I recently came across an interesting piece of commentary related to a study that was conducted by Quova, a geolocation data service offered by mobile telecommunications company Neustar. On its blog, Quova stated that it recently conducted a study of 250 marketers to determine the importance of location-based services to those marketers. It also asked about more "traditional" ways that marketers reach their audience, including print directories and direct mail.

While Quova's findings didn't surprise me, it certainly seemed to startle them. This sentence from Quova's blog post on the study results pretty much sums it up: "The good news we learned is that marketers love location. The bad news is they still love paper." Reading further in the blog post, it turns out that 30% of respondents in the study use print directories and direct mail for marketing; in addition, 10% of marketer respondents use billboards.

The reaction by Quova to these findings was a bit frustrating to read, but I feel that it represents the view of many digital-focused businesses offering marketing and media technology today. There seems to be this lingering negative perception related to print in the high-tech industry, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary related to its sustained use and effectiveness. After all, high-tech companies like Apple, Google, and IBM each spend a pile of money on print advertising each year. Would these kings of data measurement and analytics use print if it didn't help them reach their audience?

Let's take a look at some more statistics. InfoTrends' study on cross-media marketing from last year surveyed over 500 marketers from companies of varying sizes, finding the top five media types used for marketing are company Website (89%), direct mail (72%), e-mail (71%), event sponsorship (63%), and trade shows (57%). Looking at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), we find similar results from an in-depth research initiative InfoTrends conducted at the end of 2009 on this topic.

Figure 1: SMB Marketing Media Mix

Looking at Figure 1, it's not surprising that e-mail is the top media type used by SMBs for marketing due to its self-service nature and relatively low cost. Nevertheless, look at the results below the e-mail category; the next five top selections are print mediums. We're actually revisiting this study on SMBs later this year, and I predict we will see some changes, such as directories moving down the list and wireless/mobile to move up significantly. Just because the media mix is evolving, though, doesn't mean that print is going to disappear anytime soon.

Staying on the topic of SMBs, one only has to point to the continued success of a player like Vistaprint to realize that print is still important. Jennifer Matt further emphasized this point in her last article about the democratizing force the Web has had on SMBs, and I couldn't agree more with her assessment. Look at what else is happening in the market. Online printing service MOO.com recently launched MOO Business Services, a way to manage business cards and other brand identity materials for small businesses. Other e-mail marketing service providers like Vertical Response offer complementary direct mail services. Vertically-targeted marketing automation providers like GuestEngine and Lighthouse 360 also offer print marketing capabilities because their users still leverage it to promote their businesses.

Again, there's no doubt that the media mix is changing, and I'll be the first one to say I love purely digital technologies, as well as the prospect of integrating interactivity with print to improve effectiveness and relevance. I think one of the comments on the ReadWriteWeb post where I originally found Quova's study results says it best. Nick Stamoulis, the president of Boston-based Brick Marketing, stated that "Offline marketing methods are still effective and important. Online marketing shouldn't replace your offline efforts. The two need to work together in order to get the most work done for building your brand." Print still gets the job done; even more so when combined with other media types. As long as it does that, it's still extremely important… sometimes we just need to open peoples' eyes to that reality.