If your 2024 marketing goals include maintaining a consistent brand identity across multiple physical and digital platforms without inflating your budget or overwhelming your team, then it might be time to consider brand management software.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through what it is, why it’s a powerful tool for any marketing team, and how to find just the right software for your organization.
What Is Brand Management Software?
Brand management software centralizes everything marketers—and brand reps, distributors, retail location leaders, or franchise owners—need to ensure brand integrity in every communication, on every platform. The right brand management platform will include a variety of features and capabilities:
Centralized Brand Hub
A brand management platform serves as a central repository—or a digital asset manager—for all your most up to date brand assets, for both print and digital channels. This ensures that all of your authorized brand representatives have easy, 24/7 access to the most up-to-date and approved assets, reducing the risk of reps using outdated materials or creating their own and muddying the brand with inconsistent messaging and design.
Brand Guidelines and Modular Content Templates
Of course, sometimes marketers need to create new assets—or customize existing ones—for their particular audiences. Brand management software should make that easy to do without risking brand consistency, providing brand guidelines and modular content templates that help your team adhere to brand standards—and, for some industries, legal regulations—ensuring that all marketing materials, from social media advertisements to direct mail postcards to grand opening signage, contain consistent messaging and accurately reflect your brand’s carefully curated identity.
Automated Approval Workflows
The approval process is often a sticking point for local marketers and brand reps, as they wait for corporate or legal or anyone else who needs to sign off to get to the draft collateral that’s buried deep in their inboxes. With the right brand management software, automated approval workflows streamline the process and remove the temptation reps may feel to bypass it in order to avoid delays.
In-Platform Print Ordering
All the work the brand management platform (not to mention the corporate marketing team) does to ensure brand consistency and high-ROI campaigns falls apart if distributed reps are using print providers who either bust the budget or turn out low-quality materials. Giving users access to a trusted print provider—and allowing them to order materials directly through the platform—resolves those worries once and for all.
Why Does My Organization Need Brand Management Software?
The right brand management software makes the corporate marketing teams’ lives easier in countless ways, but beyond that, it offers several tangible benefits to the organization:
Brand Protection and Consistency
We’ve already seen how brand management software can help ensure the consistency that is so crucial for building brand recognition and trust. But a platform with user authorizations and controls will also help protect your brand from unauthorized use, which becomes especially important when you’re working with a sprawling network of internal and third-party brand representatives.
Time and Resource Efficiency
Centralizing your brand assets and streamlining the creation and approval saves time and resources by making it easy for reps to find whatever they need quickly and reducing the need for constant revisions and one-off design requests. Budget tracking features, chargebacks, and the in-platform connection to a trusted printer and distributor provide additional cost- and time-saving features.
Elimination of Silos
When teams work in silos, it’s easy to duplicate work—wasting time and resources that could’ve been spent on far more valuable endeavors. And when employees are working remotely or in different sales territories, those silos can become more and more difficult to break open. But when departments have a single, accessible place to share the work they’re doing and grab the assets corporate has already created for them, that added visibility enables teams across the organization to take advantage of the legwork that’s already been done.
Scalability
While small and fledgling companies may have no problem managing their brands themselves, larger and growing companies will quickly find that the process is much more difficult with more cooks in the marketing kitchen. Laying the foundation early with a brand management platform that supports efficient systems will make it much easier to grow down the line.
Sustainability
When it comes to marketing sustainability can be a hard balance to achieve. With a brand management platform, you can simplify the process by having pre-approved sustainable options available for ordering through an already vetted partner. Some key sustainable features brand management technology can offer are:
- Print-on-demand production to avoid the waste that comes from overprinting materials.
- On demand marketing premiums enables you – and your approved users – to order just the quantities you need, while still taking advantage of economies of scale that ensures competitive pricing.
- Inventory management to ensure you know what’s in stock at all times.
How to Select the Right Brand Management Software for Your Team
Of course, there are countless brand management software solutions on the market. So, how do you determine which one is best for your organization?
Start by articulating the problems or challenges you want a brand management platform to solve, and then outline the features and capabilities your team needs in order to solve those problems. Consider not only the elements we’ve discussed here—digital asset management, modular content, approval automations, etc.—but any integration capabilities you’re looking for as well as your budget. Once you have those lists pretty well solidified, research your vendor options, and request demos or meetings with the ones that look promising.
Among the candidates who meet all of your organization’s listed criteria, the best one for your company is the one that will act not just as a software vendor but as a true marketing partner, supporting you in developing and executing high-impact campaigns on every channel, for every audience.
OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect Platform
At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves in being that partner for our clients. Our U.Connect brand management software checks all of the boxes in terms of features and functionalities, our print and distribution facilities ensure every physical asset upholds your highest standards, and our team is obsessed with helping our clients meet their loftiest marketing goals.
If your organization is looking for a brand management software to maximize productivity, keep costs in check, and empower brand reps to deliver high-quality multichannel marketing campaigns, we encourage you to learn more about OneTouchPoint today — and, when you’re ready to talk further, request a demo. One of our experts will be happy to walk you through our platform and services.