Simply, Digital & Print Templates enable your marketing teams to produce top-notch artworks in-house – no digital or design skills required. Better still, this technology saves marketing production costs and simultaneously drives up brand compliance and consistency.
So that’s not a bad start. Let’s drill down a bit and find out how Digital & Print Templates help to make all this good stuff happen.
But first, note that it’s important to integrate your platform with or as part of a Digital Asset Management platform. Successful Digital & Print Templates depend on having direct access to approved, consistent brand imagery, logos and values. A Digital & Print Template platform separated from a DAM or Brand Management System will only result in another isolated silo of information – and that means potential trouble with the risk of inappropriate images or information being selected, as well as a lot more time taken to shift images from one system to another.
How does it work?
Essentially Digital & Print Templates is an automation tool that edits marketing materials a piece of cake. Your design team or agency tags frequently-used marketing artworks, turning them into templates. Once uploaded into your DAM platform, the text and images tagged up become dynamic fields in the template that can be edited in real-time and output as omnichannel marketing content.
Users log in via their web browser, ready to edit preconfigured, approved dynamic templates – no need for additional skills or third-party software. Thus marketing teams can create their own customised, on-brand marketing materials on the go and at low cost.
So why does this matter to marketers?
Here are five reasons your team needs Digital & Print Template software:
Controlled brand governance
Managing a brand and overseeing consistency can be tough, particularly if you have decentralised teams working in different geographic locations that need to localise their artwork. With Brandworkz templates, frequently-used marketing artworks can be turned into dynamic templates, each pre-approved for brand compliance and pre-designed to allow specific fields and images to be updatable. Users easily produce consistent, on-brand, localised marketing materials to an approved design.
Fast artwork turnaround
There’s no need to brief an agency or internal design team to make changes that might take days; users can self-serve and edit artwork themselves. They don’t need design skills or specialised programmes. They fetch the relevant artwork from the DAM platform, select the template they need, click to open, make any changes and watch it update in real-time on-screen.
Templates can be designed to be ‘intelligent’, so if you need to change the dimensions, the artwork shifts within the parameters. If you need to amend pricing from Sterling to US dollars in an ad, other details associated with product availability or specification in that country will also change. Even multi-page documents can be edited from within one screen, and edited templates can be saved in the DAM system for re-editing or reuse.
Cost savings
We calculate that the conventional briefing, artwork modification and approval process for a single piece of artwork will take an average of 6.5 hours. At a conservative average of £20 per hour salary cost, each artwork amend will rack up to £130. Scale that up across dozens of artworks or multiple regional teams, and suddenly you’re looking at thousands of pounds in costs. Now compare it with the few minutes it takes one person to update a template and issue a digital or print-ready proof. It makes you think!
Reuse of marketing artworks
Because artworks can be reused multiple times, the cost of creating the dynamic template reduces to pennies per iteration. Unnecessary duplication of artwork is also minimised because centralised, accessible marketing content and artworks make everyone aware of what’s been created previously, so only content that is genuinely needed and doesn’t yet exist gets created. Even better, requests from local teams in the field for localised marketing materials will reduce by as much as 90 per cent as users can find and create their own.
Automated processes
A range of management tasks is also taken care of. Inefficiencies cause marketing processes to slow down, which can be detrimental to time-sensitive projects and deadlines. Still, Digital & Print Templates ensure teams collaborate more effectively and can operate to tight deadlines.
Additional integrated features improve efficiencies further. With an Approval Workflow module in the DAM platform, users can submit their artwork amends for approval before they go live. And by connecting to an Ordering Widget in the DAM, users can place an order for printed marketing materials immediately after completing their edits.
What our clients tell us
Two of our clients, the University of Greenwich and Mitsubishi Motors, successfully use an intelligent Digital & Print Template tool integrated into their digital asset management platforms to improve processes and marketing ROI. You’ll find case studies we’ve published here reveal further inspiring evidence of how, by centralising, managing and repurposing digital assets and marketing artworks in one platform, teams can be empowered to produce brand-consistent and cost-effective communications themselves.
