With so much emphasis on the Internet of Things, Smart Phones, Tablets and all things digital, it might seem like flyers, postcards and brochures are antiquated notions — who bothers with paper these days?

Actually….believe it or not, print is still very much alive, especially when it comes to marketing materials.

Although we’ve all had to learn new ways of dealing in digital, there’s nothing that replaces the tactile experience of having a brochure or sales sheet to carry home from a business. By giving your customers something they can hold in their hands, you’re continually reinforcing their mental connection with your business. Every time they pick up that brochure or flip through your catalog, their imaginations run wild with the possibilities.

What was Ordinary is Novel Again. Print may seem like an old idea, but in many ways print marketing materials will set your business apart from your competitors, especially if you use them along with your digital marketing campaigns. So many businesses have prematurely abandoned print media that even popular advertising venues like magazines and newspapers are looking remarkably less crowded than in years past. In the world of marketing, doing something different is the only way to get noticed — and traditional, reliable print marketing campaigns are no longer the norm.

Direct mail used to be considered a low-return vehicle — if you had a return rate of one to five percent from a mail blast, you had really spectacular results. That was back when your potential customers had to deal with a pile of direct mailers every day, to cope with the mess they simply tuned out. Today, they’re paying more attention to things companies bother to put onto paper and beginning to filter out digital messages instead. It’s just human nature, we have to sort all the incoming sales messages or we’d spend all day looking at ads.

Novelty gets our attention, and how. It feels a little weird to proclaim that paper marketing materials have become a novelty, but it’s increasingly true with each passing year. Even pizza coupons have gone digital — so if you want to really make your Internet marketing grab attention, you’ll need to bring in some printed materials.

By using your printed sales materials to support your digital marketing efforts and your digital marketing efforts to generate ideas for useful printed materials, your marketing campaigns will have a harder impact. Everybody and their grandmother has gone digital, as a business marketer, you’ve got to find a way to stand out from the crowd: printed materials are a simple, time-tested way to do just that.