Marketing inventory management involves more than keeping your brochures neatly stacked and organized on a shelf. It involves both the development of marketing assets and the associated operational tasks once an asset is complete.
Your marketing department is likely responsible for the development of things like:
- Brochures, product spec sheets and other print marketing campaigns.
- Introductory, thank you and follow-up sales letters.
- Product samples.
- Direct mail campaigns.
- Trade show displays, signage and collateral.
Your marketing department is also responsible for everything after a marketing asset has been developed, including:
- Processing orders or requests for marketing assets.
- Inventory management.
- Kitting and assembly of assets.
- Storage and warehousing.
- Managing budgets for designers, printers, storage space and shipping.
- Maintaining brand guidelines.
- Ensuring compliance with legal or regulatory requirements (depending on your industry).
That’s a lot!
Especially when you consider how many other projects, campaigns, events and initiatives the marketing department is working on. And while managing your marketing inventory can be a beast, it’s critical to achieving business and sales goals.
Fortunately, there are three ways to master marketing inventory management that will make your life easier and support business goals:
- Centralize all marketing inventory in an online marketing portal.
- Boost bandwidth through controlled customization.
- Leverage modern print management strategies.
Centralize All Marketing Inventory in an Online Marketing Portal
Centralization is critical to marketing inventory management and modern technology makes it easier than ever.
A marketing portal centralizes all of your marketing inventory in an easy-to-use, online portal that’s accessible 24/7. Marketing teams can effortlessly maintain complete control over inventory, branding, and budgets while users benefit from self-service access to order and distribute the materials they need quickly.
Users, such as sales reps or franchise owners, can even customize marketing materials for individual prospects or local markets.
This leads us to our next tip…
Boost Bandwidth Through Controlled Customization
Brand guidelines, messaging, and marketing collateral need to be consistent across all channels and assets. As any marketer knows, this is much easier said than done, especially when you’re constantly receiving custom design requests.
Do any of these requests sound familiar?
- Sales reps with last-minute design requests for a big meeting with a lucrative prospect.
- Dealers asking for co-branded flyers to promote products.
- Regional teams looking for marketing materials that address the needs of their local market.
With self-service access to the marketing portal, users can customize pre-designed and pre-approved templates with images, logos, and content specific to prospects, clients, events and more.
This “controlled customization” is a game-changer for marketing teams. Users are empowered with hyper-targeted marketing materials that can be created, ordered, and distributed fast–and with minimal oversight from the marketing department.
Marketing teams also benefit from controlled customization by:
- Operating more efficiently and increasing bandwidth for the entire department.
- Simplifying and expediting the marketing collateral development process.
- Ensuring brand guidelines are always adhered to.
- Faster distribution of marketing materials.
- Reduce or eliminate one-off or ad hoc design requests.
Don’t worry, admins (typically members of the marketing department) control what, where and how materials are customized. And, you can set permission, budgets and approvals for each user to ensure your budget always stays on track.
Leverage Modern Print Management Strategies
Print marketing materials are at the heart of marketing inventory management. But even a small change in consumer behavior, market trends or business direction can mean print materials need to be updated.
But what if you just printed 100,000 brochures last month?
This is why we created a hybrid print management solution that leverages the speed of on-demand printing and the flexibility of a just-in-time printing model. This model ensures that just the right amount of inventory is always in-stock and ready to ship.
In other words, you no longer have to worry that the 100,000 brochures you just printed will be outdated before you can use them all.
Instead, we’ll print a small quantity of each asset based on historical usage reports and real-time data. When the quantity hits a certain threshold, our automated shelf top-off technology will notify you that it’s time to reprint. This print management system ensures you never have too much or too little. It also “future-proofs” your print marketing collateral and budget. After all, it’s a lot less painful to throw 200 brochures in the recycling bin instead of 200,000.
Marketing Inventory Management with Jet Mail
Since 1993, Jet Mail has helped businesses streamline the creation, management and distribution of marketing inventory. With a state-of-the-art print shop, commercial mail house, full-service fulfillment center, and global distribution network all under one roof, we can create custom solutions that boost bandwidth, build brands and generate more revenue.
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