Social Media and Print: Why Cross-Media Marketing Matters
Social media marketing matters. It's effective, you can track it easily, and you can target a specific audience or demographic. But there's still a place for print marketing, and combining the two gives you a killer marketing platform. Here's why.
Immediacy vs permanence
Social media is very 'now' - and its very impermanence is one of its great strengths. You can quickly and easily engage your customers directly, creating conversations that build your brand's presence. But printing offers permanence and gives credibility and tangibility, an opportunity to reinforce visual branding and target an audience who may not access social media. Print advertising gives you an opportunity to stand out from the competition when all their efforts are focused online.
Combine and cross-promote
By combining your social media marketing strategy with print, you can cross-promote effectively between the two. Ensure your leaflet printing (http://printuk.com/leaflet-printing) , flyers and business cards all point to your social media presence. Then tweet or post directing your customers to your print ads to build a real buzz around them. This technique will reinforce your marketing message, connect with differing consumers based on the marketing medium that has caught their attention and ultimately elevate your campaign resulting in a higher customer conversion rate.
Get creative
Study the Twitter feeds of companies who are effectively working cross-platform to see how they incentivise and drive traffic to their print ads, and vice versa. Then get as creative as possible with your own print advertising - beautiful, customised graphic art is set to be the next big trend in website and graphic design, so tap into that to produce something unique that your audience will want to share and tweet and post about.
Engage with meaning
Don't ignore customers who respond to your print advertising online. You need to engage them and keep the conversation going. Be timely and interesting in your responses, and engage with positive and negative responses to learn what you did well and what you could do better in future. The more people tweet or post about your print ads, and the more engaged you can be with them, the better. Remember that printing and direct mailing drive potential and current customers to your website so in order to collect the relevant return on investment data ensure that your promotional codes on the printing vary from the online social media marketing so that you can monitor which activity has driven which website traffic.
Try our online leaflet template designs to help kick start your multimedia marketing campaign and boost you business sales.
At PrintUK.com we specialise in high quality printing and design to get your brand out there, so contact us about that print ad that will set social media buzzing.