Marketing portals are powerful management tools that help you organize your corporate digital assets in ways that make you more efficient. They give you the power to produce customized printed materials when they’re needed, in the exact quantities requested. A portal means you have, at your fingertips, a manageable system for cataloguing and accessing all kinds of digital content that’s used by numerous people who work in or with your organization. It also functions as a highly sophisticated but easy-to-use reporting engine that brings sanity to an otherwise logistical nightmare.
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How do you know you finally need a marketing portal? Here are the top 6 signs:
1. You suffer from Shrunken Staff Syndrome.
Ten months ago you were part of a 12-person marketing team. Today, there are 4 of you, and it’s getting impossible to get everything done with the same level of quality, let alone on time. Ordering marketing materials over and over again for different sales team members is taking way too much time. There’s got to be a smarter way.
2. You have a growing number of channel partners and field reps.
And they’re all clamoring for your attention. They’re in different time zones and represent different product lines. Getting all of them the information they need, in the form that they need it, is becoming a Sisyphean task.
3. Your company now has a global presence.
It’s great for the bottom line, but it means you have to serve sales reps and their customers around the clock. The logistics of producing corporate materials – marketing, training, POP, promotional – has become a nightmare, not to mention inefficient.
4. You want to produce customized marketing materials on the fly.
Since your marketing staff is small and your field force is growing, you want to produce high-quality, short-run printed materials that are customized for every group’s requirements – superfast. It will be easiest to manage this printing program from an online portal that offers web-to-print capabilities. Not sure exactly what web-to-print means to marketers? Have a look at this explanation by Julie Shaeffer, a W2P expert in the printing industry.
5. You have to protect all corporate branding elements – or else.
Ever since last month, when an embarrassing, old headshot of your company’s CEO got printed on 3M copies of a sales rep’s marketing brochure, you’re now totally responsible for protecting your brand’s corporate design elements. This includes photos, logos, brand colors, product language, and pricing details. They must be managed all across your organization, and you’ve been named Chief Gatekeeper.
6. You’ve been told to start tracking the ROI of marketing campaigns.
This includes tracking marketing activity by every product, every location, every sales territory, and even every individual who orders marketing materials. So unless you have approval to hire an army of systems wizards, you should work with an online tool that does the tracking for you and can give you all sorts of reports, just the way you require them.
A sophisticated marketing portal is the cure for these 6 conditions. If you’re experiencing these symptoms, it’s time you do the research for the perfect marketing portal and let your boss know how much it will benefit the company: total control over your digital assets, great reporting functionality, streamlining of print production efforts, reduced costs, and flawless web-to-print capabilities.
