How SPAR improved the production process of their marketing materials with Relayter

A customer story about SPAR with Tim Daamen.

SPAR Supermarkets

SPAR is one of the largest retail franchise brands in the world, with over 13.000 store locations in 44 countries.

The company was originally called DE SPAR, which is an acronym of the Dutch phrase “Door Eendrachtig Samenwerken Profiteren Allen Regelmatig”. In English that translates to “through united co-operation everyone regularly profits”. This perfectly describes SPAR’s succes, and we are proud that Relayter is their tool of choice for automated creation of marketing promotion materials.

Tim Daamen promotie coordinator van SPAR

“Relayter offers us the possibility to create doordrop folders, flyers and POS marketing material in an easy and user-friendly way. We do this for all our different types of stores, each with its own brand identity. This is why Relayter makes the promotion process much more efficient for our entire organization."

Tim Daamen – Promotions Coordinator

The Challenge

SPAR produces retail promotions all year round, on a bi-weekly and monthly basis. This means there is a lot of data that needs to go into correct design layouts.

Before producing marketing material, there is another challenge. Making sure all product and buying staff provide correct promotions data, and people can manage or access this data in an easy and secure way. For this first stage of the promotions process, SPAR has setup a custom Microsoft Dynamics environment. This provides a solid base for all promotion management needs.

The second stage of the process is to produce creative material from large data sets. This needs to be done efficiently and on-brand. All assets need to be flexible for (data) change and everything needs to be reviewed or approved by appointed product category managers. Making sure layouts and designs are filled with the correct data and marketing material looks good for multiple store brand identities.

The Solution

As a central publishing hub, Relayter brings all marketing promotion data and digital assets together. All stakeholders can work together in one tool.

Relayter is integrated and connected with SPAR’s Microsoft Dynamics ERP. This means it automatically creates and updates campaign information in Relayter, with all promotion and product data. Relayter functions as the central DAM and Publishing hub for multiple departments. Staff from buying, category and product management, marketing or external agencies can all work together in one solution.

Campaigns in Relayter are used to automatically setup publications, such as the doordrop folder, magazines, flyers and POS store material. Once all promotion data for a certain campaign is loaded in, SPAR is able to manually enrich this data. For instance, with more specific promotion information, images and other digital assets (DAM).

By using smart Relayter templates, pages and materials are filled automatically with all correct product and promotion data in the correct brand style, such as pricing, text or product images. Everything can then be processed through our easy-to-use workflow tool with proofing and sign-off options for multiple stakeholders and departments.

Automated Layout + Custom Creative Design

Every automatically generated asset can be modified and fine-tuned to desire of the marketing team. All generated files can be downloaded as Adobe InDesign or Sketch files.

We often hear people say “Our content is too special to automate”. This is partly true when your content is very creative and custom made. But as is the case with SPAR, 50-75% of its content production is data driven. The rest is custom made. It can be advertorials, cooking recipes, fun facts, or other creative content.

With Relayter, SPAR is able to merge these two types of content together. All design files in Relayter are easily editable with industry standard tools such as Adobe InDesign or Sketch. But not only can SPAR edit the files, it is also possible to upload new custom design files to merge into your publications.

This creates a much more dynamic and flexible setup, where automated content creation meets creative work. Whatever the needs are, SPAR is able to focus time and resources on the right materials that matter and automate everything else.

How to automate productions with Relayter

Manage campaign or project data by importing products and promotions. Set up smart design templates and create proofing workflows. Then streamline your complete marketing production with creative automations.

Automated design & proofing workflows for Retail Promotions

Relayter is a leading SaaS provider of omnichannel Automated Design and Proofing Workflow management within large marketing productions. Request a FREE DEMO from one of our Design Automation experts to discover why so many companies use Relayter.

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