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Marketing Portals: What Are Their Benefits and Who Uses Them?

April 17, 2023

Marketing is no longer an intuitive aspect of business, with brands spending money on open media platforms that offer no measurable outcomes or tangible data to ensure their success. Since the advent of digital marketing, marketing has not only become data driven but has also evolved. Now brands can tailor personalized digital experiences to each of their customers and get actionable insights along with measurable outcomes.

But with this increase in information, insights, and outcomes, the role of marketing has become more complex. Marketers are not only designing macro-market campaigns, but must also create micro-personalized campaigns, create reliable and relevant digital data points, and create brand-centric customer interactions. Their Key Result Areas (KRAs) are not just about conversions and sales, but also about creating unique brand experiences that can create lasting impressions on the minds of their potential target audience.

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Plus, there are concepts such as omnichannel marketing for which marketers literally leave no stone unturned in their endeavor to generate brand-personalized content for each digital platform on which their potential customers are present. From creating personalized email messages to creating content for social-media platforms to generating brand-personalized assets, they now have to manage many different digital assets and types of marketing collateral.

So, how can an individual marketer or Marketing team manage all these digital assets, marketing campaigns, customer relationships, and repositories of consumer data? Just as technology has made this new vision of marketing feasible, tangible, and measurable, a marketing portal can make the management of digital marketing assets and marketing collateral more manageable.

What Is a Marketing Portal?

A marketing portal is an online space or software solution where marketers can create marketing assets and artwork, manage them, edit them, store them, and distribute them on all digital and physical channels from one single platform.

The platform acts as a marketing repository where all marketing personnel can create artwork, collaborate remotely on campaigns, assign tasks, manage campaigns, and track activities for maximal transparency and accountability. A marketing portal can also act as a marketing information–management system on which marketers can create credible information for all stakeholders and help them understand their roles and responsibilities.

For an online printing business that has remote teams, a marketing portal can help organize and manage all marketing collateral and personnel from a single platform.

Benefits of a Marketing Portal

The use of a marketing portal can deliver many benefits to businesses and their customers. Let’s explore some of these benefits.

Transparency

With a marketing portal, marketers can easily track the owners of the content, as well as the changes that each member of the team has made. Plus, they can use this platform to track all the versions of the artwork and find out who was responsible for each task.

This capability creates complete transparency throughout the artwork-creation process and lets decision-makers and supervisors keep track of each version of the artwork’s design, its authority, changes, and timeline. The marketing team can also use the platform to assign tasks. Thus, all members of the marketing team have a clear idea about what they need to do.

Access Control

With the marketing portal managing all your assets and personnel, you can determine how much authority each person has over the digital assets. Therefore, with access control, you can ensure that only the authorized personnel have access to amend the artwork and other content. You can assign other personnel to review and comment, but if they are not authorized to make changes, they won’t be able to make any changes to your artwork and assets.

Reduced Turn-around Times

An online print shop could employ a marketing portal not only to manage digital assets but also to use the solution as a Web-to-print solution or vice versa. An ideal, online, artwork-design tool could serve as a marketing portal for the entire business. Along with marketing assets and artwork, the Web-to-print solution could also enable the business to provide custom product design to its customers by enabling them to design their own products, then place a print order.

Not only can a printer manage marketing assets and campaigns but also the entire design and print order cycle from a single platform. Also, since Web-to-print software is an extension of the business’s online store, the business can seamlessly integrate it into the system, thus creating a user friendly system.

Therefore, customers can design their own products and marketers can design brand-centric designs using Web-to-print solutions. Plus, a business can use a Web-to-print solution to create design templates, ensuring that all their artwork aligns with their brand guidelines.

Analytical Capabilities

A marketing portal has a centralized database containing all marketing collateral, campaigns, and artwork. At a glance, a business can measure the performance of each piece of artwork or campaign through dynamic reporting. These reports can give the business insights about what artwork or campaign performs best for their brand, then they can use the best artwork in templates and create effective content for all their marketing channels.

The Benefits of a Web-to-Print Marketing Portal

Let’s consider an example that demonstrates all the benefits and use cases of a marketing portal: the ways in which a Web-to-print marketing portal can give an online print shop an edge over its competitors. A Web-to-print solution with integrated marketing and artwork design-automation capabilities can provide the following benefits to an online print shop:

  • design-automation capabilities for creating marketing and product artwork
  • order, customer, and marketing-management solutions on one-single platform
  • decreased design turn-around times
  • a 24/7 print-order window for businesses
  • complete transparency and the elimination of human error resulting from task-delegation failures
  • a solution that provides actionable insights for data-driven decision-making
  • increased efficiency and productivity that boosts the growth and profitability of an online print business

Who Benefits from Using a Marketing Portal?

Any online print business that wants to achieve a sustainable development goal and has an established marketing team can benefit from using a marketing portal. Whether you have a global business with remote teams and global customers or are in a niche market with a small marketing team, design automation and artwork management can be beneficial to businesses of all sizes and scales.

Getting an Edge over the Competition

Whether your goal is to integrate new market trends, create and manage an effective marketing campaign, or introduce product innovation without spending much on research, a Web-to-print marketing portal that offers marketing-management solutions is your best bet. Using a marketing portal, you can create fast-paced, automated business operations that can ensure effective management and operational excellence, contributing to your bottom line. 

CMO of Design’N’Buy

Irving, Texas, USA

Abhishek AgarwalAbhishek has an extensive background in information technology (IT). His mission is to deliver the best, innovative ideas in Web to Print (W2P). Delivering the best, with the utmost perfection is Abhishek’s life motto. He holds a Bachelor’s in commerce and a Master’s in ecommerce.  Read More

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