Web-to-Print Saves the Marketing Budget
Printers who want to take on larger clients need to have a strategy in place for selling more than their print. Global and national brands are working in a fast-paced, digitally connected world and you need to meet them at that level.
This means you need to have an in-depth understanding of how your modern web-to-print solution meets the complex needs of these organizations. This article will detail how private, intelligent marketing portals solve for a very big need of these enterprise clients: Saving Money and Tracking Marketing Spend.
This is part two of a three-part series on the value that modern web-to-print brings to the clients who use marketing portals. See part one, on the importance of brand compliance, here:
Brand Consistency: What Does It Mean and Why Should You Care?
Anything, Anytime, to Anywhere
Time is money. And every business wants more of both. Marketing portals carve down the once tedious process of distributing assets to a simple matter of point and click. Forget about office hour phone calls to vendors to request reprints or long email threads of art proof changes and approvals. Web-to-print gives marketers instant 24/7 self-directed access to their entire library of assets. Everything is ready to go as soon as it’s needed.
Modern web-to-print brings B2B print businesses into the same convenience-driven realm of e-commerce giants like Amazon. Assets can be personalized on the fly by the sales reps and approved in a matter of minutes. Managers can order materials for their whole office in one bulk order with a few clicks, getting bulk discounts on materials and saving on shipping.
Beyond the time saved, bulk discounts, and efficient shipping, adopting a marketing portal also comes with reduced labor costs, administration fees, storage costs, artwork errors, and more. These savings add up when you multiply them by the scope of a sales and marketing force with locations all over the nation or globe.
That’s why more and more, big brands are finding it not just appealing, but necessary that the producers they work with get with the times and provide a platform that can handle the needs of a modern marketer.
Saving Money by Streamlining
Marketing portals enable brands to consolidate all their marketing assets on one portal, regardless of who is producing them. This means they can seamlessly connect all the vendors they need through one platform for all their products. Promo, apparel, print, and even digital assets can be stored, managed, tracked, and ordered through one portal.
Compare this to the alternative. Without a unifying portal, marketing teams need to build relationships with different vendors for different products, submit orders manually with each, and eat the cost of shipping from multiple vendors to the same locations. These vendors probably have different turnaround times, unpredictable inventory to match unpredictable demand, set up fees, order minimums, etc. Not to mention the mess of trying to track and analyze spending and ordering. It’s easy to see how the budget can spiral out of control.
Web-to-print gives marketers tight reins on their ship and the ability to work with their favorite producers through one unified platform.
Tools to Control the Marketing Budget
One major differentiator between a B2B-geared web-to-print solution like Propago and your typical e-commerce platform is user controls. Budgetary controls let clients set guardrails on their portal userbase and in a segmented and granular way.
What do I mean by “segmented and granular”? Let’s say, for example, that a large financial firm is setting up its web-to-print marketing portal. The company decides to segment its organization members into groups of users with different ordering rights and budgets. Some organizational members, like branch managers, need full access to the entire marketing catalog and unlimited ordering rights and budget. Others have a monthly spending limit and more specific limits on how much of certain items they can order.
The company can get as detailed as they want with their user controls. The end result is a predictable quarterly marketing budget. Combine these controls with a comprehensive reporting system and you have all the tools you need to define your marketing budget, stay within in it, and make calculated decisions for the future.
