Touchpoints 1/3

In the marketing context, the term touchpoint refers to an advertising or commercial contact point between the brand and the consumer. It can be a human contact, a website, an application, or any other form of communication. We can distinguish between what is published and what is interaction.

Did you know that there are many published contact points available to you?

At the end of this article, you will find the upcoming touchpoints. In this first installment, we look at these:

• Catalog ;
• Proposal & Catalog ;
• Brochure, Magazine ;
• Flyer, Flyer ;
• Asylum Parcel.

Catalog

A printed catalog can be defined as a haptic medium that creates emotion and spreads information.

Paper is a friendly material that creates trust and reinforces the brand. We remember what we read, a catalog generates a memorable sensation.

Paper “exists”. Compared to digital communication, it remains both present and discreet. Many of us appreciate these qualities! In the post-digital era, the number of main catalogs is less important; those that remain are all the more noticed.

Finally, the agility of the printing process has improved. It is possible to publish personalized or small quantity catalogs, or even only addressed in PDF.

Catalogs mean “content to be published”. As we know, the job of having quality content ready to be published is not an easy one! On the other hand, this work is used by all the company’s publications, including the merchant sites. Simple Workspace can help you in this respect through its offer management.

For catalog publications, Simple Workspace allows to mix different approaches:

• Your data is ready to be published and the layout rules have been defined: the pages are then generated automatically at high speed. They can then be finalized if needed ;
• Pages are too creative to be reduced to rules. The products are then dragged and dropped into the pages. Automation is no longer at the page level, but at the product level ;
• Simple Workspace also works with purely creative Adobe InDesign pages, and then brings its workflows to them: correction and proofreading, translation, etc.

Proposal & Catalog

Proposals (quotes or offers) are precious touchpoints, that can be optimized when accompanied by a PDF catalog describing the proposed or related products, as this article describes.

It is a mark of attention appreciated by the recipients, especially since the quality of the cards benefits from the graphic charter developed by the marketing department. It is a tool appreciated by salespeople, who enhance their proposals with perfectly up-to-date data and in the right language.

The sheets can be simple or present images and very detailed characteristics on several pages, but also recall legal mentions, standards, information on installation, links to the website, assembly or maintenance videos, etc.

They can present specific references, or products with their variants, and product comparison tables. In fact, the amount of information continues to grow as the company improves and expands its data. Your customers appreciate complete information if it is clearly presented.

This automation relies on qualitative data, a positive side effect being to get salespeople on board to contribute to the quality of the data through their feedback.

Simple Workspace is regularly used to produce individual or grouped product sheets on the fly in a customized layout, single or multi-page, with or without prices, multilingual, with the distributor’s logo, etc.

Leaflets, Magazines

Printed leaflets can be used to cover topics that are company, department, or product line-oriented. The content and form depend on the target audience: employees, partners, customers, the market, etc.

The same is true for sales magazines, which deal with themes oriented towards their general target: cars, home, leisure, health, etc. Unlike companies, magazines are vital to their publishers: they live off them. That’s why it’s interesting to compare these two media.

Most of the magazines sold have a publishing tool, automation reducing the “time-to-publish” and allowing to focus on the content: editorial line, editors and journalists, photos, etc. Few are multilingual, which is not the case for brochures, which require more and more flexibility to always correspond to the readership.

Simple Workspace is the perfect tool for magazine management and long texts (which run over several pages). The solution is used to produce leaflets, magazines, and illustrated school books.

Pamphlet, Flyer

Used to animate a catchment area around a place of sale, often through advertisements or promotions, the flyer has long been the means to … saturate our mailboxes through weekly publications! This era is partly over.

Nevertheless, it is still a medium used today in a more punctual way, and therefore can be more noticed. Very connected to the points of sale, it is easy to take with you when you go shopping.

A flyer should be very quick to produce and generally does not require a creative layout or detailed information. Even more, a repeated layout coupled with a regular publication frequency promotes its recognition.

This is why it benefits from a high degree of automation, sometimes customized and often coupled with point-of-sale markup, for example, to highlight products on promotion.

With its ability to simply ingest Excel documents (or to feed on a PIM) and to conditionally automate the presentation of products, Simple Workspace allows you to produce flyers in minutes.

Parcel Asylum

As mentioned in this article, the package asylum is regularly used by industry and trade: inclusion of assembly instructions, user manuals, coupons, and warranty statements, promotions and related items, legal notices, etc.

There is (almost) always an emotion when opening a package; participating at this moment with relevant, useful, or pleasant information is a good idea that expresses the attention of the company towards those who have trusted it. A good way to increase customer satisfaction, and to stimulate the frequency of purchases.

Simple Workspace’s ability to manage (or connect) relevant data and translate it into automated printed materials allows for many variations in the package asylum, from a simple product leaflet to a dedicated flyer, not to mention the use of QR codes or augmented reality. It is even possible to personalize messages, provided that the logistics are suitable.

Conclusion

We have reviewed some important touchpoints; they all involve knowing how to “stage the offer” from solid data, having powerful and flexible automation engines, as well as workflows to manage and delegate in a serene way. Simple Workspace is efficient and proven on these 3 themes.

The next article will deal with other touchpoints: Direct marketing, Packaging, Magalog, Product sheet, Excel matrix, Excel, Insert, Tagging & labeling, RFQ response, Document, Notice, Mail, Shop, Merchant site, Website, Smart Application, Youtube & others, TV commercials, Social networks.

Would you like to know more, or would you like a live demonstration?
Contact us : we will be happy to discuss.