It’s 2018, and there are still an assortment of print publications distributed throughout the Dynamics community. A number of Dynamics ISVs still regularly allocate budget to display print ads in them. Given the digital age we live in, does advertising in a print publication, even a relatively niche one, still make sense? Or is it just throwing good marketing dollars away?
Magazine publishers don’t even attempt to claim that physical publications can generate a predictable and steady flow of serious sales leads. Those days are long gone. They do argue that, in this era of digital-everything, print publications have a narrow but important role to play in marketing technology products: primarily in building brand awareness. Well-targeted magazines “have the reach” to potentially influence brand awareness, argues one online publication targeted at magazine publishers. Moreover, certain print publications “are trusted” and “demand more attention” in terms of “a deeper reading experience” than online publications.
Even so, there are two major downsides to print advertising, which cannot be overlooked, and will not ever go away.
- Cost. Advertising in a print magazine is still very expensive, relative to what you can get, even in the best of circumstances. As an example, a full-page ad in a Dynamics publication can cost more than $3500. For that same investment, you can run a 60-minute webcast with MSDW, and walk away with 100 or more sales leads.
- No transparency. Print advertising offers almost no hard data regarding campaign performance, so you have no way of knowing if the magazine, and your ad, were even seen by the people you wanted to target. Digital marketing programs can track everything about your campaign’s performance, which in turn allows you make better follow-on marketing decisions.
Nowadays, any marketing activity you invest in needs to be able to provide you with insight into who is seeing your brand, signing up for your webcast, reading your articles or other content.
You could be a large ISV with vast sums of marketing dollars to burn, or a small ISV trying to build up your brand. Either way, unless you can get a print ad for free, it’s not worth spending your marketing dollars on something that doesn’t offer you a return you can at least calculate, let alone is reasonable.
