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 article, we’re focused on keeping marketing communication consistent across every channel with our brand management capabilities.
For any organization—and especially for businesses juggling national and local marketing campaigns spearheaded by teams of sales reps, distributors, and retail managers—showing up for customers consistently across every campaign and every channel is easier said than done.
If this level of brand management is difficult for your marketing team, you’re not alone: less than 10 percent of brands can confidently say their brand presentation is consistent. Brand management is critical gear in a well-oiled marketing machine, as consistent brand presentation has been shown to increase revenue an average of 33 percent.
Ready to level up your brand management game but aren’t sure where to start? Without the right partner and tools in place, brand management is a full-time job (or more) for an already overburdened corporate marketing team. For many businesses, OneTouchPoint is the right partner with the right tools, making consistent branding in every campaign, on every channel, a breeze.
Our U.Connect platform is a powerful all-in-one brand and content management tool, empowering national marketers to easily manage the brand, enable local marketers, simplify the ordering process (and production, fulfillment, and distribution—we’ll do it for you!), and monitor analytics every step of the way.
Here’s a look at just a few of the features and capabilities that make that possible:
Asset Management
Whether you’re talking about digital assets like social media ads and campaign emails or physical ones like point-of-sale signage, catalogues, or store opening kits, keeping all the marketing collateral up to date and easily accessible is step one of successful brand management.
Our U.Connect platform functions as a content hub, storing only the latest, corporate-approved collateral files—from signage to swag—so that anyone working on a campaign can easily locate the right item anytime. No more risk of outdated messaging or design, and no more temptation for local marketers to recreate collateral from memory when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
For marketers in need of physical items, our inventory management system keeps track, in real time, of what’s already ready to go in the warehouse. No need to produce more sample kits for sales reps when there are already hundreds waiting to be distributed. And, on the other hand, no more getting caught empty-handed when you assumed you already had what you needed only to discover that stock had dwindled since you last checked.
And finally, because production quality can make or break that beautifully designed content, marketers can place and track orders—from direct mail campaigns to one-off, grand format signage—from directly within the platform. Our experts will handle production and fulfillment.
Content Operations
Just keeping the latest content in one place isn’t enough for airtight brand management, especially when users are looking to customize campaigns for their local audiences or, in industries like healthcare and alcohol and beverage, in accordance with differing state laws.
That’s why OneTouchPoint makes it easy for marketers to customize content as needed—with plenty of controls in place to maintain brand integrity along the way.
- Permissions controls manage user access, including assets, budgets, and approvals, based on role, division, and/or store location.
- Locked-down content and modular templates (more on those in a minute) make it easy to update what can be updated, such as location-specific details, while protecting content that shouldn’t, like regulatory language or product descriptions.
- Automated approval workflows make it easy for anyone who needs to sign off on content, streamlining the process to remove the temptation to bypass it in order to avoid delays.
- Third-party APIs integrate our through-channel marketing automation platform with other systems that may influence marketing personalization or strategy.
Modular Templates
When asset customization is left completely up to users, the free-for-all nature can have a not-so-great impact on brand integrity and/or budget.
Fortunately, there’s modular templates. Modular (or templated) content is content that’s been divided into the smallest possible preapproved “blocks” that users can mix and match into any number of assets with very little effort and, more importantly, no actual design work.
These include text blocks (think: disclaimers, value statements, locations, hours and product descriptions), and visuals (think: product shots, brand approved images, partner logos, and infographics), some of which are locked down and some of which are customizable to local audiences’ needs.
Modular content goes a long way to ensure global brand consistency while still giving users the flexibility to create relevant promotional assets in local markets. Whether a brand rep is building an online ad, a quick print-on-demand poster, or anything else, modular content makes asset creation—and brand maintenance—as easy as drag and drop.
Campaign Management
For the corporate marketing team, keeping track of every arm of every multichannel marketing campaign can be a herculean task, and nobody wants to take on—or endure—that level of micromanagement.
Here again, OneTouchPoint can help, empowering distributed teams to access and run pre-approved digital, traditional, and in-store marketing campaigns through our purpose-built technology platform. We’ll then ensure everything is published, printed, and/or distributed on time, monitor print inventories and budgets, and measure digital engagement.
This way, local marketers are empowered to is empowered to create, build, and run localized campaigns that increase lead generation and customer retention, while the corporate team is free to focus on their own high-level campaigns and strategic initiatives.
Fund Management
Of course, a key piece of corporate brand oversight is budget management—keeping track of who’s spending what and making sure overages aren’t coming out of the corporate coffers. But waiting around for every local brand rep to submit expense reports (and following up ad nauseum when they get behind) makes budget management all but impossible.
That’s why, among the many metrics and KPIs OneTouchPoint tracks for our clients, we provide crystal clear transparency into how each marketer’s budget is being used. We give our clients total visibility into and control over spending with comprehensive price monitoring, local expense tracking, and reporting.
This means budget allocation and management are simpler than ever, with both distributors and HQ able to see how much of the allocated budget each local marketer has spent. And when expenses get a little too high somewhere, a streamlined chargeback system makes it easy for HQ to be sure the local teams — and not the corporate office — are responsible for any extra.
Make Brand Management Easy with OneTouchPoint
All of these capabilities make brand management easy at both the national and local levels, empowering franchisee, retailers, and distributors to create powerful local marketing campaigns and allowing corporate teams to breathe easy knowing brand integrity is completely safe.
At OneTouchPoint, we want to provide value for our clients in every step of the marketing management process. Brand management sets up every other piece of the marketing puzzle to fall into place, and throughout this series, we’ll explore the rest of our core capabilities.
In the meantime, we invite you to learn more about our platform and services, and to contact us when you’re ready to talk in detail about how OneTouchPoint can support your business.