6 Advantages of Print Advertising

1. Leveraged Credibility

Print publications that consistently offer readers high-quality, reliable content develop credibility, and advertisers can easily leverage this credibility. Known as the “halo effect,” brands who place ads in respected print publications receive the same positive feelings from readers that are associated with the publication itself. This means your ads can be seen as completely trustworthy, which makes generating leads and sales much easier.

For newer brands specifically, this is a great approach as you will be able to dovetail on the success of an existing publication. Your organization may still be a startup or only a few years old, but if the newspaper has a 30-year history and is featuring your products, your authority and credibility will be inherent to the readership.

2. “Influentials” Are Swayed by Print

An MRI Survey of American Consumers found that “influentials,” those consumers who have the ability to sway other consumers, are influenced by print ads, with 51% being influenced by magazines and 53% influenced by newspapers.

3. Print Readers Have Bigger Attention Spans

The digital age has pretty much killed the human attention span. We surf the web with six different tabs open while someone is instant messaging us, another is texting us, and “The Walking Dead” is on the TV in the background. We’re simply not as receptive to all of the digital advertising happening around us. Print readers, on the other hand, don’t typically multitask when they read a magazine or newspaper, making them far more receptive to the ads within the publication.

“While digital content is scanned quickly, paper-based reading is slower and more deliberate, leading to greater rates of comprehension and recall,” says Media Space Solutions. For advertisers, this means that traditional print media ads are more likely to make a lasting impression and, thus, lead to more sales.” That may be why neuroscientists have found that people are 70 percent more likely to recall your brand after seeing it in a print ad than in a digital ad. Other studies involving brain scans have found that physical ads activate different parts of the brain than digital ads, and viewing them “involves more emotional processing, which is important for memory and brand associations.”

4. Unplugging Is In We touched upon the fact that we are tech-obsessed creatures, but we are tech-obsessed creatures who have begun to understand the value of “unplugging” every now and then. When we do unplug from the digital world, we tend to turn to print media as a form of entertainment and engagement.

5. Print Ads Offer More Flexibility and Options

Print ads allow you to target your audience. You can choose exactly which section of the newspaper or magazine your audience is most likely to read, for you can choose to run ads in specialty newspapers targeting a specific genre – like Senior Spectrum!

Beyond these options, print allows you to tailor your campaigns to fit your budget by offering quarter-page, half-page, and full-page ads that can run for a single month, three months, six months, or a full year. And finally, advertising in print publications means you’ll actually work with a human being when buying your ad space as opposed to relying on an online algorithm to decide where your ads should live.

6. Print Ads Last Longer

Imagine if someone kept seeing your Facebook ads until they decided to delete their account. Or they kept finding your ad on Google until they decided to stop using Google. It sounds crazy, but print ads last until the content they’re attached to no longer has value.