How Web to Publish Templates can Improve Company Efficiencies
As a part of a marketing team, you know what it’s like to get regular requests from people within your organization to customize an asset with new information. Sometimes it’s as simple as updating the image and store location of an ad or brochure or adjusting the ad dimensions. As simple as it is, each request takes time for your team to fulfill, and when multiple requests are coming in each day or week, seemingly simple change requests start adding up and costing your team hundreds of hours each year producing repetitive content.
An easy solution to remove this repetitive process may be to provide the organization with access to the source files they can use to input their own data and images. However, now you’ve given your end users creative freedom, and possibly introduced a barrier if they don’t know how to use them. They can (and will) change everything from layout, colors, fonts, images, and logos. If adhering to brand standards and maintaining brand consistency is important to you, that idea probably makes you cringe.
This is where Web to Publish (W2P) can save the day.
W2P software allows you to take any asset created in Adobe InDesign and create a configurable, web-based template for your end users to leverage. Not only does this free up your marketing team by allowing your end users to self-serve, but it also allows you as an admin to lock content and restrict the document so the end user can only input or edit information in set fields that the admin designates.
For text fields you could provide a few fixed options to choose from, like a few headlines for example. Or you could enable a single word, phrase or paragraph to be edited with open text typing, or even give them options to hide/show content as needed to provide users with configurable options. For images you can decide which images are editable, and for each image frame specify which images they can choose from. You can even provide multiple layout options for them to choose from, and/or enable and allow the document to dynamically re-size within certain width and height constraints.
Another major benefit W2P has to offer is the ability to download the file in various export formats. If they are using this for print, they can export as a PDF with bleed and crops. If they are distributing the PDF digitally, they can choose a PDF without bleed and crop marks. If they are customizing a social media graphic or a web banner image, they can export as JPG or PNG for digital use.
The options are endless with this software.
If you can create it in InDesign, and if PDF, JPG or PNG are the outputs you need, you can make it a Web to Publish template. Here is a sample list of the types of assets we see our clients leveraging this tool to create:
Ads and promos
Agendas
Avery labels
Awards
Banners
Billboards
Business cards
Certificates
Coupons
Course Overviews
Door hangers
Event posters
Flyers
Infographics
Invitations
Logos with Taglines
Marketing materials
Memes
Mortgage Promotions
New Employee Orientation Handbooks
Newsletters
Postcards
Product packaging
Programs
Proposals
Signage
Slide Deck Presentations
Social Media graphics
Stationary
Table cards
Tri-fold brochures
Web Ads
Web Banners
And more!
Web to Publish will save your team time and MONEY
We’ve found that an average request to make simple content changes to an asset will likely take anywhere from 2-4 hours for a basic request once you factor in the time it took for the user to submit the request, the designer to ask questions via email exchanges and perform the initial work, and make any edits and revisions.
Configuring a Web to Publish template can take as little as 15 minutes for a very basic template, to 1-2 hours for a mid-complexity template, or multiple hours, depending on the complexity of the content options you wish to provide your users.
While the initial setup may take a little more time in some cases, the long term cost savings are exponential and are typically recovered with only a handful of users self-servicing their artwork via the W2P template.
This not only reduces the amount of content change requests that come to your marketing team, but it frees up your team to focus on more creative, strategic and revenue producing activities for your organization, as opposed to spending their time on repetitive data entry & changes to existing assets.
Time is money, and saving time means saving money. Utilizing Web to Publish software helps ensure your team’s time is no longer spent on repetitive, time consuming requests that end users are capable of doing with the right tool to guide them.
The American Cancer Society utilizes Web to Publish software for all of their external event marketing and they created over 1,600 templates resulting in over 45,000 artworks created by end users in a single year.
By their calculation, in their first year the American Cancer Society saved over $2 million in design team utilization alone.
This impact is huge as it has enabled their end users to self-serve and take care of their own material requests immediately, improving their speed to market and saving the organization money in the process.
Web to Publish is an incredibly powerful tool for organizations that want to free up their marketing team from repetitive requests, save time, and save money.
One great provider of this software is Brandworkz -- a Brand Asset Management software that not only provides a platform to safely store and display assets and brand standards, but also houses this powerful W2P software. And if you need printing or approval workflows to facilitate users downloading & print their assets, you can even send the materials created from those templates directly to the print shop through the Brandworkz workflow features.
Spinakr is proud to be the exclusive sales and implementation partner for Brandworkz in North America and we would be happy to schedule a consultative demo to help you discover how your business can use Web to Publish to add efficiency and profitability to your organization as well.
Find out more at SpinakrSolutions.com
