Automation is the future. As we continue to refine how we can increase efficiency at work, improve people’s work-life balance and minimise human error, automation will be a constant presence in achieving these aims. There’s no turning back, especially in the world of marketing:
- 75% of marketers say they use at least one type of marketing automation tool
- Marketing automation results in a 5% increase in sales productivity, and a 12.2% drop in overheads
- The artificial intelligence market is estimated to be worth $16.06B by 2022
Innovations are emerging to streamline and automate previously long-winded, manually-driven activities that cost marketing teams time, money and energy. A burgeoning example of this in action is brand automation.
What is brand automation?
While brand automation software falls into the wider category of marketing automation, it applies to the unique tasks and processes behind promoting your brand. At its most basic level, it takes your company’s brand and marketing assets and applies it to templates to accelerate the production of future assets. A central resource to control all aspects of your branding.
This makes brand automation platforms a crucial component in our Brand Activation Management systems. It enables brand marketing teams to develop a substantial volume of high-quality, on-brand content in a short space of time, without specialist design expertise.
Brand automation is also considered a key aspect in the evolution from DAM to BAM. With the need for marketing teams to be reactive to changing trends and opportunities, they need more than just a library to store their brand assets. Brand automation is that next step.
This is more than just slapping on your logo or colour palettes – it is a way to produce an abundance of brand assets with a minimum of effort and manual intervention. Using your distinct visual identity, tone of voice and brand vision, brand automation exists to enhance the way you spread your brand message to your various audiences.
Yet, brand automation as a term is still infrequently used among marketing teams worldwide. While it remains in its infancy, there’s a real opportunity for organisations to get in on the ground floor and utilise brand automation systems to make a noticeable difference to how your company operates, and how your audience engages with your brand.
Here, you’ll discover 6 of the standout advantages of brand automation, and how it can change your business, your processes and your life.
1. Enhanced efficiency
The goal of brand automation above all else is to eliminate the wasted motion associated with creating, cultivating and consuming brand assets. Brand management teams worldwide all have to work to tight deadlines and turnaround content – whether that’s emails, social posts or videos – for their consumers, but outdated, manual processes often prevent them from achieving the efficiency they’re after.
Did you know that productivity issues and poorly managed leads are estimated to cost companies a combined $1 TRILLION+ every single year? Try to imagine that amount of money each year being wasted as a result of outdated practices.
Professionals in all industries, but particularly in marketing, waste an excessive amount of time digging through files to find the resources they need, or implementing all their branding elements from scratch onto their upcoming campaigns.
By providing intelligent, well-crafted templates and access to a wealth of on-brand resources, brand automation platforms reduce the time it takes to brief work in, produce assets, gain approval and disseminate it out to your various audiences. In essence, you produce more while putting in less, allowing your brand marketers to achieve a much greater return on investment.
2. Empower your team
One of the most impressive aspects of brand automation software is its capacity to make every member of your team a brand marketer. Not everyone has an eye for design, or has the familiarity with bespoke design software, and in the formative years of marketing automation tools, it would still require a specialist to manage these effectively.
Brand automation goes a long way to removing that barrier, putting parameters in place to ensure all materials are aligned to your brand.
Through smart templates, every team member is enabled to create collateral that embodies your brand identity, with no deviations or difficulties. While a level of training is to be expected (less than an hour with Papirfly), the reduced manual involvement allows anyone to drag and drop elements into their designs in a matter of minutes.
As well as enhancing the capabilities of your team, brand automation empowers your local markets to capitalise on opportunities and faster turnaround on-brand assets, without having to wait on requests or approvals which could arrive after the moment has passed. Brand automation software closes the window for error, and allows global teams to become more self-sufficient in how they engage their audience with your overarching brand messaging.
3. Achieve complete brand consistency
A perennial problem for global brands is the fear that their identity will become distorted over time or across national and cultural boundaries. Revenue on average increases by 23% among companies who present their brand consistently when compared to those who don’t.
An effective brand automation strategy and platform eliminates the concern caused by inconsistency by containing your branding in a fixed, regulated framework. This reduces the risk of design and content straying too far beyond the bounds of your brand.
With a single point of truth providing the basis for all brand assets, your employees feel confident that they will produce work that fits your identity. This allows you to better manage content across your multiple channels – video content, social media, digital displays, etc. – to ensure everything follows your specific brand guidelines on each platform.
4. Improve customer experiences
It’s essential for brands to engage with their audience on a personal level. A powerful way to accomplish this is through personalisation, but through traditional, manually-driven means, this can be excessively time-consuming and costly.
Brand automation and marketing automation tools help remove this barrier by cutting away the time it takes to create content, and allowing team members to quickly produce collateral aimed at a select group of customers, be it based on their demographic or their location. Instead of spending separate hours to develop this unique, personal content, it can instead be created in a short window of time.
Linking your brand automation systems with automated emails, for example, can allow you to instantly send behaviourally-triggered content to give your audience a more personalised, familiar and effective brand experience.
5. Reduce time to market
Without access to effective brand automation software, your teams will often spend a long time collaborating and adjusting content with your internal and external parties before it can go live on your chosen channels. This means you miss golden opportunities to engage your customers at the ideal time, reducing the effectiveness of your brand marketing and wasting time and money.
By giving your teams the ability to quickly create on-brand marketing materials to react to new trends and events, you significantly cut down the time it takes to get your brand messages in front of your audiences. In a digital, social media-led age where being ever-present in your customers’ minds is crucial to establishing your brand, being able to get content to market quickly and regularly in a cost-effective way is essential.
6. Gain space for strategic thinking
As discussed, a key advantage of brand automation is it helps eliminate those repetitive, mundane and time-consuming elements in the brand marketing process. While it can’t directly impact your audience’s brand experience, it allows you to develop content at scale that can more frequently and effectively reach your customers.
Then, with the time you save, you give yourself more room for sensible strategic thinking. While brand automation systems are a real asset for any marketing team, they will only reap results if your brand strategy and identity is truly connecting with your audiences. With more space to think, analyse available data and get creative with ways to meet their needs, you help your teams unlock their potential to improve their return on investment.
Building on the benefits of brand automation
While the phrase ‘brand automation’ is currently seldom heard in the marketing landscape, we are in no doubt that it will be firmly established in the next 10 years as a must-have initiative for teams worldwide.
And now you have an insight into the life-changing advantages that brand automation platforms provide, you can get in on the ground floor to increase the efficiency, frequency and effectiveness of your brand marketing.
If you are ready to start taking back time spent on repetitive tasks and empowering every member of your team to connect your audience with your brand identity, discover BAM by Papirfly™ for yourself. Like brand automation, it could very well change your life for the better.