Home > Learn > How to Improve Your Fall Marketing Campaign With Print

Leaves are changing, football is on TV, and pumpkin-spiced everything is back it must be fall.

This season presents a great opportunity for businesses to create unique marketing campaigns that play off the holidays as well as the emotions of your customers.

While many companies will use digital marketing and videos to showcase their heartfelt holiday campaigns, small businesses can accomplish the same using printed materials and a much smaller budget. Here are five ways you can use print marketing to improve your fall marketing campaigns.

1. Set the Right Mood with Fall Colors and Templates

You already know how important selecting the right images and templates can be for your print marketing materials. Carefully designed flyers and banners can help draw the eye and make your designs stand out.

Like any season, selecting the right color schemes and palettes can help create an emotional response from consumers. In the fall, orange and black immediately reads as Halloween while a mix of orange and brown gives more of a general fall or Thanksgiving feel.

When crafting your seasonal printed marketing materials, it's important to avoid the temptation to over-design - colors specific to a season should not make it difficult for the reader to identify your business. Your customers still need to recognize your brand or logo. If they can t, then you ve strayed too far away from your brand standards. Start with a neutral brand color and build in seasonal colors from there.

Related articles: How to Create Your Visual Branding Strategy With MyCreativeShop, 10 Design Lessons from Starbucks' New Brand Guidelines

2. Send Mailers Before Your Competitors

Most retailers will point to Thanksgiving and Black Friday as the major fall holidays to target for potential shoppers. However, a Deloitte study in 2018 found that 64 percent of people planned to start their holiday shopping before the Thanksgiving holidays. 

Instead of waiting for the time that your competitors will reach out, beat them to the punch. Build your direct mail campaign around these fall times:

Even if you have your mind set on fall campaigns around holiday shopping, you should send your mailers out early. Not only will this help customers think of your business when it s time to begin shopping, but you ll have less competition from other mail because the USPS is expected to deliver up to 15 billion pieces of mail during the peak holiday season in 2019. 

3. Follow Your Nose into the Fall Marketing Season

Tear-off coupons and QR codes are great methods to make your printed mailers interactive. But don t stop there. According to FragranceX, people are 100 times more likely to remember something they smell.

Stimulate different senses with your print marketing assets this fall season. You re already using sight and touch because your customers are physically handling your printed materials and reading the content on them. Adding scents can go a long way to encouraging customers to engage with your brand. What s more, fall is associated with many signature scents, including:

Simply add scratch and sniff elements or scented paper in your marketing to take advantage of these emotional responses from your potential customers.

4. Help Customers Look Ahead to Next Year

Postcards and other simple mailers are great for promoting your sales and new products, but chances are most businesses are doing the same thing. A smart strategy could be to mail a printed calendar to your customers and prospects, because something that provides actual value to their lives is less likely to get thrown away.

Even in the current digital age, nearly 30 percent of people still rely on paper planners and calendars to organize their days and manage time. While a postcard or flyer is great for attracting attention for a limited time, a calendar can put your brand in front of your customers for 365 days a year. Be sure to add your logo and social media accounts to ensure they remember your brand.

Alternatively, consider creating a postcard mailer featuring a condensed calendar of important dates throughout the year, such as new product launches or sale and clearance events. Your customers will be empowered and in the know, making them far more likely to shop with you this fall!

Related article: 8 Direct Mail Marketing Strategy Tips From the Experts

5. Pair Your Print Marketing with Other Channels

Print is a great tool for your fall marketing campaigns, but it needn t be the only medium you use. Digital marketing, including emails, social media, and display ads, pair well with print.

A recent study by Canada Post found that sending mailed materials at the same time as using digital channels helped improve brand awareness and customer engagement. In fact, the organization found sending direct mail immediately following an email outperformed the average for single channel campaigns by 40 percent.

If you have robust contact information for your existing customers and prospects (and you have received their opt-in permission to send them emails), use a multichannel strategy to drive  conversions.

Fall Marketing With Print Campaigns

Your fall marketing campaigns often have the same goals as the campaigns you d run any other time of the year to encourage customers to make purchases.

In the fall, many companies connect their marketing campaigns to the emotions that are naturally associated with the changing of seasons and approach of the holiday season. Your challenge is to keep these feelings and buying behaviors in mind while creating a campaign that s unique and makes you stand out above the crowd.

Related article: 10 Halloween Flyer Templates for Small Businesses

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Ready to launch? Check out our customizable holiday templates before the leaves start to fall!