Printing flyers, stickers, leaflets and business cards gets you halfway with your print promotions. The rest comes down to distribution. But while physical print distribution faces challenges right now, digital print promotion could be a massive opportunity to market your brand and offering online.

Changing times = a change in strategy

These are challenging times for countless businesses. But they’re also times of change and opportunity, especially online. While our physical world has become cautious, and rightly concerned with all of us keeping our distance, our digital world is flourishing. There’s still plenty of opportunities to share your business cards and flyers online, to help get your name out there.

While it may be trickier right now to physically hand out your flyer, brochure or business card, ultimately, you only need people to see it for a moment, and to act on it – and that can be done on social media.

And, provided that you space out your social feed with plenty of other varied and valuable posts, you could even post a photo of your marketing prints every day.

How to promote your prints on social media

Social media is helping to bring more and more people together. Like virtual marketplaces, these sites attract vast crowds who aren’t just there to socialise, but to shop and do business too.

So don’t just limit your printed flyers and business cards to the physical world; these prints are an investment in your business – so get them seen! Post your prints on social sites, quickly and easily, and use them to promote your marketing materials and services to your target audience. Here’s how.

1. Take a great photo of your prints

The first rule of sales and marketing? Get attention. The best way to do that on social media (and especially Instagram) is with a large, beautiful, high-impact photo. But you don’t need a studio set up to photograph your flyers, brochures and business cards. Even a square foot of desk space with bright, evenly diffused lighting (and maybe some objects of your trade included) can create a fantastic photo of your prints that grabs attention, gets your brand out there, and instantly tells people what your business is all about.

The secret here is to edit and expose your photo well (each social site has its own recommended size for images) and to use a surface with a gentle slope towards you. This gives you the best angle for a professional, vibrant, super-close-up shot of your printed flyers, stickers and business cards. And, even if you aren’t a confident photographer, you can always ask someone who uses social media regularly – they’re never far away!

2. Spend plenty of time on the wording of your post

A powerful, high-impact social media post combines a great photo of your prints with interesting, well-written text that delivers value, and encourages people to take action. (This could be a like, share, call, or click through to your website.) While a great photo of your printed flyers and business cards will grab people’s attention, it’s then down to the text of your post to inform and persuade people into taking action. This could be a summary of your services, or even better, a fantastic customer review.

Alongside the photo of your printed business cards, flyers or brochure printing , craft a message that complements the image and tells people all they need to know. The key to good writing is re-writing, and that takes time – so spend an extra couple of minutes checking over the wording of your post. Ask yourself whether it clearly offers to solve your audience’s problem. Ask yourself whether it could compete with posts from the leaders in your industry – and if in doubt, search that social site to compare your post with your big competitors. Ultimately, these are what your posts are up against.

3. Harness the right tags and hashtags to grow your reach

While the steps above seem super-simple, not tagging photos or hashtagging text is where so many social posts fall down. Amazingly, there are still plenty of posts out there that don’t use any hashtags at all. Since social media operates on tags and hashtags, not using any on your posts is the equivalent of shouting your wares into an empty room – and so you may as well not post your printed brochures or business cards at all!

If social media sites are vast virtual arenas and marketplaces, then hashtags are the maps and signs that help people find what they’re looking for. Hashtags group you in with others in your industry. It’s like putting you on the right page in the phone book, or in the right expo event for your sector. With Twitter, it’s polite to use around five or six hashtags tops, while sites like Instagram allow and expect that you include an entire cloud of hashtags, separated beneath the text of your post.

Before you publish your post, take a while to search social media sites for your most popular industry hashtags. (If you’re feeling forensic, you can even compile a table, and list your top hashtags by their reach.) Adding these tags to your post will massively increase the number of people who see it, and even like it and comment on it. And, since you’re posting a pic of your printed flyers and business cards, there’s also a huge choice of hashtags like print, printing, business cards, design, small business, SME, paper love and many more to include as well – letting you reach entire communities who love print and printing too (and who may be potential customers for your own business.)

Additionally, since social media is all about connecting people, be sure to include other @accounts in your post’s photo or wording if it’s relevant – for example, the profiles of your partners, your customers, and us, your printers!

We hope these tips are useful in giving you additional avenues to market your brand, your business, and your printed brochures and business cards. If you’d like to learn more about our range of print products and services, click right here for our bestselling items or here to get in touch with our team.

For more on The Power Of Print Marketing check out this article on Retail Drive.

We work with everyone from small businesses and medium-sized enterprises to household brands and organisations, including the NHS, Salesforce, Network Rail and L’Oréal Paris. With decades of combined experience in printing everything from flyers and business cards to PVC banners, we’ve made it super-simple to order exceptional, professional prints quickly and easily online.

You can check out more articles here or click through to our store for beautiful, professional, attention-grabbing prints to share both physically and online. PrintUK.com