5 advertising and marketing ideas to outperform your competitors

In the modern age, where customers are overwhelmed with information about brands and products both online and offline, outperforming your competitors can be a challenge.

Not only do you need to capture your audience’s attention amongst all the advertising and marketing ideas, but you also want to encourage them to learn about your product and ultimately become long-term customers. When it comes to making an impact and initiating a connection, print marketing is making a comeback.

While purely digital advertising and marketing ideas may seem cheap and simple to execute, if used effectively, print marketing could be the answer to beating your competitors and winning potential customers. That’s thanks to the benefits of haptic or tactile memory, which encourages interactivity with your brand, increased recognition and a sense of connection that continues long after the audience has picked up your brochure or read your leaflet.

However, it is no longer enough to simply choose a nice design with an interesting colour scheme. To truly outperform your competitors and ensure a positive ROI from your print marketing, you will need innovative advertising and marketing ideas that take advantage of modern approaches to go one step further than competing organisations.

You’ll need to consider the playing field, do some research and figure out how you can leverage a combination of quality print products, bold design and innovative technology to surprise and delight your audiences with your posters or brochures.

Luckily, we’re here to tell you about the best print advertising and marketing ideas that will help you break through and leave your competitors behind.

Best print advertising and marketing ideas to stay competitive:

1. Combine online and offline

Many businesses see their digital marketing and print advertising and marketing ideas as two approaches that help them achieve their goals: brand awareness and lead conversion.

While leveraging both approaches at the same time will allow these brands to reach a wider target audience, many are missing a trick that you can take advantage of to get the most out of your print marketing campaign. Instead of seeing your online and offline approaches as two roads leading to the same destination, why not build a bridge between the two and use them together? You’ll harness the immense power of digital and print by digitising your print marketing, and you’ll also take advantage of a gap in many of your competitors’ campaigns.

Why decide between print and online marketing when you can combine the two?
A great way to do this is to use your print advertising as a portal to your digital presence, which means you can track responses to your print ideas through online interactions, and join the dots between your two marketing strands for maximum effect.

For example, AR applications such as GizThis, which are based on the idea of the QR code, allow you to transform your logo or an image into a trackable portal that takes your audience to an online location of your choice. This can be a video, an exclusive offer, an article or an information page. In this way, your printed materials become a window into your online presence, and you can combine your print and digital marketing techniques to attract and retain customers more successfully.

2. Target specific locations

Your competitors may have a very professional poster design, but unless they place their posters in strategic locations where interested audiences will find them, their investment in eye-catching designs will be wasted and they will lose customer conversions.

Consider these advertising and marketing ideas to avoid acting like them.

So carefully consider the target audience for your print materials and pinpoint specific places, such as shops, cafes and public services, where they spend time.

For example, if your poster advertises a night of live music, asking the owners of a record shop or urban clothing shop if you can place your posters in their shop can be a great way to make sure your print marketing reaches the eyes of those who already have an interest in the product or event you’re trying to promote. By targeting specific audiences, you can go one step further than your competitors and ensure that your print marketing is seen by the right people.

3. Add embellishments

In particular, if you plan to distribute your print marketing at an event such as a conference, trade show or symposium, where the audience will receive a large volume of print marketing materials, you’ll need your print marketing to be eye-catching and different. That means you sometimes have to take advantage of people’s taste for fancy-looking objects, or that extra special touch.

An example of this is foil stamping or lamination. If you haven’t heard of this dazzling approach, it essentially involves applying a layer of foil to your design, usually using a hot stamping press that applies heat and pressure to coat your poster design with a shiny, attractive layer. This foil can come in a variety of designs, including metallic, pigment, pearlescent and even holographic options to really make it stand out from the crowd.

This technique is especially appropriate if you are promoting a technology product or event, a space-themed party or exhibition, or simply if you want to draw your audience’s attention to certain words or letters. Extra embellishment can help you outdo your competitors, as these extra touches can encourage your audience to keep your poster or flyer to decorate their homes if it looks special, high quality or with an eye-catching design.

Plus, foil stamping makes your printed materials last longer, so they can really stand the test of time.

4. Use calls to action

A key print marketing mistake is not giving your readers a concrete action to take as a result of finding, reading and enjoying your print marketing. Even if your competitors make sure their brochure contains all the information about their new product, if your audience is not encouraged to follow a specific instruction, your lead conversion rates will remain low. Conversely, companies that use attractive, carefully designed and positioned calls to action in their print marketing efforts will see higher customer conversion rates and a better response to their brochures or posters.

Adding calls to action to your print products increases sales and makes your print campaigns trackable

So a key advantage you can gain over your competitors is to give readers a clear and logical next step, such as “Buy Now”, and a short link they can follow to buy a product they have seen in your brochure. To increase the appeal of your CTA, you could even add an incentive, such as a 20% discount or a limited availability offer. In this way, you use your print marketing as a way to not only capture the attention of your audience, but also to convert interested parties into actual leads for your product.

5. One of the best print marketing ideas. Get textures.

One of the fundamental advertising and marketing ideas, think about the look of your print marketing, but what about the feel?

Cheap poster printing can often leave results that look flimsy or low quality. But with highly specialised offset printing presses you can take advantage of high-quality prints that not only look great, but also feel special.

So, one interesting way to get an edge over your competition is to think in terms of meaning.

They will focus on the visual sense, but you will go further and focus on the visual and tactile sense of your customers as well.

Besides ensuring the quality of your paper, a good way to make your print advertising textured is to try embossing or debossing, which raises or lowers parts of your brochure or leaflet so that your customer can interact with your print marketing through their touch as well.

Also, why not experiment with interesting brochure folds that encourage interactivity and textural play with your print marketing?

This will help your brand or organisation take its relationship with its print audience to the next level and gain a valuable advantage over your competitors.