The Power of Printing
By Andrew Shedden
Do you really need a four-colour brochure? Why bother with a printed brochure when you can just put your brochure online? With the rise of the Internet many marketers are questioning if printing has any relevance in modern communications. The answer is printing most emphatically does have an important, albeit different, role to play in the marketing communications field.
Many business pundits proclaimed that the Internet would spell the death of printing. After all, how could printing compete with a seemingly no cost way of reaching millions of people all over the world? With a click of a mouse they could travel around the block, or the globe.
While these prognosticators accurately predicted the rise of the Internet they couldn’t see how, in a perverse way, its very rise could be good news for printing. The fact is the very popularity of the Internet is making it more important than ever to know how to effectively market with direct mail.
The problem with the Web
The problem with the Web is very simple - you can’t be seen. Don’t let anyone tell ya any different. Anyone who thinks they can get top search engine rankings for their new site without spending big bucks is sadly delusional. If your site gets indexed by the overworked search engines and directories you’ll be lucky to be listed in the top 100. If you’re not in the top 20 you might as well go home.
There are millions of sites on the Web with thousands of new sites being added daily. This explosively geometrical growth means the clutter on the Internet is worse than you could ever imagine. If you think getting your advertising read in a major metropolitan newspaper is a tough task, imagine how difficult it is being noticed when there are tens of thousands of businesses competing with you in any business category you’d care to think of.
A pay per click primer
Once it began to dawn in people that even getting a top 100 listing on the search engines was virtually impossible it became obvious a better way was necessary. This ushered in the birth of the pay per click (PPC) search engine.
With PPC you pick specific keywords or phrases related to your business and bid on them. When one of your keywords or phrases is entered in the search engine in question your site description or an advertisement shows up on the screen. You only pay when visitors click on your description or advertisement, which directs them to your site.
The problems with pay per click
PPC is a great idea with a fairly obvious weakness. The demand for the keywords determines the price you need to bid on them. This means that the companies with the deepest pockets lock up the most desirable phrases. For example you can buy the keyword phrase “mom’s best octopus recipes” for considerably less than “website design.” Certain keywords are well over $1 each. This means every click on your site is costing you $1 or more. At rates like these your site better be converting a good percentage of visitors to buyers.
Google has an excellent pay per click search engine we use extensively in our business. One of Google’s selling features is that you can restrict those seeing your advertisements to the countries of your choice. This is fine if you sell to national markets but somewhat less advantageous if you want to sell within a 100km radius of your business. It is virtually useless if you want to sell to local markets.
While there is a move afoot to begin offering more tightly focused geographically based searches on the Web we’ve still got a long way to go. Furthermore, the cost of clicks will continue to be driven up by competitors which means they will, as usual, dominate.
The future of printing
I believe the most effective use of printing will be to drive highly targeted traffic to rich media web sites. This may be done with sales letters, post cards, or other forms of printed materials.
The good news is that this will have a way of making the Internet playing field a little bit more level. Rather that trying to reach the top of the search engine rankings (highly unlikely and expensive) or paying ever-increasing amounts on pay per click engines (becoming more expensive by the day) you can utilize direct mail to drive traffic to your site. This will allow you to focus on local and regional markets and be noticed on the Internet without having to spend a fortune.
