London Calling

In anticipation of the AMA’s Digital Marketing Day next week, I’ve been getting to grips with the practicalities of internet marketing and its associated acronyms: SEM, SEO and SMO to name a few of my personal favourites, i.e. Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation respectively.

This got me thinking about something a lot of us marketers take for granted – the basics of print design.

Sure, there may be best practise guidelines and plenty of examples to hand (just check our racks if you need some new ideas) but what interests me here is how we can use these new digital lessons to revisit our other communications mediums and, for instance, re-imagine our approach to print within this broadening context.

Here then are some of my own thoughts on new approaches to print and how to optimise it’s affect as a vibrant part of a 21st century audience engagement strategy that includes digital, mobile and the whole marketing mix.

Include more than just your URL

It used to be enough to include a simple www.myvenuename.com URL on your print, but now  I’d argue that simply listing your URL is almost counterproductive. Audiences expect you to have a decent website, after all they all have one via facebook, twitter or even personally branded sites, so how much value does simply listing this really add?

Print display is an ideal way to reach new audiences, so we should be thinking of how best to add calls to action that will encourage people to jump online to where all the added value content is,whether it’s curatorial blogs, video trailers for forthcoming productions or even just foregrounding the 3 clicks & You’re Booked benefits of a new online box office system.

Sell the experience

If online is trackable down to the last pay-per-click, then is modern print shifting to a more experiential model? Now that people are as likely to find you via search, land where they like on your site then navigate around by themselves, there can be real value in reconsidering how you want people to engage differently with your printed material.

Returning to the idea of Prestige Format print, what are the added advantages of being able to directly influence the journey people take as they browse your brochure? Are there ways you can look to make your content more immersive? What can we learn from the ways people browse magazines, newspaper or even books. Does your print have a throughline, something that foregrounds the wider experience of your venue or production? What stories can you tell that go beyond the usual mix of production copy, pull-quotes and how to find us information.

Offer multiple ways to engage

Our research shows that offering new ways for people to engage with you can help foster a more modern & up to date impression in the eyes of both new and existing audiences. For instance including SMS short codes on posters and print has been popular for a number of years and is increasingly catching on in our sector. However there’s still a need to tailor the offer to your audience.

Downloadable mobile wallpaper and similar content might be great for fans of blockbuster movies, and I’d count myself in that demographic, but I’m still looking for more from my friendly neighbourhood arts venue. Instead, are there vouchers I can text in for and use at the bar, can I sign up to controlled text message alerts that update me on the added programme around a main exhibition or even for the price of my original text message (perhaps tailored to a one-off premium charge) can I sign up to a new cheaper but more flexible mobile membership scheme with your venue?

Think about sustainability

Audiences are demanding, and we’re seeing mounting evidence that arts audiences are also highly likely to be engaged with broader cultural concerns like climate change. If you’ve not greened your print yet, then the costs of doing so are now highly competitive as more printers are appreciating the added business benefits of using vegetable inks and sustainable paper stocks. If your print is as sustainable as you can make it, is there more you could do to highlight this to audiences and communicate other green initiatives your organisation is working on?

Could you include especially selected pre-show dinner offers with sustainable restaurants, highlight the new selection of organic drinks and snacks in your bar or restaurant or, given that one of the largest parts of our sector’s carbon footprint comes from travel to and from a venue, partner with a friendly carbon-neutral taxi company?

I spend a lot of time thinking about print in one form or another and, whether it’s meetings with clients, planning campaigns, researching different audience segments or just sitting in a bar with friends and watching how people approach our racks, one thought comes through loud and clear.

People love print.

Note, I didn’t necessarily say financial directors, front of house staff or even marketers, just people. Oh, and before this starts to come across as a digital marketing versus trad marketing screed of some kind, let me also say I love my iPhone, am hooked on Twitter and buy a load of stuff online (including tickets) like everyone else.

And none of this means that print, and our relationships to it, isn’t changing.

Because I’m fascinated by evolution, I like to talk a lot about how the marketing mix functions as an ecosystem and how, like everything else, print evolves.

Evolution is slow, difficult to spot in the field and, crucially, not a conscious process, so adaptations that might seem entirely sensible to intelligent designers are often lost in favour of seemingly counter-intuitive but highly efficient solutions that work just fine in the real world.

For example, given the flexibility of modern websites to create new pages and update content in real time versus the predetermined size, page count and word limits of brochures, it would make sense that marketers would shift to a quicker, cheaper and more efficient flyer or postcard format with a simple call to action. The obvious tactic being to nimbly attract people’s interest then encourage them online as swiftly as possible so they land where all the good stuff is.

It makes sense in a tactical kind of way, and there’s likely all kinds of efficiencies involved, however looking at the print display campaigns we manage, and the trends over time, I’m starting to recognise the beginnings of a different pattern.

In simple terms, I’ve started to think of this emergent trend as a shift towards what I’ve called prestige format print.

Prestige print is an approach to design and content that eschews the lowest cost to highest content ratio of many brochures in favour of investing in a deliberately high quality product that enhances the reading experience.

Quick examples of prestige print would include an investment in higher quality print stocks, value-added copy such as Q&A’s with artists, and a design process that favours open white spaces mixed in with text and often devotes whole pages to single unadorned images.

The aim is to deliver an artifact with lasting value. A piece of print that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table, serves as a direct statement of your own interest in innovative arts culture and encourages repeat readings over a simple short-term browse and bin.

Now that the web is the default destination for information on demand, perhaps print is changing to meet a different set of audience expectations and satisfying a need for a more lasting and tangible engagement with modern venues. One that runs in parallel with the way we engage with our audiences online.