Use the right software to take the pain out of catalog and brochure creation

Today’s marketing professionals must be thanking their lucky stars every day for the online revolution.

Sure, there are new areas to think about like search engine optimization and social media engagement and pay per click, but at least now that we are all living in a paper-free world, they can consign the pain and aggravation of trying to create physical catalogues, brochures and price lists to the pages of history, right?

Of course not. If only it was that easy. The truth is that many businesses see digital marketing as a whole new discipline that they need to consider.

For many, it is perceived as something that bears some links with traditional offline marketing efforts. Still, you would be amazed at how many businesses essentially have two parallel marketing functions doing their own thing.

There’s an app for that

Not only does the above scenario constitute huge business inefficiencies and increase operating costs, but it also sends out an incoherent message to customers who are seeing one thing online and something either slightly, or sometimes fundamentally, different in your physical catalogue.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the shape of the convenient Adobe InDesign.

This is so helpful because it bridges the gulf between the raw product data you might hold on a database or in a spreadsheet, the information you have on the product pages of your website, and the content published in your brochures and catalogues.

Specifically, data merge InDesign features the software that pulls information from even the ugliest-looking data source and brings it into your slick customer-friendly marketing material.

It allows you to generate material exactly how you want it, merging product codes, descriptions, prices hyperlinks and any other data fields you can think of. Even better, you can then use this merged data to publish information online and print it off into traditional brochures, price lists, and catalogues to benefit the more traditionalist sectors of your customer base.

An automated process

The clever thing about InDesign is that used right, it can turn what was a doubly labour-intensive and time-consuming marketing headache into a slick, automated process that is easy to manage, quick to perform and will allow your company to deliver marketing messages and materials that are up to date, consistent and on time every time.

The key phrase here, of course, is “used right.” When it comes down to it, InDesign is a professional piece of software and takes time and practice to fully master. This is where a specialist solution like Pagination can make the process run like clockwork.

It can genuinely make the creation of top-quality catalogues and brochures a matter of simplicity, providing all the high-end professional benefits of InDesign, but removing the complexity by making the process automatic. It also overcomes the one flaw of InDesign, which is the fact that it struggles to merge larger and more complex datasets is.