Marketers are enjoying a golden age of marketing and advertising. There are dozens, if not hundreds of accessible marketing channels to consider, including accessible digital options like PPC ads and social media marketing. Even if you’re inexperienced or working with a tiny budget, it’s possible to develop an effective marketing campaign from scratch.
But one of the most effective marketing strategies is commonly overlooked – possibly because it’s been effective for decades: booklets.
Traditional printed booklets have the power to improve your brand awareness, increase sales, and inform your customer base (among other achievements). So what is it that makes this approach so effective?
The Advantages of Booklet Printing
These are some of the biggest advantages of booklet printing:
1. Low costs. Booklet printing is inexpensive these days, especially if you plan on printing thousands of them. You can often get the per-piece price of your booklets down to $0.25 or lower, depending on the options you choose. For many businesses, this means that if even 1 percent of your booklets result in a sale, you’ll end up with a positive return on investment (ROI).
2. Fast production. Online printers also work fast. If you’re on a tight schedule and you need to get a set of booklets ready for a big event, you can often get your materials printed in the span of a few days. With upgraded shipping, that means your time from initial printing to booklets-in-hand can be less than a week.
3. Potential reach. It seems like everyone uses the internet constantly, but this isn’t necessarily the case; about 10 percent of Americans rarely or never use the internet, and those that do may never encounter your business normally. By contrast, 100 percent of Americans get mail to their home address, meaning your potential audience for a booklet is, by some standards, larger than your potential audience online.
4. Distribution flexibility. You don’t have to mail your booklets. You can hand them out to visitors at a tradeshow. You can give them to people who go to your local storefront. You can even leave them at other local businesses, if they’re willing to host you. You have a lot of distribution flexibility here, and it’s worth taking advantage of.
5. Detailed information. Brochures are nice, but they’re somewhat limiting in terms of how much information they can provide. With a booklet, you can write pages and pages of information to convey to your audience – which is especially useful when explaining a complex topic or reviewing lots of details.
6. Connection to other strategies. Booklet printing and distribution isn’t designed to be a marketing island (although it can be). In the broader context of your marketing campaign, your booklet can tie into many other channels. For example, you can use your booklet to lead people to your website, a specific landing page, or even an email distribution list. Similarly, you can use online marketing channels to encourage people to sign up to receive a booklet (if it’s valuable).
7. Design versatility. Booklets are primarily a visual medium, and you’ll have plenty of flexibility for how you use them to put your brand on display. You can use real photos, illustrations, charts, graphs, and other visual elements – and lay them out however you want. If you want a professional appearance and the capacity to make a bold first impression, booklets can help you achieve your goals.
8. Industry agnosticism. Some types of businesses are better suited to booklets than others. But for the most part, marketing booklets are industry agnostic. You can use them for a wide variety of purposes and with a wide variety of audiences, making them incredibly versatile.
9. Tangibility and permanence. Unlike digital ads, booklets are both tangible and permanent. Your customers will get the chance to comb through the pages by hand, share the booklet with other people, and even keep it around the house for future perusal.
10. Potential for future updates. You don’t have to keep the same booklet design forever. You can update last year’s booklet with new information or make design tweaks to boost the performance of your strategy over time.
Getting Started
You don’t need to be a seasoned marketing veteran or a booklet printing expert to get started with a booklet-based marketing strategy of your own. Instead, you can get started with a simple set of goals. That is to say, what are you hoping to accomplish? Who is your target audience and how can you reach them? What are you going to say?
Once you have these goals nailed down, you can work on hiring a professional designer and outlining a concept. And with the right concept in place, printing is a breeze.
