Build Brand Trust with Print Marketing and Advertising

I write quite a bit about the trust bump of printed magazines, how appearing in print – whether in ads or editorial content – can elevate your brand’s trust quotient across channels. Around here we know it to be a fact, confirmed by our own customers.

That trust helps explains the massively higher ROI of printed direct mail over email.

“Judging from figures posted by the Data & Marketing Association, 4.6% of all direct email elicits a response, whereas the corresponding response rate with email is a mere 0.12%,” writes Satyajit Routray in TweakYourBiz. “Hence, of 100,000 recipients of direct mail, 4,600 are likely to buy.”

And it’s not just direct mail, but print advertising that gets to benefit from print’s trustworthiness, Routray continues.

“In a press release on the PR Newswire website, the research institute Marketing Sherpa reported what it found from surveying 2,400 US consumers,” he notes. “The survey asked recipients to sort advertising channels into “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” categories – and the findings were eye-opening.”

Those eye-opening results? Fully 82% of Americans trust print ads in newspapers and magazines, while just a quarter of Americans trusted online pop-up ads. (We already know that digital ads rank low on the trust meter.)

Interestingly, as Daniel Burstein at Marketing Sherpa notes, even a well-respected brand that publishes in print sees a bit of that trust wear off when their content is published online.

There’s a very high-value online content – even most print publications publish online as well – but that real value is drowning in a sea of mediocrity or worse, and as a whole, it damages consumers’ trust,” he is quoted as saying in Routray’s article.

In the incessant din of the online world, which seems to grow louder and more intrusive by the day, look to print to put out a message that will be more trusted from the moment it is received.