How the World’s Most Successful Companies Keep their Teams on Brand
A brand is the life and soul of an organization. It’s where your true value comes from, it powers your marketing and it’s what your customers pay for. A strong brand sets you apart from your competitors, promotes recognition and represents your promise to your audience. For every company, a brand is a significant investment of money, time, expertise and culture. That’s because there’s so much more to your brand than making sure the visual elements are right. A brand becomes memorable when it’s consistent. Having brand consistency means that it becomes engrained in the day-to-day of your customers’ lives. But to do this, a brand needs to consider the following:
Brand Compliance
From visuals to the language used – a focus on brand compliance that every marketing campaign across your business is approved, coherent, and consistent with your overall marketing strategy.
Brand Risk
Controlling potential brand damage requires standardized systems, processes and technology that can screen risks and share your marketing campaigns internally to address any potential concerns.
Let’s examine some real branding examples
By learning from some of the world’s leading brands, this playbook is designed to help you take a closer look at how you can bring your brand to life through the use of creative online technologies.
Controlling potential brand damage requires standardized systems, processes and technology that can screen risks and share your marketing campaigns internally to address any potential concerns.
Branding Deserves More than a PDF
To have a strong brand, you need brand guidelines that explain to everyone in your organization how to correctly use each asset.
Brand guidelines are there to communicate the brand parameters with the wider business and external stakeholders so that they can ensure it’s always used correctly.
Traditionally, marketers create lengthy PDF files to act as brand guidelines. However, PDFs have a lot of limitations that can slow the process down, get ignored or cause errors.
So, even though PDFs have been ‘checking the box’ for a long time, we now have to accept that they are a thing of the past. Successful brands are leaving old systems behind and embracing more efficient technology to get better results for far less effort.
What does your brand need?
A Single Point of Reference
Brand guidelines must be the single source of truth for all marketers, designers and people who directly work with your brand. Centralized software solutions like IntelligenceBank equip your team with a reference point to access updated and compliant brand elements.
A Dynamic Showcase of Brand Guidelines
Instead of flat, long PDF documents, password-protected interactive webpages allow you to easily browse and share approved assets, brand elements and campaign materials with internal departments and external partners.
An Online Brand Portal
Having an online brand portal ensures corporate viewers can get a complete understanding of your brand and its processes while giving your designers a way to quickly access the brand pages for their very specific task – like logo placement on digital banners or secondary color choices.
“Having a self-serve online platform where our team can access the most up to date branded assets ensures that we are providing our customers with a consistent brand experience.”
– Presley Brown, Carls Jr.
What is Digital Asset Management?
Effective brand asset management is more than just good creative productions – it is ensuring that you’ve got measures in place to control how these brand assets are being used by the rest of the business and third parties.
What is DAM?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is an important component of an online brand portal, acting as the central hub that connects your business’s branding together. It serves as a single source of truth for storing and distributing brand assets, campaign elements and creative content between departments, colleagues and suppliers.
What are the advantages of DAM?
Updated and Compliant Assets
Integrating DAM Software allows your marketing team to control the access of approved and up-to-date branded assets. By providing a way to track usage and downloads, DAM also minimizes your brand risks and leaves a paper trail.
No More Expired Assets
The system delivers alerts to inform you if assets are no longer compliant and if you have expired talent usage rights, ensuring that legacy designs disappear from view or are updated using live version control.
Brand Refresh
Everything in the DAM platform is seamlessly integrated and assets stored in it feed directly into your online brand guidelines. This allows you to make branding updates in just a few clicks.
The Importance of a Central Point of Contact
A central point of contact or a dedicated “marketing inbox” within your online brand portal guides your internal users to a single location where they can make marketing requests and have their brand questions answered. This efficient method paves the way towards achieving better brand compliance throughout the business without overloading your marketing department.
What does this central point provide?
Automated Marketing Requests
By moving away from traditional, manual emails and upgrading to an advanced marketing system, you can streamline requests, enhance communications and reduce admin duties.
Self-Serve Solution
The software has automation capabilities, that can be set up to answer user queries in a selfservice manner. For example, they can request a logo or a certain image, and be directed to the assets they need, so they can download it directly from the DAM.
If an enquiry can’t be fulfilled with self-service, forms will instead capture information relating to requests which will then create a ticket. This will allow the marketing team to handle concerns more efficiently without getting overwhelmed.
Insights and Analytics
Having a central point of contact provides you with trackable data around insights like the most common queries, which can then inform decision-making around potential improvements to streamline solutions.
“The ability to showcase our Brand Guidelines in a dynamic way increases user engagement and helps maintain brand consistency. We chose IntelligenceBank BrandHub because not only does their platform serve as a central area for digital content, but it also provides a way for us to communicate in a manner consistent with what each of our three distinct brands represent.”
– Rhonda Williams, Hertz
Simplify the Marketing Approval Process
The approval process is necessary to ensure brand integrity. However, it can be quite long and disorganized when done manually or through email. Streamlining the marketing approval workflow using a central digital platform ensures that all creative materials are reviewed by relevant people to ensure brand compliance with brand guidelines, marketing regulations and company policy before it gets distributed.
Email approvals vs permission-based approvals
By providing a clear path for approvals and an easy way for all users to navigate your brand, you begin to break down silos across your business and improve the line of communication between teams.
This gets campaigns and content approved much faster, with far less hassle and inconvenience.
“Our IntelligenceBank DAM provides a centralized and streamlined repository for our digital assets, brand guidelines and project requests. The ability to use one platform for all of these related tasks has helped save a tremendous amount of time and resources. In addition, it has simplified the creative workflow, while providing an easy-to-use system for all of our users.”
– Andrew McLeroy, Baptist Health
Greater Brand Control with Dynamic Creative Templates
Empower creativity across your entire business with Dynamic Creative Templates. They provide your local area teams with the ability to customize certain elements within approved templates using brand assets, without risking consistency and brand compliance in the process.
What are the benefits of Dynamic Creative Templates?
Every Piece of Content is on Brand
Dynamic Creative Templates are connected to databases of information and populate depending on which design is needed. The design can then be downloaded or sent off for approval, with complete assurance that all disclaimers remain intact, the design is correct and overall messaging is compliant – no matter who edits the content template.
Significant Time Savings
With pre-approved templates, designers don’t need to start from scratch and go through the same stringent approval process. Customized content can be produced quickly and more effectively.
Creative Control
Creative Templates allow you to lock down specific design elements so that users can only edit specific parts and maintain the important aspects of the brand.
Allow for Localization
If you have teams in different areas, they can customize marketing material to display the geographical name or make tweaks to products and services, based on their specific outlet – all without changing anything significant.
Easily Assess Brand Risks
Producing and distributing creative content comes with the possibility of having incorrect information, messaging or design. While they may seem minor, they can lead to brand damage. To avoid risk, all branded content needs to go through a proper approval process. However, it can be difficult to evaluate potential concerns without a system that can identify and accurately display them to the approval team.
How can a business assess potential brand risks?
Forms
Forms gather information when content submissions are made. The data collected can be used to generate a “risk profile” with a score that shows whether a job is high risk or low risk. This way, it’s easier to determine and action can be taken quickly.
Risk Scoring System
Risk Scoring establishes which jobs need a low-level approval workflow and which ones need to be reviewed thoroughly or routed to higher levels, such as legal departments. This method of risk scoring is also effective for streamlining the approval process.
The Power of a Content Distribution Network
A Content Distribution Network (CDN) is composed of “magic links” that close the loop on content distribution, accelerating the delivery of web content and rich media to internet-connected devices. This connects digital assets to marketing materials digitally in your DAM platform. To ensure creative materials are consistently on brand and that only the correct assets are used, these links enable users to drop content directly from the DAM into online channels.
What does a CDN offer?
Image and Video Conversion
Eliminating the need to download, this feature allows you to resize, crop and transform assets directly within the system before distributing them.
Usage Analytics
Using CDN provides you with analytics on usage and impressions that give you a better understanding of which content is performing well, and which content should be retired or revised.
Updated Digital Assets
Assets supplied anywhere online through the CDN can be updated instantly. So, if something is now outdated or perhaps a promotional offer has ended, there is no issue of it still appearing online as everything is updated dynamically.
Disclaimer Engines: Making Sure Marketing and Legal are on the Same Page
Brand compliance also involves adhering to strict regulations and legal marketing requirements. Placing approved disclaimers and terms and conditions within marketing content is an important part of this process. One reliable solution you can utilize is automating this process with a disclaimer engine that makes this accurate and simple.
How can a disclaimer engine help a brand?
Remove Pain Points
A disclaimer engine takes into account any variable like the type of media, distribution channel, location and audience, without the need for legal and compliance to chase marketing for the right information.
Self-Service Tool
Conditional logic systems allow marketers to self-serve by inserting the correct disclaimer during the design process without manually guessing, and then simply getting the final approval before sign-off.
Eliminate Human Error
By automating with a disclaimer engine, you negate the risk for human errors and guesswork around disclaimers by making sure marketing and legal are on the same page – all while preventing delays.
Building a Brand Compliance Culture
Even though marketing teams are the overall brand custodians within a company, it’s still everyone’s job to ensure the success of a brand through good practice.
Establishing and reinforcing a strong internal brand compliance culture makes the whole process much easier and more effective.
Here’s how to create this culture
Create an Online Brand Portal
Giving everyone access to the company’s brand portal means everyone has ownership and buy-in regarding how the brand is used. While marketing sets the rules, it empowers all teams to share the responsibility.
Tailor Custom Pages to Everyone
When introducing an online brand portal into your company, consider the different touchpoints it may have across the business. Marketers, designers and agencies may have different requirements to the sales, compliance and legal teams, and if you want everyone to be involved, all of their needs must be considered.
Custom pages can be used to tailor your portal to suit the needs of these different groups, making it easy for them to find exactly what they need.
“Simple to use and great customer service. The tool is fairly simple to understand and update. I also like how it can be customized to your brand (landing page, colors, menu).”
– Tathyana Pires, KFC
The Outcome: A More Resilient Brand
Keeping an entire company on brand is a difficult task, yet its importance shouldn’t be underestimated. A well crafted and protected brand can make or break a your equity in the market.
By having a fully integrated and interactive brand management platform, IntelligenceBank clients have confirmed time and time again that they instantly see improvements in their brand engagement. With “one click access” to brand education and brand management tools, they notice dramatic improvements around consistency, creative quality and brand compliance – not only internally, but with external agencies and creative freelancers too. Overall, this leads to increased brand value.
Companies can no longer let their brand guidelines live stagnantly in a PDF and simply hope that everyone will follow the rules. By digitizing your brand guidelines, you can remove any barriers to access and provide a more healthy and secure environment for your brand to thrive.
To find out how trusted brands use IntelligenceBank to protect their own brand assets, connect with us today.
Download our ‘2022 Brand Compliance Playbook’ Whitepaper
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