If you’re still treating print and digital advertising like it’s an either/or choice—you’re probably losing out. You’re missing reach. You’re bleeding recall. And your brand is definitely not building the trust you think it is. The most successful, high-growth brands in 2025 aren’t choosing between print or digital. They’re mastering both. They’re winning because they understand that multi-channel marketing isn’t a tactic—it’s the entire strategy. Blending digital campaigns with print advertising delivers better engagement, higher ROI, and brand recall that lasts. Stop treating digital and print like competitors. The future belongs to brands that effectively use both. 

Digital and printed advertising each perform different functions but together they are unbeatable when it comes to engaging your customers and gaining their trust. 

Digital: Fast, flashy, and flooded

Digital media is your megaphone. It gives your brand scale, speed, and the ability to use data to ensure your target audience is reached. You can A/B test everything. You can embed video. You can retarget. You can personalize. It’s a performance marketer’s dreamscape. 

But there’s one giant, noisy problem: Everyone is doing it. Your audience is drowning in screens. Scroll fatigue is real. The average consumer sees over 10,000 digital ads per day. Digital campaigns are incredibly engaging when done right, but it’s also fleeting. You have just milliseconds to capture attention before the thumb flicks up.  

Print: Trusted, tangible, and underestimated 

Now contrast that with print. When someone opens their mailbox, they’re not multitasking on six tabs or swiping while binge-watching. Print shows up in the quiet moments. In the kitchen. At the table. It’s a single-channel moment of attention in a world built for distraction. 

As I wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “Print remains one of the most trusted and effective marketing tools, delivering higher engagement and lower ad fatigue than digital alone.” 

I’m not the only one who believes this. According to a recent article in Printing Impressions, direct mail is, in fact, the most trusted marketing channel in 2025. Think about it. How much do you trust what you see on the internet? We all hope we build a brand that consumers trust, but how do we earn that trust in the sea of data privacy issues, scams, and fake news? We show up in trusted sources. Bulk mailings require permits tied to verified businesses, making physical mail harder to fake. 

That’s why people still trust print. It’s physical. It doesn’t feel like a scam or a pop-up ad. And when print is personalized—powered by AI and data—it becomes one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. 

Print and digital together are a conversion machine 

Here’s the magic: Print and digital don’t compete—they amplify each other. A direct mail piece that drives someone to a personalized landing page with lead tracking and automated email or SMS follow up is conversion gold. A QR code that links to an explainer video or scheduling tool is frictionless funnel building. A print ad timed with a retargeted YouTube campaign builds brand and performance. You’re no longer guessing. You’re orchestrating. 

That’s why, as this LinkedIn post highlights, true marketing scale happens when brands blend physical and digital tactics. Brands that treat them as one connected ecosystem—not siloed strategies—are seeing exponentially higher ROIs. 

Here’s the brutal truth: One-channel marketing is lazy (and risky). You can’t choose just one channel in today’s fragmented attention economy. When you use both, you hit your audience where they are—at every stage of the day and every point in the funnel. And better yet, they remember you. Because you showed up twice. In their hands and on their screen. That’s not redundancy. That’s reinforcement. 

The proof is in the numbers 

You may be thinking at this point, that’s great and all, but I only have so much budget. I get that. But in the marketing world, we show how the ends justify the means. Measure everything, right? Consider these trends: 

• 82 percent of consumers trust print ads more than other types of advertising

• Brands see a 400 percent increase in the effectiveness of digital campaigns when combined with print ads  

When you layer in AI and data, print becomes trackable, tunable, and tailor-made. AI and analytics unify the experience with trackable QR codes, dynamic content, triggered sends, and synchronized campaigns. This isn’t an ad mix. It’s an ecosystem. One where your message follows the consumer, instead of hoping they stumble into it. Visibility without memorability is a waste of budget. 

Print isn’t dead. Silence is 

The marketers who are winning in 2025 aren’t the ones chasing trends. They’re the ones orchestrating total presence—where your brand shows up intelligently, repeatedly, and consistently across every meaningful channel. So no, you don’t need to pick a side. You need to pick a strategy that doesn’t force you to choose print or digital but instead encourages you to use both to achieve your goals.