More news out of the print media sector today as our local newspaper reports on a huge wave of layoffs announced recently by Time Inc.

What does this mean for marketing?  Does this mean print is no longer a good investment for advertising?

At the end of the day, speaking purely from a business perspective, it comes down to value.  Forget the number of eyeballs the message reaches for the moment.  Examine the quality of those eyeballs that remain loyal to the print vehicle in question as a market for your product or service and compare that to the cost and potential exposure of other means at your disposal.

Sometimes a smaller audience of a higher quality can mean more than reaching a larger audience. It may also mean fewer competitors in a particular marketplace. The last factor is the cost of reaching that smaller audience.  Is it economical compared to other resources?  If you can reach a more lucrative demographic, one that is much more likely and able to buy your products it is worth considering.

As an active participant in the print media advertising sales arena until very recently I know first hand the decline in both advertising revenue and readership being experienced by most publications these days.  It’s sad to see the statistics but it is also undeniable that print publications are experiencing unprecedented changes.

Only time will tell whether this is a mere balancing out as new marketing vehicles enter the arena and a tightened economy forces businesses to choose rather than employ all of the various media offerings.

With the constant barrage of bad news coming from this sector it is hard yet to see an end in sight.  Unless the economy makes a hard turn in the positive direction in the very near future I predict there is more bad news to come simply because the winter months have historically been a slow time for print media.  In this climate this can only mean at least a temporary worsening before things improve.

An article posted back in August on a local blog foretells that Birmingham News employees will face layoffs in the early part of next year.  Are there other publications quietly making these kinds of plans?  Something to consider when signing purchase agreements far in advance.

As bad as it is, this news cannot be ignored since many marketing budgets are being planned now for next year.  Predicting what will happen in this economy is incredibly difficult and deciding where to put advertising dollars is always a big decision, much more so when the competition is this fierce for securing business.

Without the use of a crystal ball, the only thing to do is examine the data at hand.  Where are your potential customers most likely to be?  How much does it cost to reach them across the various media platforms available?  How many must convert to sales to reap a return on the investment?  Is this a realistic goal for the media selected? How much can your business afford to invest?  Can the results be tracked? Do you have a reliable plan in place to track the results?

When you are placing a print media buy you should get as much information as possible about the demographic reach of the publication.  What is the demographic makeup of the readership? How many paid subscribers?  This is a different question than how many the publication reaches since readership is calculated using a different formula and assumes pass-along readership, that is each copy of the publication is passed along to at least one other reader.  Most publications have a higher multiplier than just doubling their circulation since they assume more than two people will read most copies circulated.  A certain amount of educated guessing goes on here based on reader surveys and other market data.  It is up to you to decide if these figures are reasonable.

Paid versus free is something else to consider.  When people are purchasing a publication it can be more readily assumed they are at least sometimes reading it.   Publications that are circulated free of charge tend not to have the same certainty since human nature dictates the paid piece is more likely to be read in order to garner the value from the investment.

The economy is weighing hard on everyone these days.  It is too soon to count print media out of the picture entirely but for businesses struggling to meet their own budgetary concerns the best practice is to examine all media purchases with far more scrutiny toward proving return on investment.