Net Savings: Using the Web to cut marcom costs.

There’s something very satisfying about a specific number. Little kids know that. It’s why they never tell you they’re five; they’re always five-and-a-half. Or almost six. And it’s why mathematicians spend decades trying to compute every last digit of pi—crunching numbers out to the edge of the universe.

It’s also why I’m proud to report that NetMarcom, the proprietary, Web-based content management and publishing solution from Harding Marketing Communications, helped one of our clients, a multinational technology company, cut marcom costs $1,375,300 just last year. Not “over a million.” Not even 1.3 million. But precisely $1,375,300.

Even if that’s not digits out to the edge of the universe, it makes a very satisfying point: NetMarcom is able to save huge piles of money for an enterprise with major marcom projects to manage. But that doesn’t explain how. Since we’re the ones who invented the thing, I’ll give it a try.

NetMarcom helps your business use the net to create all kinds of marketing communications: brochures, spec sheets, blogs, white papers, ads, etc., etc. With NetMarcom, people throughout your organization can enter approved copy once, publish it in almost any format (while maintaining your graphic standards), review work via the Web, revise and update it, translate for folks around the world, and store the finished materials. Anybody (at least anybody you authorize) can access NetMarcom at any time from anywhere (at least anywhere there’s a Web connection).

Here’s what that means in practice. Let’s suppose an engineer in Bangalore makes a change to part number 21057-C. She can use NetMarcom to update the stored spec sheet before they get up for breakfast in Schenectady, where accounting sees what’s happened and drops the price. Meanwhile in Chicago, marketing decides this calls for new benefit copy. Which is approved by legal in New York, then published in local languages to be read by customers in Marseilles, Boston, Cairo, Berlin, Vladivostok, Brasilia, and Kuala Lumpur.

How long does it take to cut marcom costs using the Web? It could be roughly 1.3752 nanoseconds, unless the writer is like most writers and wastes precious time trying to find just the right words. In that case, all the revisions, updates, and reviews might fritter away a whole day. Or two. Or perhaps a week if someone important is on vacation.

Our clients used the simplicity and speed of NetMarcom templates to automatically produce PDFs on the fly. Yet they were able maintain their corporate branding standards without running off to the graphics department for new layouts every time there was a revision.

This not only saved a ton of time, it helped save $1,375,300.

We’re proud of that. We’re also proud that this client isn’t the only major enterprise saving money with NetMarcom. At HP Services, NetMarcom standardizes the workflow and decreases timelines. It produces better data sheets for HP Managed Services, and makes it possible to localize content templates for HP Education. HP also uses NetMarcom to manage promotional materials and catalogs throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—publishing updated price lists and automatically translating everything into 19 languages. Down at ground level, HP sales reps use NetMarcom to create custom product information sheets for retailers who sell HP printers and computers.

I doubt I need to mention that cutting costs has become a high priority these days. That’s why it’s so important for marcom people to know about a simple tool—simple to apply and simple to use—that can save them and their companies so much money: NetMarcom.

If you have major marcom projects to manage, just email me at amy_schmidt@hardingmarketing.com. I can tell you more about NetMarcom, and together, we can probably work up some very satisfying numbers.