Cross-Media: an Overlooked Opportunity for In-plants?

As in-plants seek new service and product offerings to maintain their relevance to customers within their parent organizations, one service that should not be overlooked is cross-media marketing. Once implemented, it can allow them to capture a larger portion of their customers' total communications­—not just print.

Adding new media channels and related services is not an easy task. Transitioning an in-plant from providing only printed documents to offering print plus online, mobile and social media services requires major changes to long-standing business models—as well as buy-in from both customers and the parent organization. Investments in technology implementation, staff training and customer education require time to yield results.

To assess the current state of print services providers' adoption of cross-media services and identify best practices to grow these services, InfoTrends recently surveyed readers of In-plant Graphics. In September, in partnership with North American Publishing Company (IPG's parent company), InfoTrends surveyed 142 print service providers, including 43 in-plants, to find out how they are developing, implementing and growing cross-media services. The results from this survey provide practical insights for in-plants into how cross-media technology is being implemented in production print environments and the key opportunities it provides.

Low Adoption Among In-plants

According to survey respondents, adoption of cross-media marketing services is relatively low for in-plants. Close to 18 percent of in-plants reported offering cross-media, while 42 percent didn't offer it and had no plans to do so. Compare this to the nearly 38 percent of commercial print provider respondents that currently offer cross media services.

As variable data printing is often one of the first steps towards offering cross-media services, to support the need for direct mail, we asked respondents who do not offer cross-media if they offer variable data printing; more than half of in-plants reportedly offer it.

Findings indicate that in-plants have been slow to offer cross-media marketing services for a variety of reasons:

• They don't know how to price or market the service.
• They lack a strategy.
• They don't understand how these services will fit into their business model.
• It's difficult to create awareness or convince customers to specify these services.

There are many reasons in-plants should consider offering cross-media marketing services. They can not only enhance the value of services offered but create stronger bonds with the departments in-plants serve, making them less likely to outsource work over a minimal cost difference. Also, these services minimize the threat of outsourcing and create new and recurring service streams.

Nearly every in-plant's parent organization has a marketing department. These marketers often look outside of their organization for providers of cross-media marketing services to support their campaign needs. In-plants that cannot provide these services miss out on the opportunity to produce the print associated with these campaigns.

Those in-plants that have implemented cross-media marketing services have seen positive results. In our survey, in-plants reported improvements in their ability to demonstrate value and in customer satisfaction. Also showing improvement, they said, was digital print volume: 31 percent of in-plants that invested in cross-media reported an increase in digital print volume as a top benefit of offering these services. On average, print volume increased by 16.6 percent. This is expected to grow, since many respondents are still in the early stages of providing cross-media services.

How to Get Started

For in-plants looking to offer cross-media, variable data printing or personalized direct mail is a good place to start. Beginning with a media that the production facility is already somewhat familiar with lessens the initial impact of the transition and makes it easier to upsell to existing clients. Once started, consider technology that adds additional value to that printed piece, such as pURLs, micro-site generation and mobile bar codes.

Those in-plants that have invested in cross-media have focused on mobile barcodes, pURLs and video, a quickly growing media channel for marketers. From an investment perspective, mobile barcodes and pURLs also have the highest interest, followed by Near Field Communications (NFC), social media services and website development.

Furthermore, cross-media also allows for the addition of other value-added services, such as graphic design, marketing strategy development and data preparation, all of which have been deemed very profitable by the print service providers already offering them.

While incorporating one media channel at a time is a good way to scale up cross-media services over the long run, there should be a plan to provide a variety of services over time. Respondents offering cross-media marketing reported campaigns that included more channels (e.g., print, e-mail, web landing pages, mobile marketing) yielded higher profits.

Promoting Cross-Media

The best way for a print service provider to promote its cross-media services and demonstrate competency is to create self-promotion campaigns featuring what they can do. Demonstrating expertise through a cross-media self-promotion campaign provides prospective customers with solid proof of the concept and the provider's ability to deliver.

From growing print volume to demonstrating increased value, in-plants are advised to consider cross-media services as a way to increase the value of the services they provide. Starting with variable data printing and expanding into value-added cross-media technologies, such as mobile barcodes and pURLs, has worked well for in-plants that have selected this path of transformation. It also provides a foundation for expanding to additional cross media services over time.

If in-plants avoid adopting cross-media marketing services, they will likely lose print work to outside firms that do offer such services. Furthermore, more organizations might be prompted to outsource their printing to providers that offer these services. Getting into the cross-media game can enable in-plants to increase their strategic relevance and elevate their value within their parent organizations.