Print magazines can be an unusual opportunity for niche ecommerce merchants.
Digital advertising dominates ecommerce, with good reason. The ads are measurable, easily updated, and often produce instant results. Place an ad and get a sale on the same day.
In contrast, print advertising does not usually produce immediate results and is not easy to measure. Yet the medium has unique values that established marketers appreciate.
Take Amazon’s October 2024 printed toy catalog, for example.
“We’re not surprised to see Amazon leaning into their toy catalog,” said Polly Wong, president of Belardi Wong, a New Jersey-based marketing firm, in a correspondence with Practical Ecommerce.
“Hundreds of brands have added direct mail and catalogs to their mix over the last five years because print offers unique advantages to digital marketing — more real estate to show your product and entice consumers to buy, 100% reach, high lifetime value from customers who respond to print, and a very effective way to stand out to new customers.”
In essence, print promotions — such as catalogs or magazine ads — complement digital advertising.
Brand Advertising
Magazines and printed catalogs can provide valuable brand advertising, an often overlooked approach by ecommerce marketers.
Brand ads in a magazine tend to linger and get many “impressions.”
“An ad in print will sit in someone’s home or near someone’s desk for months upon months, sometimes even years,” wrote Troy Klongerbo, general manager at Homestead Living magazine, in an email interview.
To Klongerbo’s point, most magazine subscribers flip through the publication several times, repeatedly referring to articles and ads. His publication often includes recipes and reference material so that issues become “fixtures” in the kitchen or the shed.
Print magazines such as Homestead Living can linger on a coffee table or desk for months as subscribers revisit them.
Printed ads can also build trust. A company with a printed ad appears to be established and trustworthy.
“There’s a deeper implied trust with words and pictures placed in print. Once printed, words and messages cannot be altered, providing for a sort of permanence. Digital ads, even the best of them, are ephemeral to a degree,” wrote Klongerbo.
Indications
While short-lived, digital ads provide solid data, which print does not. An advertiser must be clever about collecting and analyzing print performance and willing to accept indications.
Many print advertisers use several performance indicators in combination.
- Brand lift surveys. Measure changes in brand awareness, consideration, and favorability after exposure to brand advertising campaigns.
- Social media engagement. Monitor mentions, shares, and sentiment related to the brand, especially when an issue is first published.
- Website traffic. Pay attention to website traffic and engagement metrics. An increase in direct or branded search visits often indicates that print advertising is working.
- Share of voice. Compares the brand’s advertising or marketing presence against competitors within a specific market or industry.
- Direct response. Finally, thanks to coupon codes, subdomains, and QR codes, magazines and catalogs can capture some direct response data, but this, too, is indicative, not definitive. Ten scanned QR code visits may represent 100 consumers.
QR and coupon codes enable print ads to capture direct response data, as in this example from Homestead Living.
Affiliates
Some print publications use this last form of measurement — direct response — to run affiliate ads for ecommerce brands.
This affiliate relationship is relatively new in print magazines, perhaps borne out of influencer marketing. Modern advertisers are often comfortable with influencer relationships combining flat-rate and affiliate payments.
For example, a direct-to-consumer brand might pay an influencer a nominal fee to produce an Instagram Reel and then pay affiliate commissions to the influencer for sales made with her discount code.
Similar arrangments now occur in print. The advertiser pays a low flat rate to help offset the cost of printing and distributing the ad and shares the revenue tracked via a QR code.
If a brand’s typical affiliate share is 15%, the publication might receive 30% to 50%, recognizing that some shoppers will search for the brand or type in its URL rather than using the QR code.
Complementary
Branded print advertising can positively impact digital. Countless published reports confirm that branding boosts performance ads, driving relatively more clicks, engagements, and conversions.
In short, printed and online ads are complementary approaches to achieving marketing objectives.