How to analyze if a W2P portal is right for you

Just like when you’re hungry, your body has ways of telling you that it’s time to eat. Your stomach growls, it’s hard to focus, and you don’t have a lot of energy. Aka. Hangry

There are also ways to tell when your business needs a web-to-print portal. Here are six symptoms your business might be experiencing that can be solved by a portal.

(And, if you’re experiencing hunger pains, maybe grab a snack before you read any further.)

 1. You spend way too much time weeding through multiple versions of documents or searching for specific assets

A lot of businesses play “Where’s Waldo” with their documents. This might sound fun in theory, but having to spend 10 minutes searching for letterhead or asking a coworker where “that one brochure from two years ago” is located is a bummer.

With web-to-print, all of those materials live in the portal, and not the old versions of documents that have been updated three times since you used them. Having these up-to-date, centrally-located materials in a content management system will save you a lot of time and headaches. Files live in the cloud, which means that everyone who needs access to these documents will have it.

Not only does a portal give better overall visibility into marketing materials and business documents, but you’ll also have visibility into who actually ordered those materials and how many. Pulling order records is easy as pie, which also means reporting on and repeating orders is so much easier too.

 2.  Your graphic design team is spending time and money updating marketing assets

Your design team should be focused on making your business money, not eating it. Having designers rework business cards, update copy, make minor edits, or recreate misplaced files cuts into the time they could be helping come up with your next campaign.

Instead, a portal would allow certain users to update pre-approved templates. It even allows for an admin to lock down certain aspects of documents, like a logo, while allowing other aspects to be personalized by those users.

 3.  You worry about brand consistency, even down to the color, paper stock, and collateral messaging across all locations

Being consistent in your branding and marketing and following brand guidelines is important whether you have one location or 1,000. And while the logo, your brand colors, and your fonts are probably the most recognizable and important to maintain throughout any collateral, that consistency needs to flow through anything your brand touches. With print products, this means even the type of paper, the ink, and the weight of the stock you use need to be recognizable to your customers.

Using an old (or just plain wrong) version of any of your assets can dilute your brand and your customers’ experience with it.

A portal can eliminate the probability of someone using incorrect assets, which is great for brand consistency. It also allows you to establish those printed presets such as the type of paper, so no matter who makes an order, that order will be created using your standards.

 4.  You find yourself spending too much time in the proofing process or tracking down orders

When you’re ordering an adult coloring book from Amazon (it’s a thing), it’s a lot of fun to purchase and track your order.

When you’re ordering marketing collateral for your business that costs a lot more than $11.95, it can become a more stressful process. Tracking orders needs to be easy, not scary. Web-to-print software not only allows you to order right from the portal, but tracking information for every order is easily accessible.

Before an order is placed, you’ll also be able to set up a proofing process that includes an instant digital proof, which saves time on waiting for a print to be delivered for approval.

5.  Your field reps or sales executives need to make updates to local-store-marketing (LSM) 

If you have a sales representatives structure, a portal will make it easy for them to update their sales materials on the fly. Updates such as an address or contact information to any collateral is a simple change, and they can order those materials all within an online storefront.

 6.  You’re sick of throwing away marketing materials due to obsolescence

A lot of printers offer a discount for ordering in bulk, which is great until your company goes through a brand refresh or an address change. It’s only then that you realize how many marketing materials that you can’t use anymore and have to throw in the trash.

Web-to-print offers a solution for this, too! Since your vendors are pre-established, they’ll often give you the same discount without requiring bulk orders. This way, you can order exactly what you need, and help save our planet. Nice!

Solving the symptoms of not having a web-to-print portal starts with a needs assessment so we can customize the software for your business. Ours is called dokshop, and it’s pretty cool.

Interested in a demo? Schedule a dokshop demo here.