Jet Mail 11/4/21 9:55 AM

What is a Marketing Portal?

What is a Marketing Portal?

A marketing portal centralizes all of your marketing assets in an easy-to-use, web-based platform. The portal provides 24/7 self-service access for users to browse, select, customize, and order the marketing materials they need with minimal oversight from marketing.

Learn how a marketing portal benefits marketing teams by:

  • Simplifying marketing asset management.
  • Enforcing brand guidelines.
  • Expediting speed-to-market.
  • Giving users the power to personalize assets.
  • Providing complete oversight into marketing operations.

1. A Marketing Portal Simplifies Marketing Asset Management

Managing marketing materials and branded assets used to require a trip to the marketing storage closet where you would sift through unorganized boxes of brochures, flyers, presentation folders and promo items. Distributing marketing assets required additional time and effort to assemble, package, label and ship the items to your respective teams.

Let’s not forget the time and resources required for inventory management, budgeting, keeping assets up-to-date and accommodating the frequent one-off design requests from sales reps.

Adding to the complexities of marketing asset management, most corporate marketing teams support the needs of multiple departments, business units, locations and partners.

Thankfully, a marketing portal simplifies and streamlines all components of marketing asset management.

With a marketing portal, marketing teams can house their entire library of assets–including business cards, brochures, sell sheets, business stationery, product information kits, trade show materials and more–in a centralized location.

By centralizing all assets in an easy-to-use portal that’s accessible 24/7, approved users have self-service access to order the materials they need with minimal oversight from marketing. Users can even personalize marketing assets in the portal, eliminating one-off and last-minute design requests.

The self-service access of a marketing portal is a game-changer for marketing departments, especially when it comes to bandwidth. Self-service access is made possible thanks to customizable settings in the portal that provide enterprise-level control over all user activity, including:

  • Who can access the portal.
  • What marketing materials each user can order.
  • How much each user can order.
  • What marketing materials can and can’t be customized.
  • Final sign-off on all orders through automated approval routing.

A marketing portal makes inventory management easier than ever by eliminating manual processes and the need to print marketing materials in bulk. Thanks to modern print management solutions, marketing teams benefit from the speed of on-demand printing and the flexibility of a just-in-time printing model.

This means you’ll always have just the right amount of ready-to-ship marketing materials in stock for same-day processing. But what does just the right amount actually mean?

It means you don’t have to print 20,000 corporate brochures at once and risk the cost, time and resources associated with destroying, redesigning and reprinting the brochures.

Using historical data and usage reports within the portal, marketing teams can print just enough of what they need. This ensures you never have too much or too little inventory. When the stock runs low, automated shelf top-off technology will notify you that it’s time to reprint.

For example, 200 corporate brochures can be pre-printed and stored in a marketing fulfillment warehouse. When an order comes in through the marketing portal, all items are pulled from inventory, professionally assembled and packaged, then shipped to the recipient that same day by Jet Mail. When inventory levels reach 25 brochures, admins are automatically notified via email to approve a reprint to replenish the stock back up to 200.

Need to update an asset with new pricing or messaging? Simply add a new file to the portal and choose whether you want to deplete the existing inventory first or if you prefer to immediately replace the existing inventory with the updated asset.

In addition to saving time and resources, a marketing portal makes it easier than ever to ensure your carefully crafted brand guidelines are always adhered to.

>>>Related Resource: Read how healthcare marketers simplify marketing asset management with a marketing portal.

2. A Marketing Portal Ensures Brand Consistency

Presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%.

Despite the benefits, maintaining consistent branding can be hard, especially for multi-location businesses.

Through the use of pre-approved, pre-designed templates uploaded to the portal, users can customize marketing materials with information relevant to their target prospects or local markets.

Marketing teams can effortlessly ensure branding is on point thanks to customizable settings within the portal. This includes:

  • Indicating what sections of templates can be customized and what areas are locked into place.
  • Embedding style guide rules into customizable areas to ensure that all fonts, colors and design elements are followed.

Want to sign off on all customized orders? Simply adjust approval settings for some or all users. Don’t worry–you won’t create new approval bottlenecks, though. Automated workflows within the portal drastically reduce review and approval times because fewer employees and resources are required when customized assets are created.

This “controlled customization” protects both branding and bandwidth.

>>>Related Resource: Learn how franchises use marketing portals to maintain brand consistency.

3. A Marketing Portal Expedites Speed to Market

Getting marketing materials in the hands of prospects quickly (and before the competition) can be the difference between winning and losing a customer.

With self-service access to the portal, sales reps can personalize brand-compliant content specific to prospects, clients, events and meetings and deliver it on their own schedule (aka, ASAP).

The need to personalize and quickly engage prospects extends beyond just the sales department. Multi-location businesses, franchises, distributors and other partners need to speak directly to the unique needs of their local markets by adapting quickly to:

  • Changes in consumer behavior that require a shift in messaging or positioning.
  • Windows of opportunity that arise from unforeseen events.
  • News, studies, insights, trends or information.

In addition to creating customized marketing materials, a marketing portal provides the same 24/7 self-service access to order pre-printed, pre-assembled items from inventory.

A marketing fulfillment partner with all-in-one capabilities like Jet Mail will take care of assembling, packaging and distributing the orders for same-day fulfillment.

Benefits of an All-in-One Marketing Fulfillment Partner

Not all marketing portals are created equal. Behind the Jet Mail Marketing Portal is a state-of-the-art print shop, commercial mail house and 80,000 sq. ft. fulfillment center. Our all-in-one marketing fulfillment capabilities drastically expedite the time it takes to distribute marketing assets by:

  • Reducing the number of vendors in the supply chain.
  • Sending marketing assets directly to prospects.
  • Having brand-compliant, ready-to-ship materials on the shelf.

>>>Related Resource: Read how to get your message in front of customers first.
 

4. A Marketing Portal Gives Users the Power of Personalization

Unless you have a one-size-fits-all audience, your marketing materials should be tailored to the individual needs and pain points of the individual. Personalized, hyper-targeted messaging builds trust, and can be the difference between marking a prospect as closed-lost or closed-won, especially in competitive business environments. It’s so effective that 93% of businesses saw an increase in revenue when they focused on personalization.

But it’s not possible for marketing teams to constantly halt operations to develop, design and distribute custom materials. This would mean thousands of requests per week for some marketing departments.

A marketing portal allows users (like sales reps) to personalize marketing assets that speak to the needs of the individual without pulling in marketing every time.

For example, the decision-makers involved in purchasing diagnostic imaging equipment for a hospital could be from the C-suite, radiology department, emergency room or all of the above.

The portal allows sales reps to personalize pre-approved templates with benefits that resonate with each individual decision-maker, such as:

  • Explaining how the product expedites workflow, resulting in cost savings and operational efficiencies that resonate with the C-suite.
  • Including product specs that focus on speed and accuracy to improve patient outcomes in the ER when time is critical.
  • Providing images of the system's high-resolution scans to show how the product makes it easier for a radiologist to detect disease.

Having collateral that is customized to the needs of each of these decision-makers helps your sales reps close more business.

Additionally, images can be tailored to represent the local health population. Sales reps can add geriatric patient images to reflect the high percentage of baby boomers in the local community for one decision maker, but not the other.

Marketing portals allow users to customize templates with information specific to their location. This is ideal for franchises, health systems and multi-location businesses that need to personalize information while adhering to global branding, such as:

  • Adjusting flyers to reflect new hours of operation.
  • Communicating new service offerings or promotions.
  • Promoting a special for home repair after a regional weather event.

>>>Related Resource: Learn how personalization is one of the biggest trends in healthcare marketing.

5. A Marketing Portal Provides Complete Oversight of Marketing Operations

Advanced marketing portals have robust reporting that provide management with complete visibility into marketing operations. This visibility provides real-time and historical data to inform future asset development and increase its ROI. For example:

  • If you notice that physicians frequently order patient education brochures about your orthopedic center, this is a sign to create more assets around orthopedic procedures.
  • When you see that a franchise location in Orange County has substantially lower order volume than the other facilities in the region, it might be due to the fact that the assets don’t resonate with the local market and need to be updated.
  • Are sales reps ordering a large volume of corporate overview kits, but nothing else? It might be time to survey the reps to see what additional collateral they need or why they aren’t utilizing current sales tools on the portal.

Marketing departments benefit from full oversight of their budgets as well.

Comprehensive reporting tools in the portal provide filtering, mining, and sorting functionalities, as well as real-time inventory data to make it easy to see what’s in stock, who is ordering what, and how much is being spent. Portal admins can assign spend and order limits for each user, location or department to ensure the marketing budget stays on track.

This is helpful at the end of the year when businesses determine how much to allocate towards marketing, especially if ROI is high. The portal could be the reason marketing gets a slight bump in their budget year-over-year to keep up the momentum.

>>>Related Resource: Learn how medical device marketers improve operational efficiencies through a centralized marketing portal

Schedule a Demo of the Jet Mail Marketing Portal

Behind the Jet Mail Marketing Portal is a state-of-the-art print shop, commercial mail house, fulfillment center, 80,000 square foot warehouse and a team of experts ready to create the perfect solution for your business. Boost bandwidth and ROI with our end-to-end marketing fulfillment services that link directly to the portal.

Schedule a demo of the Jet Mail Marketing Portal today.

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