The title of this blog probably sounds like common sense; of course you’d want to protect your brand investment. Who wouldn’t? However, it’s not always as easy as you think it would be.
Many thousands of pounds are spent directly and indirectly on brand every year. Good brands can increase a company’s value. Brand is also a key differentiator, creating loyalty and advocacy amongst consumers. Internally, businesses invest in marketing teams to promote a brand or business externally, to make a name for it and to build a brand. In financial services, compliance teams are in place to protect the company and ensure all communications leaving the company adhere to industry regulations. Your business may even have spent time and money on a brand refresh or hired a brand agency to help you develop your brand further.
How can you protect your investment to build a strong brand that consumers will trust?
Align your internal teams
Internal employees are the best, and often most overlooked, brand ambassadors a company can have. To turn them into brand ambassadors, they’ve got to live and breathe the brand and this takes time to build. It requires attention, but once you have an army of brand ambassadors it can be the best investment you’ve ever made. Make sure your employees know the stories behind the brand, understand the brand values and can articulate what differentiates the brand. It’s important to give your employees one central online location where they can access all the brand materials they may need to learn about the brand also share the story externally.
Consistent Brand Communications
While your compliance team is there to ensure that the marketing content going out into media channels is compliant to the rules and regulations of the industry, it’s up to the marketing team to ensure that it is on brand. In order to build a strong brand everything leaving the organisation needs to be consistent and follow a set of brand guidelines. This is difficult in businesses where there are multiple offices, as when employees don’t have access to the correct content they may start to sprout home grown materials. This doesn’t just happen in organisations with multiple offices either, it also happens in small teams when people, especially heads of departments are overloaded and don’t have time to check every piece of material before it leaves. It is these home grown materials that can make marketing inconsistent and confuse customers. Digital asset management platforms are commonly deployed by businesses to enable easy sharing of and collaboration around marketing content to strengthen brand consistency.
24/7 Marketing Production Process Management
24/7 marketing production management by a human is impossible. We don’t work 24/7 nor should we, but it is possible to automate processes using technology. In this multi-channel digital marketing world, the pace at which content needs to be generated is increasing and multiple teams, sometimes in different time zones, can often be part of the production process. Automating this using an online workflow system allows the people, departments and policies required to create accurate, compliant marketing artworks quickly, to be managed automatically. For example an artwork cannot move to the next creative development stage until certain people have approved it in the software platform so approval mistakes are harder to make and the whole process moves faster.
Aligning internal teams to the brand story as well as putting processes in place to automate sharing, collaboration and approval processes can help you send a consistent message to consumers which allows them to understand your positioning, gain trust and differentiate you from your competitors. All of which help you to protect your brand investment.
