Print Vs Online: The Battle For Promotion

When promoting your brand, you will more than likely begin by drawing up a marketing and advertising campaign strategy. You will be faced with the modern dilemma of whether to focus on print or focus on online marketing whether to use modern ideas like infographics and data storytelling, or more traditional media. Perhaps you only have the budget for one of the two, so which do you choose? You might be lucky enough to have a budget big enough to invest in both print and online, but how do you divide that budget? 50/50? 75/25? We might be able to help you with this, let’s compare the pros and cons of both to see which is best suited for your campaign.

ADVANTAGES

Print
Print advertising allows you to be specific and target the audiences that you intend to because you choose to advertise in a publication that the people you wish to target read. One of the main advantages of print is that it is a physical item that lives longer, in your office, in your home or wherever. Print publications are great passers – people often read them then pass them on to a friend or colleague, which means your advertisement has more eyes gazed upon it. By advertising in a magazine that has a certain status within an industry your company instantly gets associated with them, which gains you some extra prestige.

Online
From the moment you finish devising your advertising campaign you can begin online advertising, it is extremely speedy. The time period from buying advertising space to your ad going live is minimal. There is also a better return on investment (ROI) with online advertising because it is mainly focussed on performance based payment.

It seems online is a more cost effective and affordable form of advertising. One of the main advantages with online is the ability to track success, you can measure conversions and effectiveness through analytics tools.

DISADVANTAGES

Print
One of the advantages of online, as we have already discussed, is the speed your advertisements go live. One of the downfalls of print are that it can take months to get your advert in the public domain because of editorial and print schedules – this means your strategy must be placed well in advance. The risk with a print ad is that is gets shoved at the back of the publication with all of the other ads, known as the ‘graveyard’. Another pitfall of print is that you cannot track success, measure conversions or see any sort of results.

Online
There is always the risk with online advertisements that your ad can get lost in cyber space amongst the galaxies of other ads and spam. There seems to be a trust issue with online ads too. Where print publications are trusted and established, people tend to feel with online ads that they are only a click away from something sinister – a virus or something x-rated!

Although this may seem like an advantage, a pitfall of online is that your ad is present to an extremely wide audience. Too wide. The issue with advertising on such a broad spectrum is that you are not targeting a specific market or audience, you are just addressing a vast array of different people.