8 Key Benefits of a Brand Management Platform

From direct mail to digital ads and printed collateral, your modern-day marketing goal is to present your brand consistently and strategically regardless of how many locations you have to account for. A brand management platform can be your competitive advantage if you make the proper software selection. After all, consistent brand presentation across all your marketing channels can increase your revenue by almost 25%, according to a Forbes report. Still not sure? Here are eight key benefits of a brand management platform that will convince you.

1. Brand Compliance and Consistency

You just read how consistent brands make more money—up to 25% more. That’s incentive enough to give a brand management platform a serious look. It begins when you develop brand compliance guidelines. From there, you make your guidelines readily available and you enforce them. Did you know that most businesses have strategic brand guidelines, but only about a quarter of those companies take the time to enforce them? If you really want your brand to be compliant and consistent, a brand management platform can help.

This cloud-based marketing hub provides a place for you to post your guidelines. Then distributed marketers and any other authorized users can easily access them. In essence, you’re gaining more control over all your marketing materials. This includes brand guidelines, approved templates, logos, and all the digital assets for your entire organization—no matter how many locations you have in your network.

2. Increased Productivity

An abundance of books and articles have been written to help you increase productivity in your personal and professional life. But you have to put the words into action. The same concept applies to a brand management platform. The best brand management system is out there, but if you don’t put it to work for your brand, you won’t realize the benefits. How productive is your brand? Are you wasting any time? Take an honest assessment of your day-to-day activities.

If you’re like most brands, you probably spend too much time on tasks you could easily streamline. Let’s look at an example. How do you organize and distribute your marketing collateral? A brand management platform allows you to create an easily accessible, cloud-based location for all your marketing materials. This increases marketing productivity by preventing unnecessary inquiries and requests from your distributed marketing team. You can make all your marketing materials available to these authorized users by uploading the most recent versions to your brand management platform. When a new version becomes available, you simply upload it and it replaces the previous version. This frees up your time for more important tasks and thus, you’re more productive. Of course, the same applies to all digital files: PDF documents, all kinds of image formats, audio/video files, and more.

3. Empowered Local Marketers

Local marketers are more productive and more invested in the brand when they can take charge of their own marketing efforts. A brand management platform promotes empowerment for distributed marketers by giving them the freedom to control their own destiny. At the same time, it allows you to set brand standards, so compliance and consistency don’t suffer at the hands of a rogue distributed marketer. Let’s look at a franchise example to demonstrate.

Brand consistency for a franchise business means that everyone has to be on board with the overall strategy or plan. If a local marketer decides to go their own way and create marketing materials that aren’t brand compliant, that hurts the brand as a whole. On the other hand, you can give them the freedom they desire by allowing for localization. This is not just a courteous gesture, it’s a profitable strategy. Localized marketing is booming. Almost a third of all mobile web searches relate to a specific location. Plus, consumers are using the phrase “where to buy” about 85% more than they were in 2015. With these statistics in mind, you can achieve a marketing advantage by empowering local marketers to appeal to their own customers.

4. Faster Production

A brand management platform is built for speed. You’re very likely aware of how much time evaporates sending emails back and forth to your colleagues and employees. Imagine doing that with an entire team of distributed marketers every time you have a new piece of marketing collateral or asset to introduce. Not to mention the requests and responses you’ll get in return. That kind of back-and-forth activity can take on a life of its own very quickly. The next thing you know, you’re spending all day searching through emails and digital files. If it’s faster production you desire, a brand management platform can remove all the steps that lead to wasted time.

Let’s say you’re rolling out a new seasonal marketing campaign. Rather than doing the unthinkable and sending a mass email with attachments to your local marketers, just upload the necessary materials to your brand management platform. Then you can assemble them by campaign as well as by asset type, so your authorized users can always find what they need, when they need it. If for some reason you need to update any of the images or documents, it’s as easy as uploading and overriding the previous version. Then it’s instantly available.

5. Enhanced Scalability

Are you concerned that your business may outgrow your brand management platform? Well, that would be a nice problem to have, wouldn’t it? The truth is, you don’t have to worry about it because it will never be an issue, regardless of how much your business grows. That’s because a brand management platform is designed to grow with you. It adjusts as you need it to and still delivers the same experience to all your team members.

Let’s say you have a franchise that’s prepared to add a dozen new stores to local markets in the coming months. That may mean adding at least 12 new users to your system. But once you provide them with access to the brand management platform, they’ll have the same benefits all your other local marketers have—not to mention access to onboarding materials and more. They can create their own collateral and take advantage of automated marketing production solutions immediately.

6. Less Marketing Waste

When you send branded marketing materials to all of your locations, can you be sure they’re going to good use? The truth is, you don’t really know because every location is somewhat different than the others. Each physical location may have different size dimensions and thus have different needs based on their available space. This is not uncommon, especially when building cookie-cutter locations is unreasonable—or impossible.

With a brand management platform, you can be sure that each location gets what they need when and where they need it. This prevents your unused marketing materials from winding up in a trash can. For example, with web-to-print services, you can build customizable templates that allow for the easy creation and distribution of your local marketing materials. This includes banners, signs, promotional products, digital marketing content, and more. It all adds up to less marketing waste—and less marketing waste means money saved.

7. Global Capabilities

A brand management platform lets you modify your existing marketing materials into various languages. Why is this important? This helps cut the cost of hiring a translation service to change the text on a brochure, poster, or website. A Facebook study revealed that ads targeting Hispanics in Spanish greatly increase their interest in purchasing those products or services. That’s important information for a local marketer in an area that’s predominantly non-English speaking. It could be the difference between making or losing a customer.

Let’s take Spanish as an example. It’s the most common language in New York City locations like Manhattan’s Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill neighborhoods. It would make more sense to produce your brand compliant marketing materials in Spanish than it would English. This can enhance marketing ideas for veterinary practices, financial services marketing, or any industry with a multilingual market. That’s where global capabilities come in especially handy. Your brand remains compliant while adapting to the needs of a specific location.

Please note that a brand management platform won’t do the work of translating text. If you want to give your local marketers an ad in Spanish, you’ll still need to upload that ad in Spanish. If it’s an editable template, the fixed portions should already be in Spanish. Plus, if any of the editable sections include text, they’ll still need to have an approvals system in place to review.

8. Improved Marketing ROI

In summary, you want your brand management platform to produce a healthy bottom line. You can have all the other benefits in order, but if you don’t experience an improved return on your marketing investment, you haven’t achieved your ultimate goal as a business. A brand management platform features all of the aforementioned benefits—with each of them leading to an improved marketing ROI.

Choose Your Brand Management Platform

A brand management platform can make a big difference in your marketing strategy. With the best software solution working alongside your business, you can achieve brand compliance and consistency while also boosting productivity and encouraging your distributed marketers to take ownership of their own marketing ventures. You can also expect improvements in production, scalability, and your marketing ROI.

BlueSky ETO can help you reach your marketing objectives with software that’s engineered to order for your organization. Schedule a free consultation with a BlueSky ETO representative to learn how a brand management platform can help your business today.