Is managing the print and marketing collateral for your company driving you crazy? How do you think about your printed documents? Design them, contact a print provider, figure out the volume you can afford to print in order to keep the price per piece down, then hope you didn’t order too many? Balance the quality and run length requirements against your turnaround? It’s the way designers, agencies, and marketers have done it for decades. One of the biggest hidden costs in marketing today is that of collateral obsolescence. What that means is we’re throwing a bunch of printed collateral away because it’s out of date. Estimates suggest that from 10% to 30% of printed collateral is obsolete at any given company.

Today’s Web-to-print (W2P) technology enables you to do much more. We’re not just talking about printing in shorter runs, on demand, although that’s part of it. We’re talking about revamping the way you think about and manage your marketing collateral, books, forms and documents, kits, and print marketing projects. We’re talking about changing the way you approach branding, personalization, and multi-channel marketing.

Current status of Web-to-print

Most marketers think of Web-to-print (also called “print commerce”) as being able to order static or even customizable documents from some kind of Web-based portal, whether an online store or proprietary site. But it has become so much more. Web-to-print can do everything from monitoring print branding to driving full-blown database-driven personalization to helping marketers to manage and deploy sophisticated cross-channel marketing campaigns.

There are a number of key marketing benefits of Web-to-print-based applications. In a nutshell, by centralizing all of the components of your marketing, corporate identity, and other documentation, this will give you complete control over your branding, messaging, images, and production. Many of these systems also drive database-driven personalization, offer marketing dashboards for monitoring campaigns, simplify multi-channel marketing, and more.

Is this the solution for you?

Web-to-print may be a good fit for your company if you have some or all of these characteristics:

• A distributed sales and marketing organization with many members
• Multiple target markets (by geography, demographics or other relevant characteristics)
• A need to customize marketing collateral to meet the needs of local markets and even individual buyers
• Collateral pieces that change often
• A large variety and volume of collateral pieces

If any of these things sounds like your company, contact us today to explore whether web-to-print could help you thrive.