The Power of Print Media

The second oldest form of advertising is print media, and it comes second only to word of mouth. Printing out brochures, menus, advertisements, or even business cards has become less practiced in the modern era, but the tangible power of holding an advertisement in your hand is powerful. In fact, since print media has fallen out of style the odds of someone acting on a printed piece of media is much higher nowadays. Never underestimate the feel of a piece of paper in your hands.

Printing out advertisements has also changed with the exponential growth of technology. One of the coolest projects we have ever done was making video brochures for our clients. Acclaim resoundingly endorses creative uses of print media because the impact can be incredible. Another creative use we found for printed media was the use of origami animals folded up into swans, pigs, and dogs so when someone took and unfolded it, they would have a fundraising flyer in their hands.

Print media has the capacity for a level of creativity that has been developed for thousands of years. In this insight we will not go too in-depth like those creative ideas above, but the positives and negatives of printed advertisements in 2024.

If you have ever seen the movie American Psycho, you will remember the iconic scene where Patrick Bateman’s character has an internal monologue describing the minute details of his compatriots showing their business cards to each other. It is a classy, professional, and straight-forward way to promote your business. It is the single most common way to advertise yourself or your business. Since the 1700’s it has been the preferred way to give contact information to other people.

Printing off business cards creates a contact point that is cheap, portable, and easy to distribute. It can also come in handy to win a free lunch here and there. The biggest positive to the classic business card is the personal interaction it takes to get that card into the hands of a client or potential partner. Speaking to someone about their needs as a customer, shaking their hand, and handing them a business card is such a common experience in the business world that movies have developed tropes about it. Another positive to printing business cards is how you can customize them with creative assets. While the Patrick Bateman reference was poking fun at the fact that all the business cards looked the same, you can absolutely have an incredibly creative business card printed for your business.

The downsides to business cards are minimal. They are small enough to fit into a wallet, so whatever information you need to put on there will have limited space. You can always overcome this obstacle by putting a QR code on it to direct these potential clients to your website. Since they are small, they are often lost and forgotten. If it can fit into your wallet it can fit under your car seat, it can slip out of your pocket, and it can even be thrown out on accident if the person is not paying attention.

What does a pamphlet say when you ask it for a favor?

Brochure (Bro, sure).

Anytime you have visited a doctor’s office you have undoubtedly seen informational brochures hanging in plastic racks on the wall with descriptions of diseases and care plans. They used to be in restaurants and stores, but the Coronavirus pandemic of 2024 widely wiped out that practice. Brochures and Flyers are a great medium for informational dissipation. Leaving a stack of them at a store, handing them out, or mailing them are all great options as they hold far more information than a business card and are barely harder to transport.

Brochures and flyers often go hand in hand with business cards, some people pre-emptively staple their card to the corner of a flyer whenever they hand them out. Putting QR codes on them for specific sections are a wonderful way to drive traffic to your website or even a sales opportunity. (You can create free QR codes for webpages free through Adobe Express) Brochures and flyers also can be put into bags after a sale, passed out at trade shows or business expositions, and are a great tool for mail campaigns to be sent out to homes.

Brochures and flyers are much more visually interesting than a business card and can dole out far more information. Your business card does not have the room for all your services, location, pictures of projects, customer reviews, etc. There are many movies from the eighty’s and ninety’s where protagonists would just throw handfuls of flyers off the tops of skyscrapers hoping that they would land in front of a perspective customer, which is until litter laws really ramped up after Al Gore’s climate PAC.

The downsides are few, but brochures and flyers can often be overlooked, thrown away, or criticized to the point of a negative experience. Printing off brochures and flyers does cost money, and if you are not capable of graphic design you may need to find a company like us here at Acclaim to design a modest layout for your prints. Next you must think about paper quality, gloss, lamination, all of which cost extra.

These large-scale print media have extremely high visibility in public spaces. Besides making sure you can hang a poster up somewhere; these are an excellent way to advertise in the print media space. Posters and banners are excellent for live events, promotions, and they help establish brand awareness. They have evolved over the years in the digital revolution but think of a baseball game with name brands on LCD screens all over the inside of the stadium. That is a poster. It is digital and requires electricity, but at its core it is a poster.

Posters and banners really grab attention, they are huge. They are designed to be eye-catching and not to be an inconvenience in any way. It is supposed to disrupt someone in a way where they stop and look at this gigantic piece of paper. Posters and banners can also be reused for multiple occasions, especially if they are not torn or folded too often during transportation.

The negatives start to get a little more noticeable here: posters and banners are expensive. The size of a poster or banner also requires some graphic design knowledge. You do not want to have your ad look like a few colored text boxes straight out of Microsoft Word, you want it to be visually appealing. Just as we said with the brochures and flyers, banners, and posters’ cost start to skyrocket if you want nicer paper, gloss, and how large it can be is also staggering. A billboard is one giant poster hung up next to a highway.

Focus on bold simple designs with your posters and try to create an eye-catching slogan or subject. You can always hire a company like us to take care of the finer details, but if it is not in your budget yet make sure to utilize something like Upwork or Fiverr to get your design needs met. If you plan to use a poster or banner multiple times make sure you do NOT skimp out on the material used for it. If it is cheap the edges will be worn, the areas you folded or rolled will become noticeably worn down. Just get something made of quality material if it is going to be used many times.

A good old-fashioned letter in the mailboxes of your prospective customers goes a long way. This practice has fallen out of practice lately, but it does create an opportunity for you. Even our bills and subscriptions are all online and done automatically, so the only things we receive in the mail lately are junk, coupons, debt collectors, and your HelloFresh box once a week. We will give you the positives, because it might be beneficial to you depending on your business, but this is the weakest print medium currently.

Sending a letter does give you the chance to be incredibly personal with your audience. It can be endearing to get a handwritten envelope with information catered to you specifically, but the days of handwriting letters are almost gone with the dust in the wind. Not to discourage you, but it will appear as junk mail. We cannot remember the last time we received a handwritten note encouraging us to interact with a company.

It is easy to personalize letters, and if you are going to start a print-mail campaign we recommend leaning into the maximum amount of personalization possible with your letters. Include clear calls to action and provide everything necessary for a perspective customer to respond back to you. Include a return envelope and if you want to go the extra mile, put a stamp and address on it. The less work a person must do the better in an email campaign.

It may sound intimidating to hire a marketing agency, but it might be a necessary step. We have plenty of insights on how to choose a marketing agency and how much they cost, but just remember they can charge you per project and will have you pay for labor and materials to get it done. Many agencies have an in-house graphic artist who could help get your poster or business cards looking up-to-date and snazzier than ever.

In addition to an in-house graphic designer there will be more people reviewing it and making recommendations. Nothing goes through Acclaim without a few extra pairs of eyes reading and writing down recommendations. In addition to those points, hiring professionals may seem expensive on the outside, but the time it takes them to complete designs is much faster and you can get your print media out to the world much faster, and with much more cohesiveness.

After working with a marketing agency, you will start to build a rapport with them. They will know your brand guidelines, they will know your goals, and down the road you can have a much more lucrative experience in choosing an agency. That is a common way to transition hiring an agency. Make sure to review the agency’s work first, do not jump into a partnership without seeing something on their website or in their office.

Just to recap, here are the different mediums we covered with their strengths and weaknesses:

1. Business cards
   1. Cheap, portable, effective, and common
   2. Forgettable, small enough to lose.
2. Brochures and Flyers
   1. Still portable, less common than business cards, easy to distribute.
   2. People lose them, mistake them as trash while cleaning, old fashioned.
3. Posters and Banners
   1. Eye-catching, reusable, engaging.
   2. Expensive, requires graphic design.
4. Direct Mail
   1. Personal, engaging, customizable.
   2. Expensive, can be confused for spam, exceedingly rare to see.

Having print media to hand out is incredibly powerful, but due to the cost you must be more strategic with this approach. We highly recommend working with a marketing agency to design and print your flyers, posters, and business cards.

Remember, you can always reach out to us here at Acclaim and pick our brains on anything related to print advertising or graphic design.