As a professional marketer, your brand’s marketing strategy features a mix of traditional and modern-day channels from direct mail to digital ads, plus point of sale materials and more. Your goal is to build brand equity by producing consistent messaging across all these channels while also enabling local marketers to optimize your brand’s marketing for their individual needs. Your job is considerably easier—and more efficient—via a brand portal, complete with digital asset management.

With a brand portal in place, you can build brand-approved templates and a digital asset library. You can also share brand guidelines and much more. (How much more? Keep reading.) Additionally, your distributed marketers can develop customized materials to meet their own local needs while remaining true to brand standards.

Here are seven key benefits of a brand portal.

1. Improved Marketing Return on Investment

marketing ROILet’s begin with the bottom line—arguably the most important benefit of a brand portal—your marketing return on investment. Brand portal software features specific functions, as you will discover in the rest of this post. Those functions all lead to an improved ROI, which is the primary benefit for your brand. Well-managed, consistent brands are worth up to 20% more than those that aren’t.

Take your local marketing efforts as an example. When your marketing materials appeal to a local audience, they’re more relevant. You’re reducing waste. You’re speeding up production. As a result, you improve your ROI. (Keep reading for more on localization.)

2. Increased Productivity

Organizations that have connected employees generally find improved productivity by as much as 25%. One of the best ways to connect with your distributed marketing team is to give them the accessibility they need to do their jobs quickly and efficiently. Take your marketing collateral as an example. A brand portal allows you to streamline the marketing process by making the most recent versions of your marketing materials and branded content immediately available to all users. When you need to update a file or image, the newest version simply replaces the older one.  

Local Marketer Empowerment

A brand portal makes your entire team more productive because your distributed marketers can do their own thing without repeatedly asking for your help. Furthermore, your designers are free to work on other, more important tasks, rather than fielding unnecessary requests from local marketers. 

3. Brand Compliance and Consistency

brand compliance If you develop consistency with your brand, you can increase your revenue by almost 25%. That’s one of the main reasons businesses turn to brand management software: compliance and consistency.

You start by developing brand compliance guidelines and enforcing them. Most businesses have guidelines, but only a small percentage (about 25%) actually impose them.

It’s easier to do that with a brand portal, where you can post your guidelines for authorized users and update them whenever necessary. Then it’s about getting control of your marketing materials. A brand portal gives you control over the approved templates, logos, and digital assets for your entire organization no matter how many locations you have.

Does Your Business Need a Brand Compliance Review?

To maintain brand compliance, you need to control your brand’s identity. If you find that your brand identity has been compromised, it’s time to consider a brand compliance review. By analyzing the marketing efforts of your entire organization, you’ll discover how all your stakeholders are representing your brand both at your headquarters and “in the field.”

4. Faster Production Times

Employees that don’t have access to a brand portal (more specifically digital asset management software) spend 5x longer searching for the right assets. If you want to achieve faster production times, eliminate the wasted effort of looking through your email or computer’s file folders for approved images. With a brand portal and digital asset management in place, you can quickly find the right image with just a few clicks.

Let’s say you have a designer who has been fielding requests from local marketers who regularly need this file and that image. Depending upon how many locations you have, it wouldn’t take long to fill up that designer’s schedule with these types of requests. This can really bog down the production process. By utilizing the convenience of a brand portal, you’re allowing local marketers to retrieve these files and images on their own. In turn, this speeds up the entire production process. 

5. Improved Scalability

business scalabilityA brand portal is scalable. It adapts as your business grows. When you’re ready to include new locations and users, they’re easy to add. Once they’re in the system, they can develop their own collateral just like any other authorized user. New locations and users aren’t the only way your business grows, however. What happens when you keep adding new customers to your database? Well, as your contact and follower count grows, your workload doesn’t.

In fact, you can automate any of your ongoing communications: direct mail, email, SMS, social media channels, etc. and create a brand marketing campaign around automated events.

6. Reduced Marketing Waste

You know those branded marketing materials you send to every one of your locations? They could be going to waste. Without brand management tools to provide only what’s needed when and where it’s needed, the marketing materials you send to local businesses may wind up in the trash if they can’t use them at their location. Not every location is the same, so what works for one location may not work for another.

Digital Print-on-Demand Solutions

With web-to-print solutions, you can easily create customizable templates that allow for the easy creation and distribution of local marketing materials. Think banners and signs of all sizes, promotional items, digital marketing content, and more.

7. Global Capabilities

digital asset managementAbout 75% of consumers prefer to buy products in their native language. That’s why it makes sense to “speak their language.” If you’re marketing to a non-English speaking region, don’t waste money on marketing materials your audience can’t understand. A brand portal allows you to change the language and imagery of your marketing materials to appeal to any location.

Did you know more people speak Spanish in America than in Spain? Take New York City as an example. Almost 20% of New Yorkers speak Spanish. Only about half of the residents of New York City speak English. Depending on the neighborhood, if your brand has a presence in NYC, it’s important to know as much as you can about the people there, especially in regards to location and language. It might be more beneficial to create your marketing materials in Spanish (or another language) rather than English. 

Tips for Localizing Your Brand

As a distributed brand, many of your customers only care about what’s happening in their own neighborhood. That’s why you should connect with those people on their terms. It helps to have an understanding of their language, their culture, and their traditions. Location marketing has substantial benefits. For instance, geo-targeted social media posts are 6x more successful than global posts.

Here are a few tips to localize your marketing campaigns.

  • Use proper local vernacular. For example, if you live in Minnesota, you call a soft drink pop. If you live in New Orleans, it’s commonly known as a coke (with a small c). Pay attention to what words the locals use.
  • If necessary, adapt your product to fit the needs of your customers rather than trying it the other way around. An example might be a high-end product. Maybe you need a less expensive version, too. Apple takes this approach with its iPhone models. 
  • Encourage customers to submit reviews to Google, Yelp, etc. When someone searches for your business locally, they’ll see what others have to say about your product or service.
  • Seek out local media coverage from news agencies and influential bloggers. Give them a reason to get involved by offering incentives (free product or access) to write about or record a story.
  • Use paid advertising on websites and social networks that will appear in local search results.

There are plenty of common sense methods and creative ways to localize your brand. But always remember you’re marketing to humans. They understand emotions. Touch their hearts and speak their language. That’s a recipe for local success that also benefits the global brand.

Let us Build Your Brand Portal with Digital Asset Management

A brand portal with digital asset management software can make a huge difference in your marketing strategy. It helps you achieve brand compliance and consistency while increasing productivity and empowering your local marketers to create their own success stories. You’ll also realize faster production times, improved scalability, reduced marketing waste, and ultimately, an improved marketing ROI.

BlueSky ETO can help you achieve your marketing goals with software specifically designed for your organization. Do you want to improve your marketing ROI? Schedule a free consultation to learn how a brand portal and digital asset management can help your marketing efforts today.

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7 Key Benefits of a Brand Portal
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7 Key Benefits of a Brand Portal
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With a brand portal in place, you can build brand-approved templates and a digital asset library. You can also share brand guidelines and much more. (How much more? Keep reading.) Additionally, your distributed marketers can develop customized materials to meet their own local needs while remaining true to brand standards.
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