Blog Archives

Being agile, changing your message and listening to what is happening in the market is extremely important right now. A study has shown that only 8% think that brands should stop advertising due to the corona pandemic. They do however expect them to adjust their tone and messaging to fit the current situation. Consequently, having the right tools and competencies to achieve results from your ads in the current landscape is a key factor for most marketers. At the same time, your brand should still be on point in your ads.

Adapt, but don’t change who you are. Communicate your brand values, but don’t make up new ones – the consumers will see through it.

How to stay agile yet cost efficient?

A study reveals that 91% of brands has moved at least some of their digital marketing efforts in-house. With the current market situation, this number has most likely increased, as brands are cutting their costs and striving to do even more in-house.

Continue reading “How do you ensure an agile approach to your advertising strategy?”

It’s safe to say that many of us will look back un-fondly on 2020 in a few years time. We have experienced some of the most tumultuous events that will ever happen in our lifetimes. But what has it taught us? What positives can we take away? And how have these positives helped shape marketing and the way brands interact with consumers?

Admittedly, there is a lot of COVID fatigue and many tenuous links between ‘these times’ and the marketing world, but it’s something we need to be talking about as an industry. We’ve had a forced shift in attitudes and behaviours, and everything brands had deduced up until this year has been turned on its head. Everyone had been talking about brands breeding ‘real change’ and ‘authenticity’ for years, and this year more than ever, it has come to fruition.

How has the global response to COVID-19 reshaped a year in marketing?

#1 Homeworking and lockdowns

What happened?

Unless you live under a rock, you have likely been subject to some kind of lockdown this year, or find yourself working remotely. This was unlike anything anyone had ever experienced, and made us act in ways we were unfamiliar with. There was, and is still, a heavy reliance on technology and video conferencing tools. Remote communication was a barrier we have had to embrace as we’re faced with an array of different emotions each day.

How did it affect brand marketing?

Some brands had to pull campaigns that could have been considered insensitive, completely rethink messaging and find new ways to engage with audiences that were feeling less than themselves. There was less of a focus on selling and more on connecting with audiences, showing genuine empathy and sharing messages and stories of hope. Any fabricated attempts were quickly shot down.

Getting this right is a delicate balance. Back in May, Marketing Week UK found “brands that avoid generic messages about staying at home, togetherness or looking to the future with optimism are more likely to resonate with consumers during the pandemic”. By offering clear, helpful advice when people were concerned about new rules, this campaign by Tesco featured highly in their round-up of the best ads in early lockdown.

However, there have been exceptions from brands who’ve had to completely rethink campaigns due to restrictions. With sporting events cancelled, there wasn’t much to bet on this year. But Paddy Power still managed to find a way to stay in the lives of their audience with the usual sense of humour we’ve come to expect.

Like Paddy Power, Nike found a way to reach consumers without joining the sea of same in ‘these uncertain times ‘. Instead, they stayed true to their existing brand purpose to help encourage social distancing.

All three are great examples of brands keeping their cool in a crisis, without claiming to be the solution.

#2 Community spirit

What happened?

While COVID can be blamed for keeping everyone physically apart, it’s also responsible for bringing us closer than ever before (figuratively speaking, of course).

Many issues were catapulted into the spotlight, that has otherwise been left unaddressed in the past. In many parts of the world, a sense of community was reignited and people called upon big brands and corporations to help those in need.

How did it affect brand marketing?

Purpose is now much more than a buzzword, it’s an action and something every brand must embrace. If your purpose wasn’t established or front-and-centre prior to the pandemic, it can be difficult to launch it without seeming disingenuous. The best thing you can do in this situation is to hold a workshop with your teams to establish exactly what it is you stand for — if your purpose has come directly from your people, there’s nothing inauthentic about it.

Data analytics and research company, Kantar, put together a COVID-19 Barometer to explore how people have been feeling and acting throughout the pandemic, and what that means for marketing and comms.

A key finding is that consumers are expecting big brands and corporations to help; “top three comms strategies among consumers include talking about how the brand is helpful in the new everyday, keeping them informed about the brand’s reaction to the new situation, offering a reassuring tone ”

Craft beer brand, Brewdog, have always been excellent at reacting to current events and were among the first to repurpose their production lines to supply the NHS, charities and people in need with hand sanitiser made at one of their distilleries.

Dyson also made a huge impact by using their engineering capabilities to manufacture ventilators and help tackle the nationwide shortage.

Building life-saving equipment isn’t a viable option for every brand, but even finding simple ways to make a difference to those most affected by the Coronavirus will affect long-term trust and opinion in a big way.

#3 Teams getting smaller

What happened?

The pandemic left many marketing team members furloughed or made redundant. There were also company-wide hiring freezes and freelance help put on hold or cancelled altogether.

Those still in the office had to quickly adapt to working from home — with smaller teams, no face-to-face meetings and the added pressure on mental health and wellbeing from the pandemic.

How did it affect brand marketing?

It’s been vital for companies to restructure their approach and support their teams working remotely.

Marketing teams around the world have had to face problems head-on by:

Embracing digital productivity tools and instant messaging services.
Promoting empathy and clear communication between teams.
Providing more mental health and well-being initiatives.
Creating support networks for furloughed employees, people who’ve been made redundant, and freelancers worried about the future.

The way companies act now will have lasting effects on the success of their marketing teams. A robust remote hiring and onboarding process and empathetic work environments that offer extra support for parents and caregivers will be among the most important factors.

#4 Brands weighing-in on important issues

What happened

With global brands under a brighter spotlight to use their influence responsibly, they have been taking to various platforms to offer clarity among the chaos, encourage their audiences to do the right thing and call out those who aren’t.

There is the increasing realisation that if a brand is putting profit over people during the COVID-19 crisis, they will lose consumer trust forever.

How did it affect brand marketing?

Countless brands focussed on sharing social distancing reminders and information, or finding a link to certain aspects of life during the pandemic. What’s proved more important, is the ability to show empathy on a personal level, being useful and being part of a community.

Heinz maintained brand awareness through their partnership with Magic Breakfast — a UK non-profit providing healthy school breakfasts to children at risk of hunger. When schools closed nationwide, Heinz committed to providing 12 million free breakfasts for children who would usually benefit from breakfast club programmes.

As the UK’s first lockdown eased and the government encouraged people back into the office, Dettol misjudged many people’s concerns about returning to normality a little too soon.

The ads at Euston underground station went viral for all the wrong reasons (with Twitter taking particular anguish at the thought of ‘putting on a tie’ and ‘proper bants’).

We can learn from both examples when it comes to how people react to brands using a sensitive issue to promote themselves. If it’s genuine, helpful and well-thought-out, the brand will come across as a warm and positive influence in their lives. If a campaign wrongly assumes how people are feeling, then the opposite is true.

The events of this year are no longer a temporary disruption to the marketing norm, brands are now seriously rethinking their purpose, strategies and overall marketing direction. These moves are no longer considered to be simply adapting to a temporary situation, but wholesale mindset changes that will affect the way we interact for the foreseeable future.

It’s already becoming clear that the way marketing teams react to current events and adapt to change — and how fast they do it — will have a huge long-term impact on their consumer perception and success post-COVID.

Table of contents:

#1 Home working and lockdowns
#2 Community spirit
#3 Teams getting smaller
#4 Brands weighing-in on important issues

The implementation of any new software can be overwhelming. The challenge is in ensuring seamless processing and creating a system that your employees will actually use.

We have made a small guide that shows how to implement a brand management system in the best possible way.

Establish why you need a new brand management system

You have your reasons for needing a brand management system, but no one will use your system if they don’t see the utility value. Sending an email with information that a new system is on its way is in other words, not the way to go.

Continue reading “This is how you implement a brand management system”

The vast amount of digital content that leading brands distribute every day, across multiple channels and formats, means legacy content asset management systems are often no longer fit for purpose.

Long, complicated file paths on standard servers can lead to big productivity problems as marketing teams waste time searching through folders for the right asset.

How marketing professionals spend their time manually searching for information

Robust, scalable content asset management systems are critical in today’s fast-paced, global landscape. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems help drive the digital transformation of businesses and gives marketing professionals a modern solution that saves time and money.

However, not all DAM systems are created equal – and it’s important to determine whether yours is realising the undoubted potential these platforms have to streamline communication, speed up turnaround times and lock down brand consistency.

Increased productivity and peace of mind

While DAM platforms have the power to store, share and organise all your digital content in a centralised location, you should get more out of your creative files by being able to edit and track the changes being made to assets.

Can you categorise the assets based on metadata and tags?
Can you generate different sizes and file formats from the asset itself, so that you can truly operate in one place?
Can you share your assets with both external and internal stakeholders with ease?

This is what Digital Asset Management is truly about, securing a seamless workflow for your entire company while giving Brand Managers total control over their assets.

Of course, storing, accessing and sharing your digital assets quickly and easily is one of the key foundations of an effective marketing operation. But you also want your colleagues to use these assets correctly when communicating with potential customers, so it’s important to think about what else you need from your DAM system.

Dynamic brand activation at your control

Today’s marketer needs more than just static assets. They need the flexibility to create different marketing materials using these assets, such as presentations, brochures, ads, social media images. Enabling asset creation is a must-have for modern marketers. So, if you have this in place, that’s great. If you don’t, you should ask whether your DAM tools are providing what you need to keep up with evolving marketing trends.

As the demands on digital content continue to grow and organisations increase efforts to streamline brand strategy processes, a single-purpose DAM system may not be enough for modern marketers.

Here are a few key metrics and areas we recommend using to judge the performance of your DAM system:

User experience

It’s vital that your DAM solution presents an excellent user experience for your employees and any other users. The primary goal of any DAM is to make it easier for your team to find and use the resources they need to support the creation of marketing collateral. If the UX makes this challenging, the DAM is not working as it should.

A good user experience will start with how people navigate the system:

How intuitive is the structure, hierarchy and navigation of the software?
Does the system allow you to tag and categorise assets using terminology you and your team are familiar with?
Can you quickly filter resources by a particular tag or category to help you find the asset you’re looking for faster?
Is the display and user interface straightforward and intuitive to users?
Is it easy to share assets with your teams in a variety of locations?
Can the system be translated into multiple languages to support its use by your teams globally?
Does it offer any indication if an asset has already been uploaded to the system to remove the risk of duplication?
Is it easy to operate across multiple devices, including mobile and tablets?
Can you export digital assets into a variety of file formats?

These are just some of the questions you should ask about any prospective DAM solution to ensure it provides you and your team with an effective user experience. Without this, it will inevitably be ignored and underutilised, meaning you miss out on the ROI that other organisations gain from this type of software.

Internal implementation

The user experience also depends on how you, as an organisation, manage your assets when the system you’ve selected is implemented. While it can do a lot, it requires those responsible for the solution to manage it professionally and prudently.

Have you ensured that all labeling is applied consistently and in terminology that your global teams can recognise?
Are resources specific to a particular location or outlet clearly marked?
How are assets grouped together for a specific purpose and is reasoning clearly marked up?

When the user interface offered by a high-quality DAM aligns with the effective organisation of the team operating it, then the management of your digital assets can reach a whole new level.

Local vs global

There is also a need to differentiate between digital assets that are globally available, and resources that specifically cater to a particular market or location. As we’ve explored in other articles, localised marketing is essential to effectively engage your audience at a deeper, personalised level. Giving this attention can help you build stronger bonds with the various communities your brand interacts with and foster customer loyalty.

The percentage of consumers that prefer to receive advertising tailored to their situation

The scale of your digital asset creation and the severity of the problems you face will depend on both your marketing team’s setup and the needs of your organisation. But, there is no doubt that the challenges surrounding content production continue to grow as demands on content escalate, with an increasing number of channels and mediums for brands to connect with their audiences.

This puts more of a priority on asset creation than on how these assets are managed. So it’s worth looking at the additional features and benefits that a Brand Activation Management (BAM) system brings to your business.

Evolving from DAM to BAM

Brand Activation Management (BAM) expands on the capabilities of a standalone DAM system. BAM includes an effective DAM solution within it, capable of containing an enormous number of digital assets in one place, and making it easy for users to seek out what they need and share it with their colleagues globally.

But, BAM goes further in providing marketing teams with an intuitive creation suite and intelligent templates, which can be used by anyone to produce on-brand, high-quality assets regardless of their design experience or expertise.

With access to all assets available on the DAM, someone can immediately download these and use them as a base for new, tailored assets for an upcoming campaign, without the financial or time burden of starting from scratch or bringing in a specialist.

On top of the same functions as a DAM system, BAM:

Gives everyone access to create and edit brand consistent print and digital marketing materials, without the need for specialist design skills
Becomes a single source of truth for the entire brand, housing all guidelines and standards in one place to be accessed by team members
Allows users to oversee and manage delivery of assets across their campaigns, and track what assets are being utilised most frequently

Fundamentally, it builds on the platform that DAM systems and similar distinct content management softwares have created, and blends these into one powerful, all-encompassing package for content marketers.

Without the foundation that DAM established decades ago and has continued to refine, BAM could not build on this with a means of enhancing an organisation’s ability to govern their brand voice and keep it consistent across all channels and locations.

Because at their core, DAM and BAM work to deliver the same highly sought-after commodity: control.

For teams looking to take control of content production like never before, and reduce their reliance on costly freelancers or agencies to create assets you could produce in-house with the right tool, BAM goes a lot further in resolving all of the issues that teams face day-to-day:

Content creation is faster and more consistent than ever before
Brand guidelines are kept at the forefront of teams’ minds
All assets are securely stored and shared across your global workforce
Key metrics related to your assets’ usage are tracked and stored

BAM by Papirfly™ represents an ideal evolution. It is enabling marketing teams to create an infinite amount of assets with one single, annual license fee. This means they can do a lot more for less – keeping up with the pressures on brands to be ever-present without any further strain on their budgets.

Find out more about Papirfly’s BAM solution by booking your free personalised demo.

Table of contents:

Increased productivity and peace of mind
Dynamic brand activation at your control
User experience
Internal implementation
Local vs global
Evolving from DAM to BAM

Holidays are coming. Holidays are coming.

Even during quiet periods, frantic briefing and hurried collateral creation is commonplace. So during times where there’s a much higher demand placed on marketing teams and stores, it’s important to have a plan of action.

Understanding the importance of striking a balance between speed, accuracy and the need for creative, persuasive and powerful promotions is a fine art many big retail brands have mastered.

But, that doesn’t mean that things never go wrong. In fact, most retailers face the same challenges time and again. Here, we’ve outlined 5 of the most common pressures that the fast-paced nature of retail places on teams across the globe.

How to overcome 5 key retail challenges

#1 Executing cross-platform promotion

The time, budget and effort it takes to get promotional collateral delivered can be significant if you don’t have the right tools and resources.

Let’s take a typical ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offer.

You may need to promote the offer to your database via an email, print in-store brochures or flyers, create digital signage, website banners, POS, social posts and more. But the promotion only lasts a week and the budget is limited, so how do you ensure that all stores have the correct assets, in the sizes they need, delivered on time? And avoid wastage and duplication of effort?

The answer is having a centralised creation platform where your creative templates are readily available. A single place that’s accessible by teams, to adapt, edit and create the exact marketing materials they need in sizes tailored to their needs. This is called Brand Activation Management (BAM) – you can learn more about the BAM for retail marketing solution here.

#2 Time-to-market

When there’s a trend or small window of opportunity to increase sales, time is of the essence. Teams need to be empowered at store level to be reactive and not have to rely on head office or any external agency to make decisions and deliver the assets they need.

By having pre-defined templates and locked-down elements, teams can create what they need in-line with brand guidelines and still have the flexibility they need to customise as they need to.

#3 Pricing errors and PR nightmares

When there’s a rush or mistake made before go-live, this can sometimes result in the wrong information being pulled in. Wording on a promotion may be unclear or open to interpretation, the small print may have been missed or the wrong promotion put in place altogether. There are two things that can be done in order to prevent this.

This first is to put in place digitised approval processes, but this only provides a single layer of protection. In order to give your teams extra confidence in avoiding costly mistakes, you can have your marketing creation software integrate with your PIM and ERP to ensure that all product and pricing data is up-to-date, accurate and updated in real-time. BAM offers both of these solutions in its retail marketing creation platform.

#4 React to trends, competition and season promotions

No matter how much preparation you make or how far ahead you are with your promotions, there will always be a need to be reactive:

react to competition and seasonal promotions in retail

Being able to react once again comes down to your team having autonomy and flexibility, but within a specified, agency standard design framework. With no additional skill required, BAM allows individuals and teams to create as many assets as they like with a single license cost. This means that regardless of different budgets for different store sizes, there will be a level playing field at a national level.

#5 Brand consistency

In the haste of getting promotions over the line, it can sometimes be that corners get cut to meet deadlines. On the face of it, the odd promotional poster created in the wrong shade might not seem the end of the world, but if you have 200 stores nationally all rushing to get assets ready, you could soon find yourself with a wildly inconsistent retail brand.

BAM allows you to do many things, but 2 in particular will ensure your brand is never compromised.

Firstly, you get to pre-define locked down elements in all your assets. So whether your teams are given the freedom to create videos, emails, POS, brochures or any other digital or print asset they could need, you define how much flexibility they have. You can pre-select brand colour palettes, logos, imagery and more to ensure that only on-brand, consistent designs appear online and in-store.

Brand management cannot be explained in one single page. Afterall, there are full time studies for this subject. So why this blog? As a marketer, you have probably experienced the challenges with managing a brand while staying consistent and sticking to your brand development strategies. And most likely you have run into a few obstacles on the way?

We can’t cover the entire subject of brand management in this one blog post, but what we can do is explain the basic principles and why it is important to get control of your branding processes. We’ll also give you a few tips on a brand management platform can boost your initiatives without much effort.

What is Brand Management?

Brand awareness doesn’t occur overnight. Building a brand that is embraced by consumers and taking its piece of the pie called market share doesn’t happen by chance – and this is what Brand Management is all about.

Continue reading “What is Brand Management?”

As the need for brands to produce more and more content to keep audiences engaged grows ever stronger, as well as balancing this with the desire to stay consistent across all channels, the emphasis on a well-built, organised marketing team is more pressing than ever before.

But, what is the ideal marketing team structure? As the responsibilities and functions of marketing continue to expand, knowing the roles you need when building your marketing team is critical to covering all bases and guiding the growth of your brand.

Explore our insight into the role of marketing for an organisation and how to structure your team to deliver the most effective output.

What is the role of a marketing department?

So let’s start with the million-dollar question: what does a marketing team actually do? The specifics of this will vary from company to company – what you consider the role of your marketing department could be very different from another company in your industry.

But, as a broad summary, we can define the role of a marketing department as the promoters of your brand to your audiences worldwide.

It crafts the face of your company. It reaches out and attracts leads to your company, its products and its services. It plans, creates, and coordinates the materials that represent your brand. In many ways, your marketing team is the bridge between your brand and your customer.

Due to this weighty responsibility, a marketing department’s functions are often extensive and demand specialists drive them. So, before you can consider the roles and structure of your ideal marketing team, you have to first establish what functions they need to fulfil…

Establishing your marketing department functions

Here is a snapshot of the various functions today’s global marketing teams are expected to perform to connect audiences to their brand:

Define and manage your brand

One of the key roles of a marketing department is to establish exactly what your brand stands for – its values, characteristics, visions – so you can translate this to your audience.

Develop marketing strategies

From determining the price of your products/services to cementing what channels your brand should focus on, marketing teams should make data-driven decisions to inform your overall strategy.

Plan and oversee campaigns

As part of your overarching strategy, the marketing team will also take responsibility for individual campaigns and initiatives – the resources required, how long they will run, the milestones across this timeframe, and analysing the results.

Research your target market

The best marketing teams understand their target audience inside-out, and conduct thorough research into the demographics, behaviours and motivations of your market, as well as what your competition is doing on this front.

Produce assets for your marketing channels

A critical function of the marketing department will be developing content and assets across the spectrum of your marketing network. Social media, email marketing, blogs, print and digital adverts – it’s a long list (and is only getting longer).

Drive traffic to your website

One of the most important marketing team goals is to generate more high-quality leads towards their brand and nurture these for as long as it takes to score those all-important conversions.

Coordinate your social media presence

Everyone needs to be on social media nowadays, so an increasingly vital marketing role is managing and monitoring these platforms to keep these up-to-date and protect your brand’s reputation.

Identify and utilise advertising opportunities

Marketing teams should be actively locating opportunities to advertise their brand, be that through digital or print platforms, and communicating with organisations that can afford them that space.

Organise internal communications

As well as connecting customers with your brand, marketing departments are also responsible for keeping employees continuously aware of the organisation’s values, goals and priorities.

Act as your media liaison

When your brand is mentioned in the media, either in a positive or negative light, a marketing team member will often be in charge of coordinating with the media and preparing communications on these platforms.

Planning and handling events

When you host an event, seminar or webinar, it will typically be your marketing team that will organise and manage these.

Manage third parties

Particularly for small or mid-sized businesses, marketing departments will need to work closely with outside vendors, be they agencies, PR companies, influencers or freelancers, and ensure they produce work in-line with your brand’s values.

Defining your marketing department roles

With a clearer perspective of the functions of modern marketing team structures, you will be in a stronger position to outline the roles you need to build your marketing team.

Of course, the breadth and of your marketing team positions will depend on the scale of your company. The marketing team structures for a large, globally recognised organisation will be far different from a smaller company. Smaller firms will typically have more dual-role positions and generalists in their marketing teams, supported by specialist agencies and freelancers.

Meanwhile, larger organisations will often have a range of specialists in-house to fulfil the functions mentioned earlier. However, they may face greater challenges collaborating across locations, and still may look to support from external agencies and freelancers to deliver work.

In order to cover the broadest range of marketing roles here, we will focus on the largest of these marketing structures and the individuals you could expect to find within it.

Marketing Management/Strategy Team

This strand of your marketing team structure will be responsible for developing, adapting and refining your overall marketing strategy, and conducting the research informing that. In addition, they will also oversee the work of the other segments of the marketing department, maintaining a birds-eye view over all operations.