Adapting Printed Marketing Materials to the Web
As a sustainable business (or one trying to increase their sustainability cred.), reducing the amount of printed marketing materials is an ongoing battle. The thought of getting rid of all your printed materials may be tempting but sometimes it is just nice to have a tangible representation of your business to hand to someone. Also, if you just output the same artworks used for your printed materials as PDFs and post them to your website; you miss out on a lot of added functionality that the web has to offer. Your current printed materials have to be adapted to the web.
The goal is to print out the bare minimum of information about your company and get people to seek out additional information if interested. This strategy provides a person that is just meeting your company for the first time with a small bit of focused information that is easy to digest and evaluate. If they are interested they will check out your website, send you an email, call you, stop by your store, etc. (providing many methods to follow up allows people to use their preferred means of contact).
What you will create is a web of different contact points with corresponding levels of information and interest. The printed pieces that you have will be a business card and a few small flyers targeted at the different buyer personae for your company. These pieces will lead potential customers to different areas online or off where they can learn increasingly more about your company.
This post is intended to present the basic concept of adapting printed marketing materials to the web by strategically tying the offline world into the online one. In the next few weeks, I will cover this topic in greater detail and the posts will ultimately be summed up in ebook format that will be available for free.
Please provide your comments and reactions below so I can make sure to address them going forward.
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One factor to consider in choosing the medium is learning styles–how people take in information best. The web does not work equally well for all, and some will “get” your company's core message best from a tangible 3-d printed piece than from the web. From a sustainability standpoint, I also question the “all print is bad” argument that I'm hearing so much of now. The point is not to have as little print as possible, it's to have smart, strategic print that tells the core story in a compelling way that interweaves with other media.
I'm curious about the hierarchy order in your chart. Yes, social networking is “more information,” but in your hierarchy, I'm surprised that the ultimate in info is not your website or blog. Aren't social networking opportunities more conversational tidbit oriented, not major blocks of info? I'll be interested to read in future posts how you see this. Your hierarchy works as shown if the goal is more interaction, not more information. It's incomplete, though. The ultimate aim is a face-to-face conversation that leads to a new customer relationship, yes?
Thank you for the comment. You bring up some good points.
Reading off a piece of paper versus a computer screen is more of a preference than a learning-style but I do agree that some marketing messages are better suited to print depending on the goals they are trying to accomplish and the demographic they are targeting. The proportion of print versus electronic pieces will of course need to be tailored to the company’s target markets.
From a perfect world sustainability perspective, printing anything is bad because even 100% recycled paper has to be produced and trucked around. I feel that print is still a vital part of marketing but the macro-trend is leaning more toward online content. The goal is to print only what is necessary for your company to succeed and what you print should have the least environmental impact possible (local producers, recycled and recyclable content, natural inks, versatility, etc.).
Perhaps my chart is a bit indistinct. By “more information” I am talking more to the specificity and relevancy of the aggregated information, less to the specific amount of any one source/conversation. There is also a component of believability as you move from left to right. The more input that other people have to the conversation, the more likely it is to be taken at face value.