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How do your increase your website visits, when everyone and their dog are online these days and that’s the same for businesses.  It’s very rarely would you see a business that doesn’t have some sort of online presence.  It’s a way of keeping current and at the forefront of potential customers’ minds. But that’s also the problem, isn’t it?  There are so many websites out there and all are fighting for a place toward the top and paying money to get your site to the top of a search engine can be extremely expensive.

Printed Advertising

Printed Advertising can help.  People think in this digital age, the days of flyers and posters are long gone but the opposite is actually true.  The printing business is actually worth well over £11 billion per year in the UK and it shows no signs of slowing down.  It’s a known fact that people will remember a printed ad much longer than they will an online ad.  The long-term memory of a printed ad is approximately 33% stronger than one viewed on social media.  These are stats you can’t ignore.

Studies

Studies have also shown that printed advertising can play a crucial role in driving customers to a website.  Due to long term memory and printed advertising staying with the reader, these studies have shown that around 80% of people who read about a place, will often visit it.  Visits to the advertiser’s website goes up by about 120%

Here we are post covid when more people are working from home than ever and while we all love browsing online, there’s much more awareness now of taking time away from devices to avoid fatigue.  There’s never been a better time to invest in printed advertising or your business and you might just find that your return on investment can be great than throwing a few ads online in the hope that one sticks.

Does quality Matter? Thousands of businesses need printing in some form or other.  It’s a part of running a business you can’t get away from and it’s not just printing for marketing, it’s also printed material you may need internally.

Paper Quality

Not all paper is created equally.  That’s a fact.  There are different grades of paper.  Different thicknesses.  Matt paper and gloss paper. The options go on and on.  So, what do you go for?  What is the right decision for your business?  This is a question we can happily discuss with you if you want to contact us and talk it over, but we can always offer some advice regardless.

Don’t Print at Home!

Now, obviously you can still do this if you choose to do so, but we strongly advise against it and for good reason.  Most people, if printing at home, will use the standard quality paper you can buy anywhere, and print using an average printer with standard ink. And this will certainly print you a flyer, but you must ask yourself one important question.  Is this the best you can do for your business?  We all know the answer to this.

Put yourself in your customer’s position for a minute.  You hear the door go and two flyers are dropped through the letter box.  One is printed at home on standard paper with colours that might not have come out the way it showed on the computer screen. The other is professional.  Thicker paper. Much better ink.  Colours on point.

It’s obvious which one was printed by professionals, and it says a lot about the business that sent it.  We take comfort in the fact that whatever business we choose to deal with, takes pride in all it does, including marketing.  It speaks to how they think and it’s worth considering how your customers will view you and your business.

It’s true that a digital ad will reach a lot more people online than a printed one will going round the doors, but that really isn’t the whole story.  There’s much more to consider when thinking of how to spend your hard-earned cash when it comes to advertising.

We’ve discussed before about how much more effective a printed ad is over a digital one and how an advert read on a flyer or poster will stick in someone’s memory much longer than it ever would if read online.  It’s just a fact and there’s no getting around it.  Online, you’re bombarded with ad after ad after ad and it can get really tiresome.  With printed material, you have it in your hand and you’re much more focused on reading it and it just sticks.  When it sticks, you’re more likely to visit the business or at the very least, check the website.

BPIF Study

We briefly touched on this in our last post but the long-term effects of gazing at a screen day in and day out aren’t good.  The British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF for short) carried out a study to get an idea of how people felt about their electronic devices such as phones and tablets and computers. The numbers really do tell a story and worth taking note.  It showed that 49% of people believed they spent too much time on their device and 46% believed it was damaging their health long term.  But the biggest number and the most interesting was a whopping 57% of those surveyed preferred reading print over reading digital.

The world may go paper free at some stage but that’s a long way off and not taking advantage of printing could very well damage your business.  It doesn’t have to just be flyers.  It can be posters or menus to the likes of desk pads and drinks coasters.  It’s all printed, and people well see it and your business will get noticed.