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Don’t Be Deceived: Web-to-Print Isn’t Big-Company-Only
March 6, 2008

This week, The Industry Measure released a Web-to-print primer for marketers, “Web-to-Print: Transforming Print Management and Marketing for Small, Mid-Sized, and Large Marketers.” As I was finalizing it, however, I realized that, in part, I’d failed in the mission I had planned to undertake.

All three reports in the marketing primer series (digital printing, 1:1 [personalized] printing, Web-to-print) were intended primarily for smaller companies, since many small and mid-sized marketers mistakenly think these technologies are not appropriate or affordable for them. But unlike the digital printing and 1: printing primers, which focused on examples from small and mid-sized marketers, the Web-to-print primer used examples almost entirely from large corporate and brand marketers.

I went back into the case study databases to correct the problem, but the reason for the over-emphasis on large companies became apparent right away. There are almost no case studies on successes among smaller marketers. But this is not because Web-to-print isn’t relevant to their business models. In fact, the opposite is true. Rather, this over-emphasis has more to do with convenience, since case studies from this customer base are much easier to come by—not to mention more glamorous.

Ignore at Your Peril

But, as I wrote in recent What They Think column, Web-to-print providers ignore small and mid-sized marketers at their peril, since there are only so many corporate brand marketers that the industry can share. The bulk of the volume of potential customers are like readers of the columns on the site—smaller marketers who need to understand how these technologies relate to them.

Small and mid-sized marketers ignore Web-to-print at their peril, too. Web-to-print is more than the ability to go online and order print (like Vistaprint). It’s a whole new way of approaching your printing, branding, and marketing.

In the traditional workflow, the emphasis is on production. Marketers have to pay a designer, print in volume, and then deal with the inventory. When you’re thinking about all that, and just trying to manage the logistics, marketing creativity and flexibility can get lost in the mix.

With Web-to-print, marketers are often working with predesigned (and, if you desire, branded) templates, customizing them and personalizing them for their own needs. In this environment, instead of being weighed down with concerns about design, production, and storage costs, marketers can focus all of their attention on making the most effective marketing document they can. Then they can print only as many as they need, even if it’s just one (think “personalized follow-ups to retail visits or calls to customer call centers”). With all the logistical considerations removed, creativity suddenly jumps to the forefront.

Think Beyond the Surface

At first, this may sound like marketing hype or semantics, but when you sit down and really think about the case studies using this technology, its value—not just for large marketers, but for small ones, as well—becomes clear.

The challenge for small and mid-sized marketers, however, is not to be deceived by the over-abundance of case studies from large brand marketers. They need to look beyond the surface application and understand the core of these capabilities and how it could apply it to their own businesses.

It’s important to understand that in addition to the large, expensive Web-to-print systems being used by these brand marketers, there are plenty of off-the-shelf and ASP models that make these systems affordable to smaller companies. Many printers offer these capabilities to marketers with little upfront cost.

So do your homework—and don’t let the convenience of pulling together “large company” case studies derail your own creativity in how these systems might apply to you.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on March 6, 2008 | Comments (0)