you’re paying Facebook to boost a post, or having Google list your advertising as part of search results the only real cost is your time creating the marketing. Even paying for such marketing isn’t hugely expensive meaning that it can be within even the modest marketing budgets of most Small to Medium Enterprises. (How effective it is subject for a future article.) Honestly speaking as a printing company, physical marketing can’t compete with that on a cost per unit rate. But in this digital age, physical marketing isn’t trying to. Printed marketing has now moved over to being a specialised tool for promotion, instead of being the primary one for businesses.

It can be changed or updated after creation

Yep, once something is printed you can’t change it. So if you have to change a price or update information about a product, it’s only a few minutes work to update a website vs the days of production required for the physical ones. Not to mention the costs from throwing out the old material and printing the new. Much of that can be avoided at the planning stage before you print your marketing materials by not including information that is prone to being out of date, or only printing just what you need even if it costs slightly more per unit.

How to integrate the two streams of marketing in to one whole

I opened this article explaining the idea of making physical marketing link with digital marketing. How can you do this simply?  QR Codes. I won’t need to explain what they are in this article here. Even the most technologically phobic person has got used to them now through real estate signs and the covid app. So how do you use them in your marketing?  

Your website is the starting point. The easiest way to have digitally integrated physical marketing is to use QR Codes to link to parts of your website. At the simplest form you have just a link to the site’s URL so people can go to the site without having to type in the web address. You want people to go directly to your website at every possible opportunity, so to minimise the effort for someone by letting them scan and click instead of having to type it out. You can’t rely on Google to bring up your business if they search for you based on the services or products you provide, so providing easy to use web address information is vital.

From there you can make your QR Codes that are more focused by pointing to a sub page or even a section of a sub page of your website. This is great when you want to promote a smaller range of products or services that you think better suit your target audience. You have videos or slideshows of the features and benefits of what you’re marketing, then put them in a QR Code, because youtube links are notoriously fiddly to enter especially on a phone keyboard. People are more likely to follow a link if it’s just a scan and click away, then typing in a url.

As we have talked about in the article covering QR Codes you are not limited to a web location. You can also use them to book a time on a calendar, give your physical location for use on a navigation app, send a text or email message so you can call them back following up their interest. While there are ways to have them dynamically generate information that is sent to you, such as their location and contact details, that’s very reliant on your website being configured to generate such information which can be complex and expensive to set up.  

What do you need to do to make it work for you?

Just access a QR Code creation application (such as the one found on our design studio software at copyexpress.co.nz) and enter in the web address to create your code graphic. Take the graphic and paste it in to your marketing material. That’s it. However if you want to take it to the next level, here are a few ideas.

Help customers find products

For retailers, if you have a lot of different products it becomes hard for your customers to find particular products. Even a moderately sized business could have hundreds of products to look at. By doing the work for the customer, such as providing the direct url to the product page or a category search, the more likely you’ll have them look at the product. In a business like a restaurant, having the link to your menu makes it easier for people to look at your offerings out of hours (but don’t use it as a substitute for a real menu for diners, it just annoys everyone.)

Link it directly to to your social media / review / testimonial pages
Most people now use social media to gauge the feel of a business before contacting them. They want to know how well the company performs, what their customers say about them, and how well they dealt with issues. The problem is that most businesses’ social media links can be odd or not easy to enter (For example on Facebook we’re Copy Express Petone, because there are numerous on demand printers worldwide using the ‘copy express’ name.) Placing a link to those pages by a scan code makes it easy. And there is nothing stopping you including the same sort of link in a receipt or as a business card dropped in to a bag to encourage customers to rave about your service on social media.

Use it to contact you directly
It’s an odd trend but some people don’t even like typing phone numbers or email addresses into their phones these days. They would rather find a link on a website and click on that to add or use it. If you’re a business that relies on direct communications with customers, then make it easy by adding a scan code to add your email or phone number. Yes it’s an edge case now, but as time goes on I think this will become a more common habit for people.

Provide semi-automated customer support

If you sell complex products, such as power tools, then including a sticker with QR Codes on the packaging lets you speed up the customer support process that comes with it. Not everything comes with a manual these days so including a link to the manual or support pages makes sense. More importantly include a link to your own website listings for the related products used by that device. A ‘having problems’ link to your email with the important information subject line and details of the product already filled in so then they only have to fill in the blanks of issues and serial numbers will reduce the time you need to spend fixing things.

Provide discounts at the till
Got a till and want to make it easy for clients to spend their money by having a scannable code. A lot of this is dependent on your point of sale software (till). Some only support UPC/EAN codes for products and can’t use it to generate price changes. Others will, and some will recognise QR Codes to allow for advanced things such as adding customer points or setting up combo deals. You can even include them on the receipts that you generate to give customers reward points or link them back to your testimonial site.

Where to go from here

So we have talked about turning your physical media in to digitally aware ones, both to link people to your business and to help automate the act of getting them to provide feedback and to be returning customers. Now you just need to do it. If you don’t know where to start then you can give us a call at Copy Express. We are more than happy to give advice on what will work for you and help you through the process of making it work for you