The catalogue is back!

After years of believing that the holy grail of marketing was a flashy website with plenty of SEO activity, online retailers are getting back to basics and placing the catalogue at the very heart of their marketing campaigns. It’s a clever strategy and something small businesses would do well to take heed of.

In our age of information overload; hundreds of emails a day, blogs, twitter and other social medium the catalogue {to borrow an analogy from a famous beer brand} quite literally reaches parts that other marketing media can’t reach.

A catalogue is intrusive. It lands on your doormat or desk just when you’re not expecting it with it’s oh so evocative photography and asks you to sit down with a cup of tea and see what’s the latest must have.

A catalogue will travel round the house with you: from kitchen table to sitting room, up to the bathroom and your bedside cabinet. A catalogue can be marked, written on and well thumbed. You interact with a catalogue physically in a way that you simply can’t with a website. And you can dip in and out of it at your leisure. In fact, you’ll probably revisit a favourite catalogue much more than you will a website. A catalogue is a truly powerful medium.

To sell successfully online, you need to have an offline strategy too. The big retailers know that: The White Company, Viking, White Stuff, Boden and Isabella Oliver have been doing it for years. The small businesses understandably see chopping the catalogue as a way to save money in a tight marketplace – but it’s a short sighted strategy.

A catalogue is your branding tool. It’ll underpin your web and retail propositions and help your business become memorable. According to The Catalogue Exchange, when you mail a catalogue, 45% of recipients will visit your website. You compare that to an email campaign where if you get a 17% click through you’re doing well and you can see why the big companies haven’t given up on direct mail.

For every £1 spent on a catalogue, The Catalogue Exchange say you’ll get back between £2 and £5 in store or online. And if you run a luxury brand, or any brand come to that, you need to differentiate or die. A catalogue, with it’s evocative brand images, space to properly communicate and the way it intrudes on your customers, will help you do that.

I’m not for one moment saying that you should ditch your online marketing methods, but what I am suggesting is that you look at where your marketing spend is going, and invest it in the activities that are going to give you the greatest return. Put together a proper strategy that you believe will bring you a real return. If you’re spending anything at all on advertising, then you can afford to create a catalogue. Advertising will build brand awareness if you’re lucky (and you chuck lots of money at it), a catalogue will bring you a return on your investment.

Tagged as in Business Strategy, Marketing