Few things are as vital to the success of your multi-unit company as your brand. But what if you’re not sure what your brand is? Or even worse, your customers aren’t?
It can happen. Maybe somebody from your sales team inserts a logo you used 7 years ago that was lurking on a shared drive for an upcoming email campaign.
Or maybe there’s a franchisee who’s gotten a little too “creative” and has been churning out printed flyers, signage, and who-knows-what-else - all without your knowledge or approval.
Not a pretty picture is it?
“Close enough” is not good enough when it comes to how your brand appears.
Getting to a Unified Brand with Marketing Asset Management
Fortunately, a solution exists to achieve the consistency your brand requires: Marketing Asset Management. What is marketing asset management? It combines digital asset management, dynamic content customization, web-to-print and sales enablement all together in one super easy solution.
Let’s break down what all that means:
Digital asset management is managing your company’s digital assets (PDFs, sell sheets, logos, etc.) with a cloud-based marketing portal that allows you to organize, store, and easily search for creative assets and marketing materials.
Dynamic content customization allows specific elements of those assets to be tailored for good reasons (think “address line” on multi-unit location brochures). This allows for much of the asset to be locked for consistency’s sake, but tailored to hundreds of different locations or use cases to meet the needs of the individual locations.
Sales enablement is empowering your sales teams around the world with instant access to your latest corporate marketing assets they can personalize and distribute directly from email, your CRM platforms or their home printer.
Web-to-Print is a cloud-based storefront that provides one-stop shopping for the branding needs of everyone across your entire company. With this single, all-in-one portal, your team can have printed or promotional items, tailored to their individual location, shipped directly to their door -- from anywhere.
RELATED POST: STREAMLINING YOUR FRANCHISEE BRANDING WITH WEB-TO-PRINT
Centralizing Your Brand Elements
To be memorable, your branding elements - your logos, colors, fonts, and images must be consistent and reflect what your company is now. McDonald’s golden arches, Nike’s swoosh, and Apple’s … apple may all seem unchanged for years or even decades, but tweaks are often made as the result of brand audits. Other companies make major changes to their brand images as social and economic conditions change, sometimes quickly.
Does your audience still see you the same way you want them to? Are you still communicating well with them? Once you’ve figured all of that out, if your brand image needs changes, all of your old materials have to go away. Really - lock them up and throw away the key.
Imagine all of your location managers or team members accessing only the latest approved marketing materials that you designate. Print products - like mail, marketing collateral, packaging, signs, displays, folders, business cards, promotional items - will all have the same look and feel when ordered and printed from the portal. The same applies to your digital assets such as logo files, Powerpoints, email banners and signatures, videos, and websites. What about your social media graphics and images? Yeah, those too.
Centralizing all of it in one place means that everyone can easily find whatever they need for any location and be 100% brand-compliant. Any changes that you make are applied universally and become the new standard for your company’s physical and digital locations, as part of a well-defined strategy. And customers? They’re not confused about who you are.
RELATED POST: WHAT IS A BRAND AUDIT?
Flexibility While Staying On Brand
Working within a template in a Web-to-Print portal protects your brand elements by locking them down. However, at the same time, you can opt to allow franchisees and team members some measure of freedom to login to the system to customize some fields.
Personalizing employee names, store locations, contact information, and more - all as you decide - turns a customer experience from a static “form letter” communication into a more meaningful 1-to-1 interaction.
What Happens When Brands Are Consistent
Taking a holistic approach to branding is easier and worry-free with a marketing asset management system.
With marketing asset management, your brand consistency will now:
- Stand out against the competition in the marketplace
- Build franchisees’ confidence
- Bolster consumer trust
- Create more emotional connections
- Retain more loyal customers and deepen relationships
- Increase in value
- Grow revenue
Remember that every inquiry, every sale, every conversation creates a connection and builds a customer’s perception of how your company fulfills their wants and needs. Tangible things like colors, logos, and slogans form associations with your brand’s service or product in their minds. Fair or unfair, people make a judgment of your values, your credibility, and the benefits to them of doing business with you, especially when you present the same face to them regardless of where you meet.
Here at Ironmark, we’ve helped many franchisors and multi-unit teams develop and build brand consistency through marketing asset management. Please contact us to set up a time for a consultation with Jessica and her team. We’d love to develop a solution to meet your needs!
