5 Reasons Why Web to Print Means More Than Ever
Many people have predicted the death of the print industry, we couldn’t disagree more! We do however believe the print industry is evolving and it’s critical for printers to take some different views on how they approach the market. Likewise, we believe the traditional “web to print” solutions are on the way down and are being replaced with comprehensive marketing solutions that have web to print capabilities but also much more.
Product price, quality and lead times are no longer differentiators for printers, they are just table stakes for playing the game. Printers need to offer more comprehensive solutions to expand their share of the clients marketing spend and branch out from the “sell print first” mentality.
Printers must understand that print buyers are marketers and they use a wide variety of marketing assets to promote their brand. Their marketing portfolios include print, apparel, promotional merchandise, digital assets and other products. Marketers need solutions to protect their brands, their budgets and their inventory while streamlining the entire ordering workflow, from inception to final shipment.
Your customers (aka marketers) already have a full plate. They are charged with promoting their brand, crafting messages, designing art, analyzing mountains of data, and much more. The last thing they want to worry about is getting Bill in sales the most recent sell sheet or tracking down and order of pens for Sally in accounting.
To stay competitive, printers must provide marketers complete marketing solutions that also handle all of their web to print needs.
1. Provide a single web to print platform to handle ALL types of marketing assets.
Marketers are tasked with making sure the assets they create get into the hands of those that need them. This can include the sales force, employees, affiliates, branch locations, and just about anyone else under the sun. We are going to call this group the cat heard.
The last thing they want to do is try to direct this heard of cats to multiple places to get different types of marketing assets. Not only is that a poor end user experience but also increases the effort to manage these different solutions, costs and overall frustrations. Not to mention it’s extremely difficult for a marketer to pull together a consolidated view of costs and usage.
Printers must be able to show that they understand the challenges their customers face, show a bit of empathy and most importantly have a platform that provides the solution. Best of breed marketing solutions do all of this. Web to print features are a piece of the solution but not the whole enchilada.
2. Marketers want to close the gap between physical and digital assets
Marketers are also in charge of making sure this heard of cat can access, locate and download the digital files they need, in the right formats and sizes. Some marketers have Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems while some others still have hundreds if not thousands of digital files saved across different storage devices. They won’t make happy hour today!
Why make this heard of cats log in to two different systems? Why manage and train end users to use two different systems? Why not bring physical and digital files under the same roof and simplify their day?
Printers must think like marketers and offer their clients comprehensive marketing solutions that eliminate marketing challenges. Bringing physical and digital assets under the same roof does not only simplify searchability, but simplifies workflows such as allowing end users to easily bring digital files to web to print personalization workflows and integrated marketing campaigns.
3. Print is a key component of every marketing campaign
Any marketer can put a url on a print piece and direct prospects to a web page. We see an infinite number of urls on bottles, coupons, flyers, wraps, boxes, and signage…but does anyone really bother taking their phones out of their pockets, open a mobile browser, type a url to simply land on a generic site? I sure don’t, I don’t even notice those urls anymore.
What marketers want is to reach prospects with personalized messages, images, offers and QR codes and direct prospects to personalized landing pages, follow up with personalized email campaigns and track every touch point for higher optimization.
In an era where we get bombarded with thousands of advertising messages, marketers need to make it personal between recipients and their brand in order to cut trough the clutter.
Printers must understand that print is a key component of any marketing campaign, the catalyst or starting touch point of many. Printers must look for best in class marketing solutions that simplify how marketers tie print to other digital outlets taking recipients trough highly personalized experiences.
4. Marketers want marketing solution providers not print vendors
Marketers no longer want print shops that serve merely as print vendors, they want savvy partners that can help them tackle other marketing pain points. Marketers want long term partners that take care of their print supply while also provide solutions that simplify marketing and management tasks.
Printers that succeed bringing clients, especially those bigger ones to adopt sticky solutions that handle complex logistics will benefit from long lasting accounts that cost clients too much to terminate.
5. Simplify in-plant production and fulfillment without having to pay for 3-4 other systems
Most web to print solutions focus mainly on the end user leaving producers and vendors in the dark forcing them to pay for 3-4 additional systems to handle production, inventory and fulfillment logistics.
Training, setting up, and integrating these different applications is never a walk in the park. These systems are expensive, implementation processes are long and by the time you get all up and running, you find yourself married to these systems as your investment is simply too large to switch to a younger, hotter girlfriend.
Printers need to look for a comprehensive solution that provides them with a powerful back-end interface that is directly tied to the client front-end where they can manage production and fulfillment of demand coming in. This way, whether 100 or 100,000 orders come through the system, they are able to stay efficient and eliminate the need to integrate and pay for three or four other different systems.
Conclusion
As price, quality and turnaround become standard across the market, printers must leverage technology to position themselves as the savvy partners and focus on simplifying clients’ workflows. These printers are more likely to build long term relationships with their clients and create new revenue opportunities.
In a following article we address Who Exactly the Modern Print Buyer Is and What They Want. Don’t forget to check it out.
