Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

Print advertising can be the perfect way to make an online product or service stand out from the crowd.

At Hotcards, we’ve been noticing a trend amongst online businesses. Once they start to use print advertising, they come back again, and again, and again. It seems like print promotions are doing more for ebusiness than anyone might have guessed…

It’s hardly big news that the internet is the new frontier for business. Ever since the dotcom bubble burst, we’ve seen the rebirth of small business via the web. And it’s great that everybody can now have their own website and run their own business. It’s just too bad that this creates a marketplace where a legitimate, quality business can sometimes be indistinguishable from a fly-by-night scam.

Even as shopping online grows at exponential rates, there’s still a whole world of consumers out there who are wary of buying products and services online. This is not a huge concern for businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations. They simply provide websites as an additional service to their customers. But what’s a business that only has a virtual storefront supposed to do to build consumer confidence?

There are a few popular strategies that win over the average eshopper:

1. Having a really nice website. A professional look builds consumer confidence almost, but not quite as well as a low-budget, poorly assembled website gives them the “no” feeling. If your website is difficult to use, odds are visitors will click away and never return.
2. Proudly displaying your customer feedback. Since most of this stuff is fake, this old ploy is losing ground online. However, doing business through a service like eBay and connecting site visitors to your feedback rating can do the trick for businesses suited to this format.
3. Using link exchanging and banner ads to build up your presence in the online community. If consumers feel that you have been “recommended” to them by another source, they’re more likely to be confident in your reliability.

Now you’ve got the dedicated eshopaholic, but what about the average consumer who’s just as happy to take their business down the street? Particularly for those ebusinesses providing a service as opposed to a product, advertising that builds consumer confidence can be a challenge.

The reason I say this is particularly challenging for service providers is because a service offering in itself may not necessarily be tangible. So if your storefront is digital, and your service is difficult to grasp, print materials such as business cards, brochures, posters, and flyers can effectively anchor you to the consumer in a concrete way.

It is for these reasons that print advertising is an essential tool of successful ebusiness. Large, pre-internet companies use it religiously, and booming ebusinesses increasingly depend on it to connect with wary consumers.

This is a trend we see happening at Hotcards every day. A growing online business will have a few items printed through us. Next thing we know, they’re demanding large volumes and coming back for reprints and different types of materials.

Offering consumers something tangible that they can receive by snail mail or from your representatives, and that they can actually hold in their hand, is a huge step towards defining the legitimacy and dependability of your business in the mind of the average consumer. Print advertising can also make the difference between your business being just another hit on the old search engine, one bright idea out of many, and being the bright idea people actually remember.

There is no ebusiness, however small and specialized, that can’t benefit from print advertising. And because high quality, full color printing has become so inexpensive, it’s an investment that most entrepreneurs can’t afford not to make.

To learn more about print advertising strategies for your ebusiness, click here.