For the longest time, postcards have been the only option of business owners if they want to advertise their products and services. However, since the inception of the Internet, digital marketing has taken its place as the most popular advertising strategy. While one may argue that postcards are no longer a viable marketing tactic and are now obsolete, some may think otherwise.
After all, although it’s true that the vast majority of the world’s population now defers to the Internet for their commercial decisions, some still look at physical promotional materials.
So, just like how fax services are still relevant despite emails and instant messaging, agencies like Catdi postcard printing services are still very much alive despite the advent of digitalization. But, how can these types of services help grow your business? Before you delve deeper into that subject, it’s crucial to understand how one grows a business in the first place?
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How Can You Grow Your Business?
When you look into postcard printing services, you’ll find that most resources talk about their benefits as a marketing tool. While it’s true that postcards are excellent promotional materials, that’s not the only reason why they can help grow your business. After all, marketing isn’t the only facet of a company.
Here’s a closer look at four of the essential elements of business growth:
- Branding: This pertains to any action a business takes for the purpose of setting itself apart from its competitors. In short, it’s when you make the business look unique.
- Public Relations: This element refers to the practice of guiding or manipulating, so to speak, the perceptions of customers and prospects about a particular business.
- Marketing: Marketing is when a business attempts to reach out to existing or prospective customers in hopes of converting them into sales later on.
- Customer Loyalty: While marketing is essential for getting new customers, customer loyalty allows you to maintain or even strengthen your relations with existing customers.
So, where do postcard printing services fit in all this? Well, for starters, the benefits of postcard printing services encompass all four of these elements, and here’s why:
- You Can Establish Branding With Custom Postcards
Before anything else, it’s essential to get rid of the thought that postcards are as inefficient as they were before. Much like how the Internet has grown since its inception, postcard printing services have also become quite versatile over the years. In fact, their versatility might be the main reason why postcards remain relevant despite the many other alternatives of business owners.
For instance, agencies like Catdi now allow clients to customize their postcards. For one, you can include all sorts of elements and components in a postcard, such as:
- Your business logo
- Contact number
- Imagery (e.g., icons, stock photos, illustrations, etc.)
- Call-to-action
- QR codes
These elements can go a long way in establishing branding and giving your customers something to remember your business by. After all, if you move forward with using Catdi postcard printing services, you’re most likely one of the few businesses, if not the only business that makes use of postcards in the locality. That, in itself, makes these types of services a worthwhile endeavor for branding.
- Postcards Are Handy For Events Aiming To Improve Public Relations
While one may argue that customizability only affects the aesthetics of the postcard, that’s often not the case. Being able to opt for custom postcards allows you to have varying designs for your different goals, particularly when you want to hold an event to improve public relations, such as:
- Opening: Every entrepreneur knows of the importance of promoting the business before it opens. It helps you gain traction and momentum before you even start with the venture.
While there are several ways to promote the business opening, using postcards might be one of the best ones. That’s because you can include pretty much all the info people need about the business, like what it is, where it is, and what it’ll offer to the market.
- Expansion: As your business continues to grow, you’ll have to expand your company by settling in different locations and establishing a new branch. And, just like how you need to promote the opening of the business, you should also advertise the new branch.
In that case, a postcard would also be quite handy as you can create a new design specifically for that branch. You can also include information pertaining to that particular branch by adding its physical address or even an image of the location into the postcard.
- Announcements: One of the best ways to grow your business is to hold all sorts of events and special occasions to keep the customers engaged.
Examples of these events include discounts, sales, special offers, product demos, and more. Typically, you’ll post the announcement to social media platforms as it’s more convenient, but distributing postcards makes the experience more authentic for customers.
- Coupons: For the longest time, coupons were designed like tickets, but with the advent of the Internet, they now come as a digital file. It might be more convenient, but physical coupons are more memorable, and custom postcards will be ideal if that’s what you’re going for. Furthermore, you can create postcards that cater to digital users by adding QR codes and links that’ll allow them to claim their coupons through your official website.
What makes postcard printing services ideal for growing your company is that you can use them for public relations at any point. You can utilize postcards when launching the business, and even until it grows big enough to have several branches. Simply put, postcard printing services would rarely become obsolete to a business that knows how to make use of it.
- Postcard Printing Service Is An Effective Advertising Tool
Considering the advancements in information technology and communications, you’d assume that such a traditional way of information dissemination would no longer be effective. However, there are many reasons why entrepreneurs and marketers hold postcard printing services in high regard. Below are a few examples of those reasons.
- Print Readers Generally Have Longer Attention Spans
Unlike most gadget users, those who read prints, such as brochures, banners, and postcards, have a relatively longer attention span. Their longer attention span would mean that they’re more likely to remember the information and details you include in your marketing campaigns, making them a much easier and, therefore, better target.
- You Can Use Them In Conjunction With Other Marketing Tactics
A lesser-known advantage of postcard marketing, or any other type of print marketing, for that matter, is that it doesn’t conflict with other marketing tactics. That means you can use it in conjunction with digital marketing tactics, like content or social media marketing.
- It Doesn’t Take Long To Launch Postcard Marketing Campaigns
Another difference between postcard marketing and other tactics is the fact that the former doesn’t take long to launch the campaign. Typically, you only need to provide the specifics of the postcard to an agency, such as the necessary info, color scheme, and design.
Once that’s done, the postcard printing service provider should supply you with the postcards, and what’s left to do is to hand them out to your target audience.
- Postcards Don’t Require One To Have A Device
Although digital marketing is, indeed, convenient and practical to some extent, it only caters to prospects with a desktop computer, mobile device, or Internet connection. On the other hand, you can hand out postcards to people without any of these gadgets or utilities.
- It’s Possible To Laser-Target Your Desired Audience With Postcards
Usually, when launching a digital marketing campaign, you can only specify what country or state to target. However, in the case of postcard marketing, you can choose to distribute the postcards to a specific location, be it in your local grocery store, a nearby church, or a school. This allows you to laser target your desired audience.
- Postcard Printing Services Can Build Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is one of the most substantial elements of a business. Not only does it allow you to increase profits by catering to existing customers, but you’re also preventing them from going to your customers. As such, every entrepreneur must know how to build customer loyalty. And, what better way of doing that than by establishing a loyalty program for your customers. If you plan on doing just that, postcard printing services will come in handy for the operation.
For one, loyalty programs often involve discounts to your regular customers. While it’s true that you can offer discounts digitally, providing them via postcards would lead to a more authentic experience. Furthermore, some consumers consider tangible objects, like postcards, as collectibles. If you can establish your own set of postcards, you can provide your existing customers with another reason to continue doing business with your company.
Conclusion
Despite the advent of the Internet, you’ll still find a handful of companies and businesses that make use of unconventional services, such as postcards. While there are disadvantages to these services, they’re still reasonably useful in the right circumstances. They’re convenient for growing your business, as postcards can be beneficial for branding, public relations, advertising, and even customer loyalty. Nevertheless, it’s best if you use them in conjunction with other growth tactics.
