Web-to-Print in the B2B Space: How to WIN, RETAIN and GROW

Recent research reveals that offering customized web portals tailored for B2B clients can be a powerful tool for growth for printers. However, with great opportunities come great challenges, and doing it right is crucial.

We will approach this topic by tackling several common questions that get to core of what a printer needs to know about web-to-print in the B2B space.

These questions and answers cover the whole gamut of the WHY, WHO, WHAT, and HOW.

WHY: Opportunities to be found by offering customized web portals to B2B clients.

WHO: Traits of the best customer prospects for customized web portals.

WHAT: Key features of web-to-print solutions suited for B2B customers.

HOW: Challenges to offering customized web portals and how to overcome them.

At the end of the article, you’ll find a link where you can download a copy of the industry report by NAPCO that supports the information found in this article.

What are the benefits of offering customized web portals to B2B customers?

Benefits of web-to-print in the B2B space

94% strengthened customer relationships
93% increased sales from current clients
88% increased print order volume
86% enabled to go after bigger clients
85% expanded to services beyond print
80% reduced labor cost

The printers who have embraced these modern web-to-print solutions have found that this enables them to evolve into complete marketing solution providers.

Put simply, instead of being a print provider for print buyers, they are now providing centralized marketing asset management to their large clients. This provides clients control over brand, budget, and inventory, along with speed, automation, and intelligence benefits.

These services foster client loyalty through data management, workflow optimization, and improved overall experiences. This drives the exploration of additional printer services like promotions, apparel, and digital solutions, resulting in sustained revenue growth.

What customers and industries are a good fit for B2B web to print?

Top traits of typical B2B web portal customers

Large Enterprises
Mid-Size Organizations
Marketing Agencies
International Focus

Top industries using B2B web portals

Healthcare
Retail
Education
Finance

Customized web portals like the kind we are talking about don’t make sense for all B2B customers. The clients who benefit the most from these platforms are large businesses with broad marketing asset catalogs and the need to distribute assets across many locations. Think national brands, enterprises, franchises, and the like.

What are the unique needs of enterprise-sized clients when it comes to web-to-print?

Top B2B web portal features respondents see increasing customer demand for

Streamlining the user experience so customers can quickly get what they need.
Access to data and analytic tools to get insights about ordering trends, asset usage, portal usage, and more.
Personalizing marketing communication assets while maintaining brand compliance.
Ability to set user controls to support complex business rules.

Marketers don’t understand print the way printers do, and printers don’t understand marketing the way marketers do. So, to bridge the gap, printers need to do the work to connect the dots between what you offer and the things they really care about, ROI, branding compliance, multi-channel, and data measurement. In a sense, that is what modern web-to-print platforms really do, they give printers a way to play at the tech-savvy level of big brands and enterprises.

How do web-to-print solutions designed for B2B enable printers to offer more than print?

One of the key features of web-to-print solutions for the B2B space is the ability to connect third-party suppliers, production partners, and drop shippers to significantly expand the list of products you can offer.

Today’s marketers want efficiency above all. In offering customized web portals, you can be the one who centralizes your clients’ ENTIRE marketing catalog, not just print, but also apparel, promo, and digital assets. This isn’t a value add for large brands and enterprises, it’s what they are looking for first and foremost. If you can be the supplier that streamlines the entire marketing supply chain for your customers, they are going to stick with you for the long haul. And over time you can continue to offer new products and services to increase their spending with you.

What are the largest obstacles and challenges regarding web-to-print in the B2B space?

Challenges to success with offering B2B web portals

50% of Printers use more than one web-to-print solution to meet the different requirements of their clients.
66 days is the average time it takes Printers to launch a new customer web portal.
47% of Printers report increasing client demand for the ability to set user controls and enforce complex business rules.
31% of printers surveyed who DO NOT currently offer customized web portals cited lack of ability to sell it as a top reason.
84% of printers emphasize the importance of their web-to-print solution playing nice with other systems such as their MIS/ERP.

According to the data from NAPCO, the biggest challenge printers are experiencing regarding web-to-print in the B2B space is the “effort level to replace or upgrade our WEB PORTAL systems”. Many printers are finding themselves in the position of needing to replace their legacy web-to-print system. Pain points start to emerge: technical limitations that prevent scaling, missing modern capabilities to attract larger customers, or even being at risk of losing current clients.

Usually, the reason these printers don’t switch to a more modern platform sooner comes down to how entrenched their processes and workflows are in the old system. Investing in better software is a lot like investing in new hardware for printers, except instead of the cost being the biggest hurdle, it’s the resistance to changing processes and workflows that needs to be overcome.

What is the major takeaway for printers who want to implement web-to-print in the B2B space?

Web-to-print has been around for a long time, and now printers are taking advantage of web-to-print to attract and better serve enterprise-size clients – making it easy for them to manage, personalize, and distribute marketing assets across their organization.

These modern web-to-print solutions focused on the needs of large B2B customers are proving to be a path to growth for many printers. Customized web portals can enhance the client/printer connection and enable printers to evolve beyond job-based print sales into total solution providers for marketers and brands.

Get the industry report on web-to-print in the B2B space by NAPCO Research