In the rapidly evolving marketing landscape, businesses must stay ahead to remain competitive. One way to do this is by embracing the digital age and leveraging technology to streamline the procurement of printed marketing materials, signage, and promotional items (company swag). Digital storefronts, which encompasses online marketplaces and e-commerce platforms, have become a game-changing solution for internal marketing teams aiming to optimize their ordering processes and enhance efficiency.
The Evolution of Marketing Materials and Company Swag
In the past, obtaining printed marketing materials such as brochures, business cards, and banners, along with promotional items, was a time-consuming process. There was the monthly challenge of tracking supplies, placing orders, and managing billing through a series of email exchanges. Moreover, marketing teams often had to deal with multiple vendors, navigate supply chain logistics, and approval processes, all of which introduced more room for delays and potential errors that could ultimately impact costs, brand consistency, and timely deliveries.
Today, digital storefronts have transformed the landscape, giving greater control and eliminating many of the repetitive and manual tasks. These platforms provide substantial advantages to marketing teams for managing orders and executing branding efforts with greater efficiency. Here’s how these innovative platforms can streamline your marketing efforts:
1. Centralized Control
Digital storefronts offer a centralized platform for marketing teams to manage, customize, and order printed materials and swag. This eliminates the need to juggle multiple vendors and ensures consistent branding is met across all materials.
Example: Imagine your marketing team needs to order brochures and large posters for an event in NYC while also needing customized sell sheets and brochures for a branch in Boston. Typically, this involves manual customization or outsourcing, which means extra time is needed to carry out this task. Additionally, your usual print provider might only handle small formats, which means sourcing another vendor for large format posters. Coordinating between vendors, sending files, waiting for proofs, and finalizing orders is undoubtedly time-consuming. However, a digital web-to-print storefront can streamline this entire process. Your team can host all print assets and swag on one platform, add customizations and personal information to print files before placing orders for different locations. Moreover, print providers that offer their customers a web-to-print storefront can either handle various print formats or connect to other partners/vendors through the platform for you. This simplifies customization and ordering, and allows for efficient order management and tracking, benefiting both the marketing team and the print provider.
2. Real-Time Data and Analytics
One of the greatest advantages of digital storefronts is the access to real-time data and analytics. Marketing teams can monitor the performance of different materials and items, track order history, and make data-driven decisions to fine-tune their strategies.
Example: Your marketing team is running a campaign for a new product launch. By using a digital storefront, they can instantly see which promotional items, such as flyers or branded tote bags, are being ordered most frequently by different branches across the country. This data allows them to quickly identify which items are resonating with the audience and adjust their strategy accordingly. For instance, if the data shows that branded tote bags are highly popular in the West Coast region, they can allocate more budget to produce and distribute these bags in that area, thus maximizing the campaign's impact.
3. Customization and Personalization
Digital storefronts allow marketing teams to customize marketing materials and swag items based on specific campaigns, events, or target audiences.
Example: Your company is attending a trade show in Chicago and wants to create a unique set of promotional materials for the event. Through a digital storefront, the marketing team can quickly customize brochures and business cards with the trade show branding, special offers, and the event-specific call-to-action. Additionally, they can personalize giveaways like USB drives or notebooks with attendee names or company logos. This enhances the attendee experience, which in turn increases the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
4. Cost-Efficiency
Digital storefronts optimize the procurement process by offering features like preset bulk order discounts and instant quotes, allowing customers to efficiently communicate their ordering needs, saving them both time and money.
Example: A company needs to print a large batch of employee handbooks annually. Traditionally, this would involve contacting multiple vendors for quotes, managing orders separately, and dealing with various shipping logistics, often leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. With a digital storefront, the marketing team can order the handbooks in bulk, negotiate better prices with a single supplier, and streamline the shipping process. By consolidating these tasks within one platform, the company saves time and reduces costs associated with multiple transactions and vendors.
5. Consistency and Branding
Maintaining brand consistency across a variety of marketing materials is essential for upholding a company's brand identity. However, it can often be compromised when different teams order materials for various purposes and locations. Minor uncontrolled adjustments to print files over time can further take away from this consistency. Digital storefronts offer teams enhanced control over these materials, which helps to ensure brand guidelines, colors, and messaging are all being adhered to. Additionally, they allow editing permissions to be set for specific team members on all or selected elements of a print file, thus restricting editing capabilities to designated areas only.
Example: A multinational corporation wants to ensure that its branding remains consistent across all its global offices. By using a digital storefront, the marketing team can upload and manage brand-approved templates for all printed materials and promotional items. When different offices need to order items like business cards, banners, or branded pens, they can select from these pre-approved templates, ensuring that the correct fonts, colors, and logos are used every time. This maintains brand consistency and reinforces a strong, recognizable brand image worldwide. In addition, if there is more personalization involved with certain items, many digital storefront software solutions offer order approval workflow setup so managers can approve specific orders (like titles on business cards) for specific users prior to the order going through.
6. Simplified Inventory Management
Digital storefronts often include inventory management tools, which are invaluable for marketing teams. These tools help in monitoring stock levels, preventing orders for out-of-stock items, and managing inventory efficiently.
Example: A company frequently participates in trade shows and conferences, requiring a steady supply of promotional materials. Using a digital storefront with inventory management tools, the marketing team can easily track stock levels of items like booths, banners, notebooks, and branded giveaways. If they notice that the stock of notebooks is running low, they can reorder well in advance, avoiding last-minute rushes and ensuring they are always prepared for events. This proactive approach to inventory management helps in maintaining a smooth supply chain and reduces the risk of stockouts.
7. Convenience
Digital storefronts are accessible 24/7, which means marketing teams can order materials at anytime rather than relying on traditional working hours.
8. Rapid Turnaround
In today's fast-paced environment, swift execution is crucial. Digital storefronts significantly speed up the turnaround times by allowing marketing teams to place orders with less steps involved and by minimizing the amount of communication necessary between marketing and print production teams to get the job done. The quicker the orders can be sent into production, the faster the print provider can process, produce, and fulfill those orders.
Web to Print with BluEdge
Partnering with a print provider that embraces digital storefront solutions is essential for maintaining a competitive edge. These providers offer centralized control, real-time data, and customization options, streamlining processes and eliminating repetitive tasks.
At BluEdge, we offer print services and BluStream, our web-to-print storefront solution to provide our clients with a streamlined ordering experience. We work closely with clients to build custom storefronts tailored to their specific needs. We believe in advancing with technology to make the ordering and distribution of physical print products more efficient. By equipping our customers with the right tools, we enable them to reduce operational costs and improve turnaround times.
Choosing a forward-thinking print provider like BluEdge ensures that your marketing operations remain agile and effective. Embrace digital storefronts with us to transform your marketing efforts, drive engagement and business growth in today's competitive marketplace.
