Brand identity

Brand Communication, Brand identity, Brand strategyLeave a Comment on How to communicate your brand

How to communicate your brand

Papirfly
3 minutes read

Branding is all about communicating your brand – building a strong brand presence that creates desire and attracts customers. Successful branding = Business growth. Consistency and brand experience are two of four key qualities consumers value and that keeps them coming back for more. How effective is your brand communication? Are you attracting the right customers, and are they loyal?

Factors that impact your brand communication are your colleagues, available resources and manpower, the number of channels and platforms that require your brand presence, your competitors, and your audience to mention a few. As always, there are some dos and don’ts that affect your success rate.

Here’s a short list on how to successfully communicate your brand

1. Establish brand identity guidelines

A key goal for any brand should be to achieve consistency. Consumers expect your brand to be consistent and it is connected to the growth potentials of your company. This is not an impossible task, but it does require effort and dedication in addition to a real plan.

For brand consistency to happen, you need brand rules. Proper brand identity guidelines that concern everyone who is communicating your brand. These brand guidelines need to set the standard for all employees and external stakeholders on how to use and apply your brand across any and all channels.

Also read: Create branding guidelines with a brand management platform

2. Establish internal brand guidelines and align your branding processes

Employees are the central participants in your brand communication. It’s impossible to communicate a brand if you don’t have your employees on your side. Think of it as a football team playing a game. If the team isn’t aware of the purpose and goal of the game, and no one knows what position they play or how to do it, you will have a team scattered all over the football field, running in different directions. It’s safe to say that team won’t win the game.

The same applies to branding. Everyone in the company needs to know why branding is important and what role they play on the team. Therefore, make sure your brand guidelines include internal brand strategies and align your external and internal branding processes.

Also read: This is internal employee branding and how you get started

3. Establish proper brand asset management

Having brand identity guidelines in place is unfortunately not enough to achieve brand consistency. In fact, 95% of organizations have branding guidelines, but only 1/4th have formal guidelines that are consistently enforced. One step in the right direction is to establish brand asset management.

Brand asset management is the system that connects the dots between your brand guidelines and your brand assets. This is the system that enables seamless and intuitive user workflows, making it effective and easy to apply your brand regardless of who’s in need, or which channel or platform is utilized. By having this in place, growing and developing your brand becomes easier, and everyone who needs to use your brand can do so effortlessly and quickly from one single location.

Also read: What is brand asset management?

4. Create a brand communication strategy

To win the football game, or in this case, win against the competitors by achieving brand consistency and building a strong brand identity, your employees need to be included and informed about the strategy.

It’s not enough for them to know that they are a part of the plan and their role. They also need to know what is required from them. This part is essential in brand communication. Although a customer service representative and a receptionist represent the same company, their role and how they need to interact with the audience is different. To succeed, this needs to be accounted for in your brand communication strategy. By adapting the brand communication strategy to each role individually, you’ll have a better chance of realization.

5. Develop and grow your brand continuously and meet market expectations

There’s no resting when it comes to branding. How you communicate your brand today, might not fit or be sufficient tomorrow.

The market changes and so do consumers. On one hand we have a fast-growing Martech space that puts pressure on marketing teams and our ability to follow our own brand communication strategy. It’s not easy to deliver on demand when deadlines are behind us, and resources are short. On the other hand, we have consumers. How they search for information, what they value and how they engage with your brand varies between them. When communicating your brand, you need to adapt at the same speed and meet these expectations.

Communicate your brand with digital solutions

Just as you digitize your private life to simplify and increase your own efficiency, you need to do the same for your work life and your brand. By digitizing your branding processes, following the above steps will be easy. Everything about your brand can easily be maintained, developed, and communicated from one single solution.

No second guessing. Everyone will know everything they need to know to communicate your brand with ease.

Brand Asset Management / BAM, Brand identityLeave a Comment on What is a brand platform?

What is a brand platform?

Papirfly
4 minutes read

Tired of colleagues who don’t follow the brand guidelines and do their own thing? Or perhaps you’re always stressed because you’re lacking resources and enough hours to do your marketing responsibilities properly? The feeling of constantly being behind, missing important deadlines, is not pleasant and stress doesn’t tend to result in quality either.

It’s time to take control and become a marketing superstar! You need a brand platform.

Applying a consistent brand is hard

How do you distribute and enforce brand rules? PDF’s and emails or intranet? Do you know if your colleagues find it easy to find and use brand collateral or even understand your brand guidelines?

There are surprisingly many questions that come to the surface when we start looking at brand identity guidelines and how employees adopt them. In fact, 15% still lack guidelines and 31% indicate that their guidelines are followed selectively.

There’s not a single marketer who would disagree with the importance of brand consistency. But the journey of getting there is proven to be bumpy and lengthy, in the mentioned report it is found that the creation of off-brand content has only dropped 4% in two years, a staggering 77% still see off-brand content in circulation. In other words, we understand the importance of consistency, but we are incapable of achieving it.

A typical challenge related to off-brand content is the marketing team’s ability to deliver on demand. Ad hoc tasks and support requests tend to drain resources and it gets hard for the team to deliver as expected. Instead, colleagues do their own thing, off-brand of course… Another factor that’s related to off-brand creations is the usability and availability of the brand guidelines. Where can one locate the guidelines? How can one apply the rules to the actual assets being made? And where are the assets stored?

Also read: You know you need a brand management system when…

A brand platform unifies your brand

A brand platform digitizes your brand management. Driven by powerful CMS technology you’ll be able to create stunning online brand identity guidelines that perfectly matches your brand image. Like creating a website, you’ll collect and structure your brand guidelines as you see fit and create a logical online brand platform that your employees and stakeholders can easily use.

No more looking for the last PDF version of your guidelines. Just like your company website, your brand platform will have its own unique URL that every employee can access, 365 days a year.

With an online brand platform, managing and developing your brand is easy. Regardless of changes or updates, everything happens in real time. The risks of colleagues using outdated marketing collateral is eliminated and you can rest assured your brand looks the same everywhere.

Also read: Surely, you have a brand portal

A brand platform simplifies brand development

Just like brand consistency is important, so is growing and nurturing your brand. The market changes, consumers change and technology advances. A good example of this can be taken from the Covid pandemic. Many marketers learned then how important it was to swiftly adapt to changing consumer behaviour to stay in the game. Without proper technology at hand, the ability to adapt consequently has an impact on your branding initiatives and you risk falling behind your competitors.

A proper brand platform allows you to expand and grow your platform to quickly adapt to unexpected changes. Whether you need to update and inform, create and add new brand assets, or update templates, you can do it quickly and easily, without breaking with the guidelines. A proper system will also allow you do integrate with other necessary marketing tools such as video creators or banner creators to name a few. Simply put, a proper brand platform enables brand development on demand.

Also read: This is how Brand HUB streamlines your day

Benefits of a brand platform

Hopefully by now you’ve realized that investing in a brand platform should be your next step. But we know that you perhaps need to convince management or other colleagues that this is the way to go.

Also read: Why you need to invest in brand management

We advise you to do a thorough map up of your challenges and needs before you choose your desired system, in the meantime have the following benefits in mind as you complete your analysis.

  • Managing your brand strategy is straightforward:
    A brand platform brings your strategy to life, organizing your brand to secure quality and consistency across all channels.
  • Protecting your brand identity is easy:
    Protecting your most valuable asset is crucial, and with a brand platform this is a done deal. Everything is neatly stored and organized to simplify brand asset management.
  • Your brand becomes practical:
    When it comes to brand guidelines, the more user-friendly your brand is, the more likely it is that everyone will use your brand as intended. With a brand platform, you’ll link the rules and the actual brand assets together. Users don’t have to think; just act and your brand identity remains intact. This is brand asset management at its best.
  • Streamline your branding processes and operational efficiency:
    When time is of the essence and you are looking to avoid being a bottleneck and frustrate your colleagues, a brand platform saves your day. A proper platform enables self-service, allowing anyone to create their own marketing collateral, quickly and on-brand.

Also read: How to choose a branding system

Take the step and invest

To summarize, a brand platform enables seamless brand asset management, creating a home for your brand. This is the platform that allows you to focus on the big picture while resting assured that your brand looks the same everywhere. And remember, when you master your brand, your business will grow.

Want to dig into more details on how a brand platform can benefit your brand, download our free whitepaper

Brand identity, Branding templates, Marketing ToolsLeave a Comment on This is how Brand Hub streamlines your day

This is how Brand Hub streamlines your day

Papirfly
3 minutes read

A major challenge for many companies is to not only keep track of all the materials associated with the brand, but also ensure seamless work processes. Without a system that ensures increased control throughout the entire value chain of the brand, the day in the marketing department will not be particularly effective.

Brand HUB is the solution that allows you to sleep well at night – because you do not have to worry about these issues.

 

The control your marketing department needs

Marketing and branding have never moved at a faster pace than now. The technology and developments in the market ensure that marketers have to deliver faster than before.

Our solution, Brand Hub, is designed to meet precisely this need. The result is a complete brand management solution. With a powerful CMS technology at the bottom, Brand Hub is a platform that collects everything that concerns the brand – all digital files, guidelines and design templates.

By gathering everything in one system, you make sure that the necessary files are found in an efficient and easy way, while you ensure that there are no ambiguities around the brand guidelines.

You can manage your time well with long-term strategies and value-creating activities, while at the same time having control of your brand at all times. And the best part, your business’s goals for growth and value are within reach.

One Hub to rule them all

To ensure that your brand realises its full potential in different channels, you need to have an underlying strategy. With Brand Hub, you get a competitive advantage when it comes to brand management. The solution provides seamless processes that bring your strategies to life.

This way, you will always be sure that you can maintain quality and consistency across all channels in a more efficient way – always in line with the brand’s guidelines.

Also read: This is how easy brand management is with Papirfly

Protect and empower your brand identity

The brand identity is the engine that keeps the brand going – until the guidelines are not followed. With a solution that provides accessibility and increased control, you can always ensure that the guidelines that define your brand are followed. This will ensure a recognizable brand identity and strengthen their position in the market.

Also read: Empower your brand with Papirfly

When complete control leads to increased efficiency

Order ensures that your employees do not mess up your brand message. Brand HUB minimizes the risk of inconsistency because everything is accessible from a single platform. In other words, everyone has one place to refer to when accessing your brand – where files, templates and guidelines are linked and accessible.

Not only does Brand Hub provide employees with easy access to files. With the template technology, materials can also be created without the brand being compressed – all in an efficient and controlled way.

Also read: This is why investing in Papirfly is a good thing

An automated tomorrow?

For the marketing department, having an efficient and automated working day will reflect positively on the company’s profitability.

Brand Hub automates the workflows in the marketing department, which will reduce the use of resources and increase efficiency. This allows the wise minds to spend the time saved on long-term marketing and branding, in a more efficient way than before.

Table of contents:

  1. The control your marketing department needs
  2. One HUB to rule them all
  3. Protect and empower your brand identity
  4. When complete control leads to increased efficiency
  5. An automated tomorrow?