The Future of Print Marketing: 5 Trends to Watch in 2025

Published On: December 17th, 2024|By |5.8 min read|

Printed catalogs and flyers are decidedly not dead. Here are some of the reasons why they’re more important than ever.

Before the web and mobile revolutions gave us so many screens, retail marketing and advertising directors had it easier. Of course, television and radio vied with print for customer attention, but things seemed simpler “back in the day.”

In today’s multichannel world, it’s all too easy to downplay the value of print.

In today’s multichannel media world, it’s all too easy to downplay the value of print. As it happens, neglecting print in favor of other channels is unnecessary and hazardous to your business’s health.

The big problems are time and the cost of resources needed to produce effective retail campaigns. With limited time, staff, and budgets, marketing and production managers must make choices and set priorities. This is especially true in the retail world. Given the large number of products available, the time and effort needed to create a single catalog can make it seem impractical to replicate that work for online or mobile campaigns. This challenge is even greater when considering the need for customized or regionalized versions across all channels. It is tempting to prioritize one or two online channels, sacrificing printed catalogs and other “old” media. That is a dangerous mistake.

It’s tempting to prioritize online channels, sacrificing printed catalogs and other “old” media. It’s a mistake.

As we pointed out in 2021, printed catalogs are still very much alive, generating an average of $850 in average annual purchases per consumer. More recently, an Advertising Specialty Institute report marked the resurgence of print catalogs, citing a study in Harvard Business Review showing catalogs’ positive impact on purchases and customer loyalty.

That doesn’t mean that producing printed catalogs is easy; it just means they are critical to a retailer’s multichannel marketing efforts. With that in mind, here are five crucial trends to watch in 2025 that will allow retail marketing and advertising directors to have their cake and eat it, too. With the right tools, it will be possible to realize the benefits of targeted print catalogs—without sacrificing the reach and convenience of web and mobile channels.

1. Effective Automation & Workflow Optimization

The bane of retail catalog production is the need to coordinate vast amounts of product data, typically stored in separate Product Information Management (PIM) systems, Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, and numerous other databases scattered across the retailer’s IT infrastructure. Every product

The catalog planning and production process used to be a manual, labor-intensive process. No longer.

featured in a catalog campaign has a galaxy of related information—from compelling images and descriptions to size and color variables and related or recommended products, not to mention its regular and sale price.

Managing every step of the catalog process, from offer planning to layout, production, and results tracking, used to be a manual, labor-intensive process—one that precluded luxuries like versioning. But that is no longer the case, thanks to today’s data automation techniques. Systems like Comosoft LAGO provide an automated, InDesign-based page production approach to automate and speed up the entire process, including creating multiple regional catalog versions.

2. The Advantage of Cloud-Based Solutions

The adoption rate of cloud-based business systems is at an all-time high, according to CloudZero, with 54% of enterprises and 63% of small and medium-sized businesses planning to move their workloads to the public cloud within the next year. This is significant for data-intensive operations like retail and printing companies producing catalogs. By leveraging a single-source-of-truth data model, cloud-based systems like LAGO can produce multiple catalogs in less time, reduce data error potential, and use a distributed network of printers to produce multiple regional versions at their respective locations—the very definition of “just in time” print production. By using online on-demand computing resources, retailers and their catalog-producing partners can reduce IT infrastructure costs while greatly expanding their multichannel marketing prowess.

By combining behavioral and product data in meaningful ways, retailers can create catalogs tailored to specific demographic groups.

3. Greater Personalization & Tailored Experiences

Digital marketing technology has proven how consumers’ shopping or search behavior can create customized digital advertising on browsers and smartphones. This strategy can be seen as both

effective and annoying—if it is used indiscriminately. However, few marketing and advertising directors fully know that such personalization is also available for a more tactile, user-friendly medium—the printed catalog.

Two things make this possible. First, short-run, on-demand digital printing, initially developed in the 1990s, has greatly improved efficiency and quality—approaching what customers expect in a glossy, offset-printed catalog. Second, our ability to handle and interpret large volumes of consumer behavior data has also improved. By combining that behavioral data with related information from PIM, DAM, and other data sources, retailers can more easily create catalogs tailored to specific demographic or psychographic groups, dramatically increasing their appeal and potential campaign success. Personalization can even be at the individual level, using LAGO’s Direct Individualized Marketing (DIM) model.

4. More Integration With Digital Channels

Even though printed catalogs have a significant role, retailers cannot ignore the many digital and mobile channels their customers rely on. The good news is that the effort used to produce a compelling print catalog can be repurposed automatically to create responsive digital versions, as home improvement chain Lowe’s discovered a few years ago. Data from their LAGO system, first used to plan and produce their numerous print catalogs, was automatically used to populate the company’s mobile app, ensuring that product information, special offers, and product availability in stores were consistent across all channels.

Print-digital integration goes even further than product data consistency. LAGO also stores product QR Codes in the retailer’s DAM system, allowing catalog designers to include them in the print layouts automatically. Customers can then use their smartphones to find out more—or purchase the product directly—while browsing the printed catalog.

5. AI-Driven Decision-Making

This year was dubbed by Forbes magazine and others as “The Year of AI.” Still, business leaders are quickly realizing that the reality of artificial intelligence is of far greater importance than the media hype. Retailers, in particular, find that their abundance of customer purchasing behavior can be a rich source of meaningful data. In a recent case study, Comosoft and DecaSIM applied AI to purchasing behavior data at a leading regional grocer to guide the offer-planning process using the LAGO system. The study found that AI enabled the company to plan promotions better, measurably increasing sales and profitability.

AI will surely be a top trend in 2025, as retailers use it to uncover meaningful trends seemingly buried in mountains of PIM, DAM, and purchasing data. With an integrated campaign planning and production system like Comosoft LAGO, that future is now.

Find out more about how Comosoft LAGO can optimize your print marketing operations—from concept to final, multi-version output. Or book a demo to see for yourself.

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