Integrating Social Media into Your Print Marketing Designs

Integrating digital marketing, social media, and print campaigns is something that companies are realizing they need to work on to get higher conversion rates.

Big media has caught on with live-tweeting during TV shows and multiple hashtags being shown on episodes of the reality TV show Survivor to encourage interaction and opinion sharing with viewers. The same approach needs to be taken with print marketing to seamlessly blend the worlds of print media and social networks.

Let’s explore how the social media world and print marketing can work congruently and successfully together for brand building and increased brand interaction.

When Print Comes Before Social

There are times when a customer will receive some print media before they ever consider jumping on their favorite social media channels.

Perhaps they visited a booth at a trade convention and picked up print media that way. They heard about the company through a friend and requested a product brochure through the mail or downloaded it online from your website.

The assumption is that social media comes before everything in this interconnected world we all now live in, but that’s simply not always the case. The reason is: It depends.

When the customer has the handout, they can be encouraged to visit you on social media. Make sure your business has a Facebook profile and that it is active with your followers liking and sharing your posts.

Twitter can not be overlooked as it is often the best way to learn what the company is doing right and what the company is doing wrong, which allows for quick adjustments.

Consistency Matters More Than Volume Posting

With social media interaction, the thinking is that more is better. More frequent posts on Facebook increase interaction so goes the thinking. Tweet 15 times a day to boost the level of response. However, what is often discovered over time is that the consistency and quality of the social media posts and replies/re-tweets tend to matter more.

Being consistent means posting on Facebook regularly, in a somewhat predictable fashion, and not sporadically with ineffective content. People want to be entertained, enlightened, or just surprised by social media. A channel that’s always serious loses some of the people who are searching for the personality behind the company or their company ‘voice’.

Keeping the Company ‘Voice’ The Same Throughout

We all have different voices in varied situations. Sometimes we’re serious. Other times we’re playful. It’s crucial to find a balance for that and not go too far in online communications, as even a deleted tweet will have been captured, re-tweeted, and distributed far and wide. The posted tweet just never goes away entirely. Customers appreciate the consistency by offering a voice that people recognize in all company communications, from social media to print media and on the website.

With greater consistency, the level of trust established between the brand and its customers only increases. Even when someone posts a complaint on a social channel, as long as the company handles it professionally and well, generally, customers will be forgiving; we all make mistakes.

Social interactions matched with meaningful marketing materials provide good balance and enable you to use each communication channel in different ways. A custom business envelope can say more than a 500-word Facebook post or a tweet. Online print shops (like Company Folders) offer foil stamping and embossing to ensure that you achieve both the look and feel that can bring attention to your social media profiles.

Showcase Your Print Media Online for Higher Open Rates

Facebook has a clever feature that allows you to target Facebook ads to people on your direct mailing list. By using a Facebook advertisement to reach the people on the list who will receive direct mail within a given time frame, you can show how the mailing looks on their computing device before receiving it.

By getting their attention, you plant a seed in their mind, and just like recognizing a company logo once having seen it before, when the Facebook ad looks like the print media, it’s more likely to be opened and consumed quickly. Doing both is also a neat way to connect social accounts to physical mail in ways most companies fail to consider trying to do or are not aware that it’s even possible.

Have an Email List? Do They Use Social Media?

Every company should be working their email list to build it up and interact with their customers and prospective customers. Notify subscribers about a new product release, an updated version, or a new blog post with important information about a product recall. Either way, staying in touch via email is important because, unlike with social media accounts, the company has control over the email mailing list in a way that they never will via social media.

Using the email list to promote the social channels that the company uses is a great way to interact on a different level. The one-on-one and group communication methods used on social media are other than the one-directional email newsletter. Promoting social accounts prominently helps to encourage subscribers to get on board with their social usage. When they like what you say in your emails and the linked articles from your website, they’re more likely to want a closer connection to interact when necessary or when they prefer it.

Choosing Social Platforms Wisely

For huge conglomerates, interacting across every primary social media channel makes sense using the maxim: Be where the customers are. For smaller businesses, the situation is different because there are so many proper social media channels now and not enough time to use all of them.

SMEs are helpful because not every social channel is suitable for their business or the type of communication they wish to have with their audience. It also won’t be possible to match their company’s voice with every channel as some, like Instagram, won’t necessarily be suitable for serious business customers.

Don’t Hide Your Social Contact Info in Print Marketing

One of the mistakes that companies make is not ensuring their social media details are visible across all print marketing materials. It gets forgotten or is barely a footnote, perhaps with the assumption that everyone is already obviously signed up.

For companies in a position to do so, offering an incentive to sign up to a social channel and supplying proof is an excellent way to encourage interaction. A coupon with a discount on their following purpose or exclusive early bird access to a forthcoming product launch is two ways to increase the number of people who read a mailing and jump on the social accounts.

Remembering to integrate social media and print marketing might seem like an obvious point. Still, the people who create print marketing often are not the same ones who manage social media accounts. A meeting of minds must happen to successfully cross-pollinate the sign-ups across print and digital.