When thinking about how to promote your business, your mind might have drifted from one digital marketing approach to another. Perhaps you have considered overhauling your website, filling out your social media presence or even offering an app. However, what about print marketing?
Question marks have arisen about the modern relevance of print marketing. However, the real question should not be whether print marketing has a future but instead what shape its future will take. In the modern age, print can work well when either competing with or complementing digital.
The appeal of digital printing
It is possible that, right now, interest in digital printing – including production inkjet – has never been stronger. More and more printing companies have, over time, started investigating the technology and considering its implications for their own markets.
Furthermore, it opens up various exciting creative possibilities. Simply producing a high-quality print in itself no longer suffices. Instead, you should consider how to leverage your customers’ data so that you can effectively communicate one-on-one with the customer. This is exactly the kind of exchange where digital printing can fulfil its optimum potential.
How AR can augment your print marketing
What is AR? It stands for augmented reality, a technology where a device such as a smartphone or tablet is used to place an extra, digital layer over the physical setting the viewer can see. Animations, 3D models and even just images, sound and video production can all serve as such layers in AR.
Therefore, as Target Marketing explains, AR “can be used as a bridge between the physical world and the digital one.” The technology is more accessible than you might think, too, with both Apple and Google having invested heavily in their own AR platforms ARKit and ARCore respectively.
If you would like to share information that would look too cluttered on a business card, you could let AR users scan the card to bring that information up on their own screens. This could be time-sensitive information which you could simply update in an AR-compatible app, saving you from having to expensively reprint the details on new business cards.
What does the future hold for digital printing?
Of course, it’s impossible to be certain. However, Dave Johannes, a thoroughly experienced printing and mailing industry executive and a board member of inkjet user group thINK, notes that papers, inks and software tools have started evolving at the same pace as production inkjet equipment tech.
Johannes has predicted a “very bright” future for print, as noted by Printing Impressions. However, he has cautioned that printing technology is evolving so rapidly that the replacement cycle for printing equipment is now closer to computers than it is to the traditional seven-to-10-year cycle.
Therefore, if your own company hasn’t replaced its own printing tech in the last few years, now could be a good time to change tack. Tracing a firm like Duplo International lets you peruse various printing machines, like cutter creasers, die cutters and digital duplicators, for possible purchase.
