Personalized marketing is more effective in a large organization than a corporate-wide generic strategy. However, it is critical that companies deliver a consistent brand message, maintain content quality, and control costs. This is an opportunity for print service providers (PSPs) to offer their corporate customers the best of both worlds. Dispersed enterprises can support the required control while providing local users access to customizable and personalized marketing materials delivered by an approved source. That approved source is the PSP, who offers an integrated web to print (W2P) solution to simplify, personalize, and standardize marketing distribution.

Centralized marketing is the concentration of marketing activities, decisions, and control at the corporate level, including creating and distributing marketing materials. A centralized team makes decisions and implements them throughout the organization. Large organizations commonly use Centralized Marketing with a single brand and a dispersed geographical reach.

The downside to centralized marketing is that corporate messaging does not allow local sales and marketing resources to customize materials for a specific geographic or vertical market. Salespeople selling construction supplies to customers in Michigan understand their market. It is not the same as selling construction supplies in Florida, but a centralized marketing strategy doesn’t allow for geographical adjustments to the marketing materials.

Decentralized marketing is delegating marketing decision-making and execution to local entities within the organization. Local teams have greater autonomy to make decisions and personalize marketing messages to their specific markets. Decentralized marketing is typically used by organizations with multiple product lines or doing business in disparate markets.

The downside to decentralized marketing is that a corporation relies on many disparate channels to manage marketing and branding strategies. Branding consistency can be jeopardized.

Balance

The challenge is striking the optimum balance between centralized and decentralized marketing for the best results. This is precisely where a W2P portal comes into play. Local marketing teams can customize content to reflect local preferences and language while adhering to controlled corporate brand guidelines. The Tecra W2P AccuConnect™ platform gives PSPs the power to offer their customers marketing tools, allowing them to market more effectively across different channels and territories.

With the Tecra AccuConnect platform, a PSP can create a storefront their customer’s sales and marketing teams can access regardless of physical location. Based on their strategy, storefront users build and own their marketing distribution and determine the most relevant marketing products and content to order. Branding is controlled and, at the same time, the PSP supports customization for a specific geographic or vertical market. The portal provides direction and recommendations to channels while still giving individual business units the flexibility to choose what they need, when, and how they use it.

Control

Customers upload marketing assets into a branded online storefront set up by the PSP using the AccuConnect platform for local sales and marketing teams to access. Each user has defined rights, permissions, and login information. Marketing assets include locked and editable areas controlled by corporate marketing to ensure compliance. Access to various marketing collateral and promotional items is based on the user’s login, geographical or vertical markets, and the products they sell. The user orders the collateral or swag they need via the storefront, and the PSP fulfills the orders.

PSP Potential

W2P storefronts encourage higher-margin orders by emphasizing more complex items. The strength of the storefront is that it transcends the traditional offerings of a box of business cards or a case of envelopes. The storefront encourages orders featuring advanced personalization, finishing, or logistics management. This arrangement drives higher margins and deeper customer engagement. In one place at one time, a customer can launch a direct mail campaign, create custom brand kits, or access data to build lists for sales prospecting.

W2P technology connects PSPs to their customers, creating partnerships rather than simply “vendor-customer” relationships. With this level of engagement, customer loyalty is assured.

Execution

Tecra provides marketing technology solutions for PSPs to compete for and win business from small, mid-size, and large organizations using a scalable W2P solution. Through the intuitive AccuConnect™ and AccuLync™ platforms, a PSP can introduce and manage their client’s corporate-wide sales and marketing collateral distribution, lead generation, and storefront management. The Tecra solution empowers PSPs with the tools to launch and manage their client’s sales and marketing initiatives. The solutions allow PSPs to deliver powerful personalized marketing and regulatory messages using cross-media delivery channels such as print, email, SMS, personalized URLs, and video. Tecra’s Professional Services Advisors work directly with PSPs to evaluate, integrate, and deploy the AccuConnect and AccuLync platforms.

For the past two decades, Tecra has helped PSPs of all sizes be closer to their customers by providing a complete suite of marketing distribution management and fulfillment services.