OnFulfillment Blog | Print Fulfillment

Rumors of the demise of the print industry are greatly exaggerated. For many companies, printed materials are still an essential part of their marketing and customer engagement strategy.

From brochures, white papers, and data sheets to event signage, direct marketing campaigns, and product catalogs, print continues to play a significant role in building brand visibility and supporting sales and lead generation efforts. If not managed strategically and efficiently, however, printing costs can quickly escalate and consume in inordinate number of already scarce budget dollars. Everything from outdated materials to fragmented ordering processes and last-minute print runs lead to unnecessary expenses.

Today’s era of multichannel marketing demands that you engage your target audience every day across multiple platforms and media:  social, direct mail, websites, events, videos, mobile, messaging, retail, and banner ads.

This requires a solution that allows your sales and marketing teams to order and process materials for every channel you use, making everything they need readily available right at their fingertips.

Anyone who works in sales or marketing within the medical device industry understands that they must deal with numerous challenges and restrictions that impact their ability to do business effectively and efficiently.

Over the years, a number of regulations including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the Anti-Kickback Statute have been imposed to protect patient privacy, ensure quality care, and prevent fraud within the healthcare system. While these regulations do a great job of achieving their goals, they also add several layers of bureaucracy and security to what used to be a fairly simple and straightforward sales process.

While this can be frustrating for marketers, there are ways to navigate around the system to overcome—or effectively avoid—many of these roadblocks. It requires a more “old school” approach that features a return to basics and a revival of old skillsets that will take many back to the early days of marketing fulfillment.

Trade show season is in full bloom.  The calendar is full of events—everything from industry-wide trade shows sponsored by corporate marketing to regional conferences and local seminars staffed by local sales teams and admins.

Lots of exposure and networking opportunities lie ahead.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is, you’ve been tasked with coordinating and overseeing these events nationwide—literally hundreds of shows coast to coast for which you must provide banners, signage, pop-up displays, collateral, and promotional materials.

Even if you were equipped to manage multiple vendors over several months and across multiple time zones to secure the necessary materials for each of these events, that’s only half the battle.  Once the deliverables have been produced, there remains the challenge of getting them all delivered where they need to be, when they need to be there.  That means boxes need to be packed, shipping labels printed, and detailed delivery instructions provided.  And since many of these items are reusable and need to be shared by several different groups, you also need to organize shipments between events and venues, often with razor-thin margins of error.

As an online merchant, the software tools you use to conduct transactions are absolutely critical to your operation.  

The ability to successfully process payments is obviously a must.  Safety protocols such as fraud protection and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption must be built into your e-commerce system to protect both you and your customers.  A user-friendly interface that makes purchasing items easy, intuitive, and seamless is mandatory, lest your customers abandon their shopping carts out of frustration.