Developing a solid brand identity is critical to staying ahead and giving your valuable brand the leg up it deserves. That’s not exactly a secret. But the RIGHT branding can get your business the success it deserves, along with the promise of valuable growth.
But it’s always easier said than done. Factors like increasing competition, high-flying customer expectations, a huge number of distribution channels, and constantly expanding business boundaries all make ensuring a full-proof branding strategy quite the heavy task. You have to upgrade your master plans in real-time, while keeping in mind any branding developments so that yours can stand to accommodate and capitalise on these changes.
That’s where technology comes in. Advanced brand management software can not only help you create and implement a winning branding strategy, but also take your branding to the next-level for the foreseeable future. Let’s take a look at the five biggest challenges your brand development strategies should be capable of solving.
Suggested reading: Marketing and branding has changed as we know it — and is on no road to slowing down! Our blog Digital Marketing vs. Digital Branding: What’s the Difference? is just the guide you need to get up to speed.
Challenge 1. Disconnected teams and workflows
The pandemic has brought substantial changes in how teams work. Working-from-home has been quickly replaced by working-from-anywhere. The hybrid workplace certainly has great advantages but it does not come without its own shortcomings — luckily nothing that the right technology can’t fix, though!
When your team members are working under different roofs, it can make it a lot harder to track what they’re doing. Taking full control of workflows and making sure that every employee has access to the right, on-brand, approved assets is another challenge your disparate teams would have to face.
These problems will inevitably lead to confusion, inconsistencies, and loss of work hours, increasing your time-to-market. So to empower your teams on the path to success, look for a software solution that would ideally involve the following:
- Digital asset management (DAM): A robust digital asset management platform is what you need to manage disconnected teams and workflows with utmost efficiency and agility. It allows you to store, manage and share all your digital assets effortlessly without losing control — all in the same handy system! The platform streamlines communication and collaboration on assets saving time loss on searching while ensuring consistency.
- Reporting and analytics: Tracking what your employees are doing even in a distributed team setup is all the easier when you have advanced brand reporting software to help. Customisable, visually-presented reports with details of how your assets, templates, and downloads are being used along with a thorough analysis of each interaction ensures easy monitoring and control over every process.
Challenge 2. Miseducation around branding
Ensuring that all of your team members have the right idea of what good looks like according to your brand is vital to, well, ensuring that they’re doing the right work. But when it comes to disparate teams working separately from different locations, making sure that everyone is fully aligned on what ‘on-brand’ looks like becomes all the more critical, yet complicated.
This is especially true when you consider the vast amount of brand assets (images, videos, animations, audios, etc. that make up your brand) that you have in your repertoire. They all provide value in conveying what your brand stands for and does. But creating new assets, requiring different media types all the time, and trying to give your teams room for creative freedom can make cementing your brand education all the more complicated.
Managers need to focus on technology that can help provide clear brand education to every employee while addressing the above challenges — so features to look out for could be:
- Brand showcases: Your creative teams can work more efficiently when they have a clear idea of what your brand assets should even look like. Brand management software platforms like Brandworkz make it simple to showcase the best work, updates, and ideas on the very same platform that houses your assets without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
- Comprehensive, editable brand guidelines: Easily accessible and comprehensive brand guidelines work as the primary blueprint to educate your new employees and keep your existing employees on the same page. You can inform everyone instantly about any brand developments simply by updating your brand guidelines within the system — no need for them to try to trawl through long-winded email chains to find the latest colour scheme!
👉 Educate your team to deliver consistent branding across all channels with The Brand Consistency Toolkit 👈
Challenge 3. Poor ROI
Using technology to take on new challenges is certainly not a bad thing — but becoming overenthusiastic and taking on TOO MANY tools will certainly lead to problems. An overflowing MarTech stack will force your teams to have to navigate through a complex web of software, resulting in inefficiency and inconsistency. Not to mention, all these tools come at quite a cost, causing further damage to your ROI metrics.
Choosing several top-of-the-shelf tools that don’t work well with each other just makes your brand management all the more complex. Brand managers need to ensure that they invest in tools that integrate seamlessly and add real value to the process. Basically, tools that are worth the investment with the help of functionalities like:
- Effective integrations: An advanced solution that can be seamlessly integrated with your existing MarTech stack will bring you great ROI in the form of more efficient processes. A well-integrated platform like Brandworkz enables managers to work from a single system, saving on resources and improving how work gets done.
- Brand management software: A robust BMS platform offers a bunch of useful features in one solution that can effectively replace many tools from your MarTech stack. On one hand, it saves your employees from navigating through several bits of software and on the other, it improves your total ROI.
Challenge 4. Compliance concerns
Every brand needs to ensure that its work follows all compliance practices and regulations. This especially rings true if you’re pursuing ambitious goals like expanding your brand to different markets, or if you operate in high-stakes industries like finance and legal.
Different markets might need different versions of assets while sticking to the same basic guidelines. Expanding to different markets also means expanding your team and thorough tracking is how you can ensure that all your brand assets meet the regulations they have to.
- Editable templates: This seemingly simple feature is an intelligent solution to creating on-brand artwork without missing out on any regulatory compliance. Templates allow the creation of localised assets within seconds while ensuring that they meet every compliance.
- Customisable workflow approvals: With the right technology, managers can easily customise their workflow approvals to then route through their compliance teams — all through a single window. Production is both effectively streamlined and compliance-assured.
Challenge 5. Brand inconsistency
Any branding and every branding strategy you develop should work with one goal: achieving and maintaining brand consistency. Brand inconsistency directly and negatively affects brand authenticity and customer experience, resulting in a loss of trust and revenue. All the challenges we’ve introduced above are critical to solve precisely because they can lead to brand inconsistency.
Brand management software is key to eliminating brand consistency by acting as an efficient tech platform that streamlines processes and helps enable effective collaboration. Choosing the right BMS platform is the optimal solution to maintain brand consistency while ensuring better performance.
Suggested reading: For all we’ve just waxed lyrical about the importance of brand consistency, you should know it’s not that hard to achieve! Check out our blog Why Maintaining Brand Consistency is Easier Than Ever to find out more.
Set your brand development up for success with software
To create a brand and lead it to success the importance of a solid brand development strategy is imperative and the right brand management software can not only help you to overcome the challenges but also create and implement an effective brand plan that can potentially improve your existing brand value while enhancing any future extension strategy.
Brandworkz is an intuitive and future-ready brand management software that combines an array of features while efficiently housing all your brand assets on the same platform. It can replace multiple brand management tools from your stack and can be integrated seamlessly with all your old and new applications. Apart from total asset visibility and control, the solution also helps to increase ROI for each asset while ensuring maximum flexibility and consistency.
Companies can save worth £150,000 in marketers’ time with Brandworkz – this is why over 100,000 marketers use Brandworkz everyday. To know how Brandworkz can help your brand to develop the most effective brand development strategy, book a demo with us today!
