With the recent announcement from Ziff Davis Enterprise that they will be closing their remaining print titles (including eWeek and CIO Insight), the IT tech industry will again lose vital print life-blood in its media support system.

On the face of it, it really should not matter. IT professionals exist across hundreds of websites and can be reached through a plethora of different media channels. With the introduction of new social networks and media devices like iPads and Android smart phones, those channels increase every day.

But the reality is much more serious for marketers. Only a few years ago an IT professional was almost guaranteed to see your advertising if you placed it in a few key publications. Reach numbers were in the 80%+ range simply because an advert in a magazine had the potential to reach every single reader. In addition, it would continue to perform when that magazine was passed around the department. One ad reached hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of individuals.

Now if an advertisement runs on a website, typical share of voice numbers are minimal at best. Even when share of voice is high, with highly targeted media buys, the result is very few individual eyeballs and pretty much zero chance for passes on to others. Don’t believe me? Try and find your ad on a site. You either end up looking on just a few key site pages (home page, section page; so no depth to your reach) or you have to hit refresh a dozen or more times.

With this in mind what do we suggest for our clients? Firstly, don’t consider the web as the sole avenue to the audience. Recent studies of business professionals by Readex Research once again confirms the high reliance on print by the audience. With this in mind, find ways to carve out a slice of your budget to add depth to the media plan by including a mix of old and new media. Mix print at one end with web in the middle and a sprinkling of mobile at the other… mix it up a bit and be daring (by going old school!).

This multi-dimensional campaign strategy works. Our own campaign performance research proves that a business or an IT audience that sees a campaign across multiple media formats is more influenced by it, has better recall of it and will have a greater understanding of the message which it contains; and yes, eventually mobile content will continue to be a more viable delivery platform for your message. Just don’t think that the print workhorse is ready to be put out to pasture… because if you do you might just wish you had worked it that little bit harder while it was still there.

Dick Reed, CEO, Just Media, Inc.