By Jonathan Dropiewski, priint Americas
Today’s marketers are overwhelmed with data. Never before has so much information been available for making decisions. Most organizations have spent abundantly to collect, store, and interpret volumes of information in order to increase marketing efficiency. This has also coincided with the continued development of the digital marketing channel.
How many companies segregate print marketing and digital marketing? How integrated are the two processes? They both appear on marketing strategy PowerPoints, but dig deeper and a different reality exists where marketing actually happens.
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There remains a struggle over what role print marketing should play, if any, in our digital world. Traditional retailers, mail order houses, and even online retailers are all trying to assess how print fits into their marketing plans. Print remains an effective lead generation tool, and catalogs are still a must in many industries. “Magalogs” are increasing in popularity. Consumers have responded to personalized offers, customized coupon books, and there is the continued success of the popular “holiday” catalog.
Integrating Print Into The Modern Marketing Strategy
So how does print compete with digital? Quite honestly, it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to. It stands on its own as it always has, but now it gets integrated into the overall marketing strategy. Today’s articles about print talk about its “touch and feel” among its many, almost sentimental, descriptions.
At the same time, the digital cheerleaders will spend hours talking about how slow and unresponsive print it, and how it pales in comparison with the personal experience delivered by CXM and ad serving platforms. Therein lies the key to print’s success in the digital world: how does an organization turn their print marketing into a responsive platform that is so common in the digital age?
Everything about print workflows makes the process non-responsive and impersonal. Most print requirements involve publishing data from backend applications. Marketers need access to this data, but usually can only get it through IT, and these requests take days or even weeks to fulfill. The data is then delivered in an Excel or text file, from which the marketer begins copy/pasting.
After laying out each page of the publication come reviews and proofreading cycles. By the time this is all finished, much of the data is often out of date, and the calendar has flipped pages. Most of these workflows have neither changed nor evolved over time. While digital channels have received huge investments in tools and processes, the print channel is relegated to the bottom of the process improvement agenda.
So, what’s the answer? It lies in process reengineering, technology, and organizational change — many times, not in that order! Organizations need to enable the creative marketer with tools and workflows to overcome these challenges. Publishing a single catalog is often not as effective as publishing a dozen segmented and targeted catalogs half the size.
To do this under traditional workflows would require a huge amount of effort and, usually, additional staff. However, with modern toolsets and accessible data, the creative print marketer is freed up to actually be creative. What if catalog production shrank from three months to three weeks? What if, instead of manually laying out pages, it was automated with current data from the backend system? What if most, if not all, proofreading cycles were eliminated?
The answer lies in applying the same kind of technological solution and workflow processes to print marketing that are native in the digital world. This is not a competition; both are needed to optimize an organization’s overall marketing. All it requires is a new way of looking at a very old fashioned process.
Jonathan Dropiewski is the President/CEO of priint Americas, the Americas subsidiary of German software maker, Werk II. He has spent over 22 years helping organizations derive value from better managing and leveraging their enterprise information. He has deep expertise in Content and Digital Asset Management as a User, Vendor, and Consultant and has worked across a wide variety of vertical industries. Dropiewski, born in Detroit, has a BS from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He also serves as the part-time Mayor of the City of Flat Rock, MI, a City of 10,000 people located about 20 miles south of Detroit.
