2024 Business Printing Guide: The Top Marketing Collateral Trends, Tech, and Tips
Print marketing collateral is often the first impression target audiences have with your brand or the last thing they see before converting. From brochures that resonate with pinpoint precision to sales tools that turn prospects into customers, it’s crucial for businesses to have a rock-solid marketing collateral strategy in place.
To help your business thrive from the first impression to the final stage, here are the top trends, tech, and tips for marketing collateral in 2024.
- > Top Trend: Personalized Marketing Collateral
- > The Tech Behind the Trend: Create Personalized Marketing Collateral with Ease
- > Top Tip: How to Boost Your Marketing Collateral ROI
Top Trend: Personalized Marketing Collateral
The top marketing collateral trend of 2023 was personalization–which isn’t exactly shocking news for most marketers. While personalization has been a top trend in marketing for years, personalized print marketing evolved substantially in 2023–and simply adding a customer’s first name to an envelope isn’t considered an effective personalized marketing strategy these days. Hyper-personalization and incorporating relevant digital elements were the top trends of 2023. Here’s what worked and what you need to know.
Geo-Targeted Print Marketing Collateral
Geo-targeting capabilities, similar to those used in digital marketing, were one of the most effective ways for businesses to reach local audiences. Geo-targeted print marketing collateral is tailored with unique images, content, and offers based on the location of target audiences.
For example:
- > Customized event flyers featuring line-ups and activities based on the recipient’s past event attendances and preferences.
- > University program flyers tailored to prospective students, highlighting courses, extracurriculars, and scholarships relevant to their expressed interests and academic background.
- > Sales tools for B2B showcasing specific tech solutions, case studies, and service offerings relevant to their industry and previous interactions.
- > Retail store grand opening invitations leveraging Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) to personalize direct mail campaigns based on specific neighborhood demographics–such as age, household size, or household income.
Marketing Collateral Enhanced with Interactive Elements
Personalization is being used in tandem with QR codes to incorporate interactive and digital elements in print collateral more than ever. This allows sections of brochures and flyers to come to life through 3D product models, virtual tours, or immersive videos. Pairing print and QR codes offers businesses a unique advantage: QR codes can be updated to adapt to changing market trends or individual preferences while the physical piece remains with target audiences, keeping your brand top of mind. For instance, retail stores have utilized this by sending out postcards and print catalogs with unique QR codes linked to each customer. The QR codes enable real-time personalized offers and product recommendations that reflect recent purchases or preferences.
Other examples include:
- > Wall or desk calendars from real estate agents with a unique QR code linking to a real-time list of properties that match their preferences.
- > Signage and window graphic displays at restaurants near major sports venues featuring QR codes that people walking by can scan for score updates and promotions.
The Tech Behind the Trend: Create Personalized Marketing Collateral with Ease
If your business hasn’t implemented personalized print marketing into your 2024 business strategy, now is the time to do so.
Why? Because personalized marketing drives growth. 93% of businesses with an advanced personalization strategy achieved revenue growth higher than their industry average.
The best part? Creating personalized print marketing collateral is easier than you may think. Here’s what you need to know.
Variable Data Printing
Personalized print marketing is synonymous with a digital printing technology called variable data printing.
Variable data printing allows elements of print marketing collateral–such as text, graphics, and images–to be changed from one printed piece to the next without slowing down the printing process. Using data from a database or external file, variable data printing is the secret sauce behind personalized print marketing.
QR Code Technology
QR codes were used everywhere in 2023 and will remain a key component of marketing collateral going forward, but there are two important things to note about QR code technology:
- QR codes come in two varieties: static and dynamic. Static QR codes are fixed and cannot be edited or updated, making them suitable for single-use purposes. Dynamic QR codes offer the flexibility to modify the destination URL or linked content as frequently and as many times as needed. We highly recommend using dynamic QR codes due to their agility. Another benefit of dynamic QR codes is the ability to A/B test and switch to the variant with a higher conversion rate.
- Don’t forget to report on the performance of QR codes. It’s relatively easy to set up performance tracking in GA4. For example, you can collect valuable user behavior data by using UTM parameters to identify traffic originating from each print marketing piece.
Top Tip: How to Boost Your Marketing Collateral ROI
To get the maximum ROI on marketing collateral in 2024, you’ll need a strategy that enables your business to adapt swiftly to market changes.
Use a Flexible Print Production Strategy
Modern print production models combine the speed of on-demand printing with a just-in-time manufacturing approach to ensure print marketing collateral is always up-to-date. This is particularly vital for new product launches, which often require quick updates to existing materials–such as corporate brochures, pricing documents, spec sheets, and other sales tools. It’s also a safeguard against unexpected events, like supply chain issues or market shifts, that can make large quantities of printed collateral suddenly outdated.
Here’s how it works. Rather than printing in large quantities, smaller batches of each asset are printed based on historical usage and forecasted demand. When the quantity drops to a predetermined threshold, an automated “shelf top off” notification is sent to your business. From there, your team can decide to replenish the stock, make adjustments to the asset, or deplete the remaining inventory and archive the asset until further notice. This print production and management strategy, also known as print marketing fulfillment, ensures the right amount of collateral is always ready to ship while avoiding both shortages and excess inventory.
When updates to print marketing assets are needed, simply send over a new file or upload the file to a marketing asset management platform, and you’re good to go. This also “future-proofs” your print marketing collateral and boosts your ROI.
Partner with the Right Printer
For more than 25 years, Artisan Colour has been synonymous with the artisanal mastery of print at the scale modern business demands.
By blending the meticulous precision and exceptional quality expected from master craftsmen with an extensive menu of state-of-the-art solutions, Artisan Colour has helped businesses stay ahead of the curve in dynamic business environments for more than 25 years.
Since 1998, Artisan Colour has continuously invested in innovative technology to provide comprehensive solutions designed to build brands and grow businesses, including:
- > Signage and Branding: business signage, wall and window graphics, indoor and outdoor banners, trade shows and events, retail displays, and wall wraps.
- > Direct Mail Marketing: direct mail campaigns, personalized direct mail, mailing lists, Informed Delivery, and web to mailbox.
- > Marketing Fulfillment: web-to-print, warehousing and storage, inventory management, kitting and assembly, and promotional products.
- > Digital Asset Management: prepress, premedia, online image libraries, photography, graphic design, image retouching, and color management.
Though our suite of services has substantially expanded, our commitment to quality and craftsmanship remains unchanged—ever driven by the artisan ethos that marked our humble beginnings.
Contact our team of experts today and learn how the Artisan Colour difference can support your marketing collateral needs and business goals.
