Why marketers need digital brand templates

Consistency is key for successful brand development

When it comes to marketing and advertising collateral, graphics and visuals are essential parts of an overall brand kit. But these digital assets can get misused by different people across the organisation, which is a disaster when it comes to building your brand. So it’s worth considering standardising your brand identity using digital marketing design templates.

Brand templates allow businesses to simplify and speed up content creation while ensuring consistency across all marketing channels. 

Some designers have an issue with templates due to the perception that they limit the possibilities to produce unique, bespoke graphics. This “conveyor-belt” style approach to asset creation goes against the grain in their passion for producing innovative, one-of-a-kind company marketing materials. 

However, competent companies already put these boundaries in place through their clearly defined brand guidelines. This is critical to maintaining consistency across all communications, a powerful marker of brand quality, and essential for building trust among audiences. 

With strict guidelines in place, designers can only push the boundaries so far in order to preserve their brand’s identity – any further and you can quickly lose recognition and trust among your customers. Good marketing collateral templates should manifest these guidelines, ensuring anybody using them can’t stray away from the core foundations of your brand identity.

The core role of designers is to be the overarching creative force behind the brand. Rather than be caught up in the minutiae of producing repeat assets and making an endless stream of subtle tweaks, using templates ensures that designers can shift their focus to bespoke projects and creative thinking, while other employees can confidently work on day-to-day asset production.

Secure brand consistency with digital brand templates

With digital brand or design templates, you will never have to worry about colleagues creating off-brand assets, nor will you have to worry about old assets resurfacing in your circulation.

If you make brand templates part of your system, brand inconsistency will be a thing of the past:

• By producing your marketing materials through intelligent, digital templates, anyone can have the power to create these without the risk of compromising on your guidelines or visual identity.
• “In an instant” is key in the digital world. Brand templates eliminate bottlenecks that usually occur when graphics need to be adjusted to local needs. By making the production of assets simpler and faster, there are no delays, and assets can quickly be adjusted in accordance with local languages and cultures.
• Templates secure your brand identity. By deciding in advance what can and can’t be changed within a template, you “lock” your brand identity. Logo and colours remain according to rules, while content such as images or text can be adapted depending on the campaign, purpose, marketing channel, audience and more.
• Flexible template technology allows users to define the asset size and create the file type they need immediately, without any risk of deviating from established standards. 

With a template solution, the workday becomes a lot easier for those in need of marketing material. Digital templates make sure all employees can create their own collateral when needed without breaking the brand identity guidelines. Efficiency is also improved as the involvement of marketing or designers is unnecessary and you achieve smoother workflows.

It’s a marketer’s dream when colleagues can create their own brand collateral and you can rest assured that your brand will remain consistent across every platform and channel.

How to introduce brand templates to your business

1. Keep it simple

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options available when you browse design template apps. To prevent this, have a vision for what you want your template to look like before you even start looking at options. 

Consider what elements you need for the asset you’re creating:

• A simple photo template for an Instagram graphic? 
• Several blocks of text for an event? 
• A “buy now” button for a website graphic? 
• Which of those elements need to stand out the most based on your goals?

With this in mind, you can easily sort through the splashy distractions that don’t actually serve your needs. In general, it’s best to go with the simplest option that checks all the boxes you’re looking for. Ideally, it should also be something that could easily be adapted to use for multiple types of marketing assets so you can keep things cohesive across channels.

2. Ensure they’re custom-build

Design templates are a great starting point, but customising them in line with your existing brand guidelines is essential. Have your design team play an active role in the creation of your templates, so that these receive their seal of approval before they can be harnessed by other, less-skilled members of your organisation to apply as required.

3. Focus on what your brand story is saying

It’s important not to spend so much time stressing about your templates. Pick a few templates you like – prioritising functionality over flashiness – and then let yourself redirect your energy to writing stellar copy for your graphics, A/B testing, and everything else you can control to make your assets stand out. However, do ensure you have sufficient template designs to match the various types of marketing materials you regularly use.

4. Templates are economical and effective

A template-based marketing strategy is no less impactful than a fully-fledged, focused campaign intended to target your audience. Moreover, if sustained, its impact in the long term is even better.

While synchronised global marketing might seem easy when done by large corporations, the logistical and financial efforts are still large. For small, or medium-sized companies, bringing a template approach or design to brand strategy is a sensible move, both financially and from a marketing efficiency perspective. It establishes the link between customer and brand no less effective than more expensive methods.

A solution like BAM by Papirfly™ offers a powerful template studio that enables you to structure your own smart templates across all forms of collateral, which can then be harnessed by your wider team to produce high-quality, on-brand results every time.

No specialist design skills are required. No need to factor in an external agency. BAM is so straightforward to pick up that any member of your organisation will be able to use it to create perfectly branded assets in a matter of minutes.

See the difference BAM can have in streamlining production of your marketing materials, empowering your employees and locking down on brand consistency – get in touch or set up your free demo.