Published on April 12th, 2016 | by Guest

Making Marketing Magic: When Print Media and Social Media Join Forces for Your Business

Should you market online or offline? Would you believe that the best marketing is one that combines the best of both worlds? Here’s how to meld social media and print media to make your print media boost your online marketing efforts.

Get The Right Equipment

Before you start to promote yourself in print, you should check out address & envelope printers — they can make all the difference to your promotional efforts. Having the ability to print both letters and envelops “on demand” means you are effectively a print house. And, you can write your own paycheck.

Promotion Via Social Media

When you send out print materials, you should also include your social media profiles so that people can find you online. This has the effect of promoting yourself both on and offline. You’re killing two birds with one stone. And, it makes it easy for offline readers to connect with you online.

Data-Variable Business Cards

Most business cards are static. That is, they contain only one piece of information which doesn’t change. But, you should use data-variable printing, which can change the back of your business card, depending on what you want to highlight. Data-variable prints can be set up to display Facebook comments, Twitter comments, reviews, sales and promotions, or anything you want.

You can even use special codes that people scan with their phone to upload your business card right into their phone. Then, you can change the data dynamically in the future and “push” it to people who have scanned your business card.

PURL Content Runs

Personalized URLs are a way for you to encourage people to visit your website via printed material. People enter a special URL that’s on your print media and are taken to an advertisement (or advertorial) that’s unique to every visitor.

Get Client Data With Print Media

All of the popular social networking sites let users identify their favorite content using “likes” or something similar. You can harvest this data for your own purposes. Facebook, for example, uses Audience Insights (its targeting platform) to help you better understand demographics of people using the site.

If you use this data, you can start to target users based on interest, age, income, whether they have children in the home, and other information.

While you cannot print out a list of names from the data, you can use this to build a better “buyer’s persona” which will help you craft better print media ad copy.

For example, if you know that your target market makes between $50,000 and $75,000 per year, and has 2 kids and drives an SUV, then you can use this to “speak the customer’s language.”

Furthermore, if you dig deep enough, you can figure out which movies they like, what they spend their money on, and a whole host of other data, which can be used in your advertisements.

Get Testimonials

Social media is great for testimonials. Use them in your print media. Include any reviews and Facebook notes that people have written about you. Just make sure that you have permission first.

In most cases, people will give you permission. And, you can keep asking people for their thoughts on your company, products, and services. Every comment is a potential testimonial for your site.

About the author:

Evie Norton works for a busy marketing company. She loves working with new clients, brainstorming ideas and creating an impact that people will notice. Her articles appear on business blogs around the web.

Tags: business, forces, magic, marketing, media, print, social, social media