CMO’s report that they will spend 44% of their budget on marketing processes and ways of working in 2021. What is your marketing budget spent on? Managing brand and marketing processes is demanding, that we know. Along with strategic brand management, building your brand for the long term, you also have to manage the daily operations supporting your colleagues with brand assets, campaign material, maintaining a presence in digital platforms, and so on.
Maintaining a recognizable brand identity is an essential part of brand building. By upholding the brand experience through strategic brand management, you establish a successful brand, increase brand value, and attract loyal customers. In other words, branding is important to any business aiming for growth.
Four key reasons to invest in a brand management solution
Brand building and brand control is critical for company’s that needs to acquire future customers. Making a good first impression is important. As your brand’s first impression is often realized through your brand presentation, securing seamless integration between brand experience and desired brand associations is key.
When potential customers aren’t familiar with your company, a salesperson will spend valuable (and unnecessary) minutes explaining what your company is all about. It is likely that the meeting would be more effective if this could be eliminated – when your sales team can spend their valuable time selling your products or services instead.
1. Brand Management tools increase the chance to achieve and maintain brand consistency
One of the most important reasons why marketing people use brand management tools is to achieve a consistent brand presentation. Research shows that you can increase your revenue with 23% if your brand is consistent. Then how do you achieve a consistent brand?
Invest in digital brand identity guidelines
First, you need to establish brand guidelines. Approximately 95% of companies have brand guidelines, but only 25% comply with them.
By establishing online guidelines you have a better chance of getting everyone to follow your brand rules? If you decide to use software for brand management, you can also achieve full control of your marketing material connected to your brand. Including approved templates, logos and digital assets, regardless of company size and structure. When using an online software solution, your brand will always be updated and on-brand.
Also read: Management requirements – How to meet them?
Invest in a digital asset management system
A part of creating brand compliance is to make sure everyone has access to and the ability to use marketing and brand collateral.
A digital asset management system (DAM software) organizes and handles your marketing and brand assets with ease, making them searchable and available. This way your assets are always updated and available with correct formats and dimensions, and time wasted on searching for assets or trying to keep your organization updated is eliminated.
And don’t underestimate time savings -you reduce many manual operations associated with file handling.
2. Brand management tools increases productivity
A brand management tool allows your marketing team to collaborate across the entire organization and include all employees in the processes. Allowing everyone to locate and create their own branded collateral with ease as well as sharing everything about your brand from one single source. It is seamless and contributes to increased productivity across your organization.
Additionally, there is no need to ask your designer to create custom files for each marketer who asks for collateral. When you don’t spend your time sending files and being brand police, you free your team to become more productive in other more valuable matters.
Also read: This is why investing in Papirfly is a good thing
3. Brand management tools help nurture customer loyalty
Succeeding with the brand building will have a positive impact on your customer relations and loyalty. Customer retention KPI should not be overlooked in relation to ROI.
It cost less to keep your existing customer base than to create new relations. According to Harvard Business Review, it is 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
4. Brand management tools increase competitive advantage
A brand management solution allows you to respond faster to market demands and internal needs. It takes you ahead of your competitors as you undertake an innovative market approach. Think about the first-mover advantage: It makes it possible for a company to establish strong brand recognition along with product and/or service loyalty before the competition.
According to Harvard Business Review, industry dynamics is crucial. It is important to consider how a company achieves the first-mover advantage. One way to do this is to establish a technological advantage compared to your competitors. Another initiative is to gain access to attractive features (such as location, know-how etc.) earlier than your competition.
Improve growth and profitability
According to the analyst company Forrester, 90% of consumers start their purchase with a search, and 74% finalize their search online before going to the store.
Brand building is the key to driving sales, increasing partnerships and accelerating growth. Your future customers need to trust your brand, your reliability, and your ability to operate your business well and correctly.
Think of brand management as a way of life and a long-term investment – not an expense. When you know that CMO’s will spend 44% on marketing processes and ways of working and 38% on technology acquisitions and utilization, you don’t want to be the CMO that is left behind along with your brand.
If you need more information on brand management, you’ll find everything you need to know in our Resources area. You’ll find material crafted by marketing experts, supporting you to activate your brand.