GUEST COLUMN: Web-to-Print is Revolutionizing Marketing

Jere Halligan

Web-to-Print technology lets you centralize and control your brand while creating personalized content using easily published templates—significantly increasing relevance, while reducing creative costs and time

As property management companies become more decentralized and trim marketing personnel, they are typically confronted with issues of quality control, asset management, and inefficient processes. They also face high costs in attempting to fulfill one-off, custom/personalized print requests for marketing, leasing, and product materials for both residents and prospects. In addition, there are increasing demands for alternative media formats beyond print (such as Web, e-mail, and devices) all of which contribute to higher internal costs and delays.

Using a web-to-print publishing solution, you can enable distributed users to produce professionally branded, yet customized/personalized documents, and retain complete corporate marketing brand control—significantly reducing design and production costs, and shortening turnaround times. Your web-to-print users have access to the full library of customizable marketing templates or your own branded materials. Our designers can define which objects within their source files are to be used as customizable fields for personalization, including setting multiple inline text customizable fields that flow with the text. Once uploaded into the service, the user can enable customizable fields for text, images, graphics, layers, attributes, and properties for personalization. When template customization is complete, the system provides output to cross-channel formats including web, print, and e-mail and maintains the highest fidelity from desktop to published output.

If you can use a browser, you can create and order materials online. Most web-to-print systems also let you store downloadable forms and approved corporate materials, and ensures compliance with corporate branding or style guidelines. Here are some of the reasons to conduct your printing via web-to-print:

Put all of your company’s collateral into one centralized location:

Say goodbye to lost files, version control problems, platform and software compatibility issues, and missing fonts.

Virtually anything your company prints over and over can be set up as customizable templates.

Templates are accessible (via a password-protected web site) by anyone in your company from any computer with Internet access.

No extra file transfers required; all files (including fonts) reside on the web server.

Orders are saved for easy editing and reorder at a later date.

Your company’s web-to-print site can be customized to include only approved items.

‘Lock down’ the look and style of all your company’s collateral:

Predefined elements (logos, fonts, colors, style guidelines) remain as fixed elements in templates.

Employ different levels of customization to fit the project: Change only the name and phone number on a business card, or swap out the lifestyle image, headline and offer text on an outreach flyer.

Fixed style elements can’t be altered, edited or otherwise compromised, either by human intervention or technical problems such as fonts, platform or software incompatibilities, etc.

Simplify your document creation and print ordering processes:

There are no designers required, other than the creation of the initial templates.

Conduct the entire transaction, from file creation to payment and shipping, online via a single website.

Instantly review and approve all files prior to final output via an automatically generated PDF ‘soft’ proof.

No special software other than a web browser is required, thus there is no special skill set (layout applications, etc.) required of users.

Conduct, track and monitor your printing transactions via one easy-to-use website:

Grant different users different permissions. ‘Requisitioners’ can create and submit their materials for approval by a ‘Purchaser’ who reviews the proof and either approves, edits or denies the request.

Create different ‘groups’ of users each with a different approver.

E-mails can be automatically generated when your order is placed and approved.

Gain visibility into what is being ordered through robust reporting.