At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on being more than just a vendor—we aim to be a true distributed marketing partner, and as part of that, we want to be sure each of our clients is getting the maximum value out of their experience working with us.
To that end, our Level Up blog series spotlights six ways to level up your OneTouchPoint partnership, getting maximum support and ROI for every piece of the marketing puzzle. In this post, we’re focused on centralizing your brand communication with our U.Connect platform.
With marketing teams distributed over various regions across the country—and with employees working from home offices as much as from headquarters—it can be challenging to keep all the latest brand collateral, policies, and communications accessible to everyone who needs them.
When information and assets are as far flung as the team using them, workflows can become less efficient, team members find they may not be on the same page about important policies and procedures, and inconsistent messaging and design can begin to creep into marketing campaigns.
OneTouchPoint recognizes the potential of these challenges, and our U.Connect platform is designed to alleviate them. Here’s a look at all the ways embracing U.Connect levels up our clients’ OneTouchPoint experience and empowers them to meet and exceed every marketing goal.
A Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) Tool
U.Connect is a real game-changer in three key ways for marketers looking to streamline the way they manage local and national marketing initiatives to connect with external audiences (in person, in print, and online).
Local Marketers’ Collateral Creation Station
Not only does U.Connect keep assets meticulously organized, but it also empowers local marketers to customize content for their particular audiences without jeopardizing approved messaging or design specs or by bogging down the corporate marketing team with 1-off requests.
Our platform enables templates and modular content that allows local marketers to easily add blocks of already-approved text and visuals to “create” their own flyers, social media ads, direct mail, and more, customizing key fields with local details (addresses, state-specific regulations, etc.) to create collateral that maintains brand integrity and speaks specifically to each audience.
What’s more, U.Connect takes collateral from design and strategy to finished marketing campaign by empowering users the freedom to upload digital content to promote their location(s) or order and ship printed assets straight from within the platform.
A Quality Control Center
From accurate messaging to just the right colors to the quality of printed assets, there are a lot of opportunities for local marketers to inadvertently jeopardize brand integrity.
Why does brand integrity matter so much? A few reasons:
- Research finds that brand value is worth about 17 percent of business value, meaning that protecting that value is critical to keep customers engaged and loyal.
- Today’s customers have more choice than ever before, no matter what they want to purchase. So, to stay ahead in this crowded marketplace, marketers have to ensure their brands are consistent enough to stand out from the competition and remain recognizable to potential customers.
- 81 percent of consumers want to buy from brands they trust, and part of building that trust is ensuring that your brand is showing up the same way on every channel. Consistency builds familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust.
U.Connect helps control for all of these potential brand integrity pitfalls by centralizing approved collateral, streamlining asset approval processes, and connecting every marketer to trusted production and fulfillment teams.
Corporate’s Insight Central
Finally, for the corporate marketing team, keeping track of every local marketer’s activities can be a full-time job in and of itself. When you’re chasing down every distributor or sales rep for budget updates and inventory counts, it’s too easy to lose track and wind up overspending on production, warehousing, design services, etc. — or running out of critical inventory when and where it’s needed the most.
U.Connect helps out here, too, minimizing micromanagement and maximizing visibility into campaign progress, effectiveness, and expenses at the local and national levels, making it possible to ensure everything’s running smoothly without adding more to the corporate team’s already-full plates.
A Centralized Communication Hub
While the hybrid and fully remote work models that took off during the pandemic have significant advantages (we embrace remote work here at OneTouchPoint!), there can be gaps, inefficiencies, and the occasional breakdowns of communication. When this happens, it may be difficult for teams and their leaders to get their work done efficiently and stay on the same page about policy changes and evolving priorities.
To help solve this problem, U.Connect acts as a centralized communication platform, that’s accessible anytime, from anywhere, keeping critical communications and updates organized and at users’ fingertips. U.Connect makes communication easier for employees in three primary ways:
- Centralizing the latest updates: Think of U.Connect as the digital incarnation of an old-school bulletin board, providing employees with the information they need, when they need it—whether that trickles down to customer-facing messaging or stays internal – that keeps everyone on the same page.
- Enhancing security: When remote teams are juggling multiple channels, it can be all too easy to inadvertently send the wrong thing to the wrong person. U.Connect helps tighten security with customized permissions for every team or level.
- Boosting productivity: How often do you find yourself looking for something in your email? Or following up for approval on an asset that needs to go out yesterday? Or fixing content that a colleague “pieced together from memory?” U.Connect gives you that time back by keeping the latest assets and information organized and accessible, automating approval workflows, and streamlining delay-prone processes.
Learn more about our distributed marketing platform, U.Connect.
At OneTouchPoint, we want to provide value for our clients in every step of the marketing management process. U.Connect is the foundation of that value, and over the next few blog posts, we’ll explore the rest of our core capabilities.
In the meantime, we invite you to learn more about our distributed marketing platform and services, and to contact us when you’re ready to talk in detail about how OneTouchPoint can support your business.