How strong employer branding improves your high-volume recruitment campaigns
Papirfly
8minutes read
High-volume recruitment. Bulk recruitment. Mass hiring. Whatever you call it, most global organisations have at some stage needed to sign up a large number of new employees in a short window of time.
It’s a long-established practice, but it’s increasingly challenging when demand for top talent regularly outweighs supply. Whether your company is opening a new location or needs more hands on deck at peak times, you must use every tool at your disposal to engage your target market and fill your vacancies.
While technologies such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and video interviewing platforms are key to streamlining this process, you must reach and connect with candidates first – and few things help you do this more than a strong employer brand.
Here, we’ll explain how well-managed recruitment branding strategies enhance your hiring efforts, and how you can activate your employer brand to attract and retain potential candidates.
What is high-volume recruitment?
High-volume recruitment is when an organisation looks to hire a significant number of candidates in a short space of time.
Commonly used in retail, hospitality, customer service and practically any industry with fluctuating workforce demands, this strategy is deployed in many circumstances, like when:
Seasonal demand for products or services peaks, such as during Christmas
A business rapidly expands or opens new locations
Employee turnover reached a high point
An organisation offers a lot of entry-level positions, such as call centre operators
Why is a strong employer brand important for your recruitment efforts?
Your employer brand is your shopfront to potential candidates. It’s the values, perks, incentives and motivators that resonate with your target audience, stretching from the first job ad a prospect sees, right through to your day-to-day company culture.
In a highly competitive talent landscape, your employer brand is your chance to stand out from your competitors and secure exceptional recruits. It’s your brand’s identity for your workforce, and is crucial for bringing the right people on board.
How does employer branding differ between high-volume recruitment and traditional hiring?
It’s easy to overlook the importance of a solid employer brand for high-volume recruitment. For entry-level or temporary roles, candidates aren’t going to care about how clean or well-managed your employer branding looks, right?
Wrong. Over 75% of job seekers research an employer’s brand before applying for a role, while 69% of candidates say they would reject job offers from companies with a bad employer brand. When you’re trying to fill roles fast, you can’t afford this degree of rejection.
In many ways, a strong employer brand is more vital in high-volume campaigns than in typical hiring cycles. Because you’re advertising on many job boards and platforms at once, a negative reputation or lack of clarity can cause candidates to question why you have so many openings.
This uncertainty may deter high-calibre candidates from applying, causing your campaigns to suffer and drag out longer.
What are the key elements of a strong employer brand for high-volume recruitment?
Employer branding in recruitment at any level requires multiple key elements to achieve consistent success:
Personalised experiences for candidates, from pre-application to the onboarding process
A well-constructed careers page outlining your company mission and values
Carefully monitored and managed listings on employer review sites like Glassdoor
Employee advocates who promote your organisation within their own networks
A successful employer brand strategy is layered and consistent at every touch point – and this is just as critical for mass hires as it is for individual roles.
4 ways your employer brand helps with mass hiring
High-volume recruitment is fraught with challenges. Immediately it conjures up ideas of mass generic emails, automated responses and candidates left in limbo.
An impressive employer brand can help overcome many challenges associated with volume hiring, ensuring each potential employee feels special even when reaching out to thousands at a time.
1. Eliminate ill-fitting candidates
The biggest headache for large-scale recruitment is sorting applications to find suitable candidates. You can easily waste hours on this process, pushing your campaigns back with every ill-suited application.
With a clear, coherent and ever-present employer brand, candidates can immediately see your company values, benefits and culture, and visualise if they “fit” in your organisation. This helps reduce the number of inappropriate entries, resulting in higher-quality applications.
2. Reduce time and cost to hire
With so many roles needing to be filled, time is of the essence in high-volume recruitment marketing. A good employer brand is estimated to slash the time and cost of hiring in half, which results in substantial savings when you’re trying to fill dozens of spaces at once.
3. Improve employee retention
Focusing solely on filling positions quickly can compromise the long-term retention of your candidates. If this leads to a rushed interview and onboarding process, it becomes difficult to hold onto new hires, taking you back to square one.
Finally, it’s no great secret that potential candidates trust the word of employees more than employers – particularly if they’re already sceptical about the number of openings available.
Encouraging your existing employees to reinforce the reasons to work for your company on social media, employer review sites and word of mouth helps silence any doubt from your prospects.
Activating your employer brand for volume recruitment campaigns
Now you understand the difference an excellent employer brand makes for high-volume recruitment, how can you best “activate” it to reap the rewards?
Our employer brand solutions have empowered many world-renowned brands to navigate these turbulent times with ease and control, so here are our 6 top tips to help you achieve the same:
1. Understand your roles and ideal candidate personas
Knowing your target audience is even more pressing for high-volume recruitment than conventional hiring – you don’t want to be inundated with hundreds of irrelevant resumes for each role.
Take time to distinguish what skills, experience and characteristics the ideal person would possess for every position you have available. This will ensure your job adverts are tailored to these expectations, so you receive more appropriate job applicants.
Plus, understanding what makes your candidates tick will help you adapt your recruitment branding to the values most meaningful to them – do they prefer flexible hours, remote working or development opportunities?
2. Centralise your recruitment branding strategy
A disparate employer brand strategy creates inconsistency, which damages both your reputation and ability to hire in pressing times.
Bringing every element of your employer brand identity – guidelines, EVP, tone of voice, employee handbooks and more – under one dedicated brand hub will help ensure your materials are aligned, whether you’re reaching out about one position or dozens.
3. Harness tools to create personalised content
With mass hiring campaigns, it’s all too easy to send the same formulaic emails, adverts and job descriptions to each audience. But for the best results, it’s important to speak to candidates on a personal level – their wants, their language, their culture.
Particularly if you’re hiring for positions in a different country, it’s vital to translate your employer branding for local markets. With the right brand management platform, localising recruitment campaign collateral for specific audiences can be done in minutes, enabling you to tailor messages without major losses of time or resources.
Remember: think global, but act local.
4. Prioritise your candidate experiences
Employer branding doesn’t end with the application process. So many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. You must carry your branding and company culture through this process as well.
Consider:
What do candidates first see at an interview or video call?
How can we streamline and uncomplicate this process?
What materials can we provide prospects to help them understand our work culture?
Who is best placed to support and guide new hires for a particular role?
Consistency is key to any recruitment campaign, but it’s especially challenging when advertising for many jobs concurrently on multiple platforms. Any break in brand consistency can lessen your appeal to candidates, and present your company as low-grade and disjointed.
To lock down your employer brand identity, invest in intelligent, on-brand design templates. This framework will ensure those responsible for creating your recruitment materials never deviate from your core branding, while offering enough freedom for their creativity to shine.
Furthermore, consider implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to support these templates. This comprehensive online library of assets can make sure your teams worldwide have instant access to the right content for their campaigns, keeping your local recruitment efforts in lockstep with your global identity.
6. Plan your campaigns with precision
Coordinating high-volume recruitment campaigns can be a real struggle without a centralised, birds-eye view of all activity – particularly when multiple locations or countries are involved in this drive.
Equipping your teams with proven campaign execution tools helps them organise activities more effectively. This minimises waste and provides much-needed stability during substantial times of change and upheaval within your organisation.
How can we adapt our employer branding strategies in periods of high-volume recruitment?
During high-volume recruitment, there are many ways you can adapt your employer branding to make a meaningful positive impact:
Emphasise your employer values and unique selling points to immediately capture the attention of applicants
Leverage technology for automated screening and personalised communication to improve the speed and quality of your recruitment processes
Harness a wider range of recruitment channels, such as social media and job boards, to maximise visibility
Offer referral incentives to your existing employees to encourage them to play an active role in your campaigns
Showcase your company culture through testimonials and success stories to give candidates a tangible sense of life in your organisation
Master your employer brand, maximise your recruitment efforts
Many of the biggest headaches attached to high-volume recruitment can be reduced or eliminated altogether with a healthy, consistent employer brand. We hope this article has helped you recognise this, and advised on how you can harness it to engage candidates on a mass scale.
One final piece of advice – continue to review and refine the performance of your recruitment campaigns. Candidates’ priorities and attitudes constantly evolve, and change from location to location. Investing in real-time campaign data and analytics keeps you on top of these trends, and illustrates what assets and activities are reaping results for your organisation.
Combined with further talent acquisition software, you can build an employer brand that connects with audiences globally and locally. Meaning that whenever there’s an urgent need to bring people on board, your organisation is at the front of the queue.
The summer of sport 2024: How can you capitalise with your brand marketing?
Papirfly
8minutes read
For sports fans, this summer is shaping up to be one of the most exciting in history.
The Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. Euro 2024. Wimbledon. The Tour de France. The Open Championship. Some of the world’s most high-profile sporting events, all contained in one three-month span.
Few things emotionally click with people like sport does. It brings communities together, forms shared identities and inspires action. So, it’s only sensible that marketing teams globally look to harness these rare opportunities to build brand awareness and secure some extra sales.
Capitalising on major sports events is a tried-and-tested pastime, but one with plenty of hurdles. In this guide, we’ll explain what you must know to lawfully use sporting events in your marketing, and help you kick off your campaigns with some effective brand marketing strategies.
The brand marketing value of major sporting events
Well-established brands understand the interest that The Olympic Games, World Cup, Super Bowl and more can bring to their products and services. That’s why they pay huge money to become official sponsors and partners for these events.
Take Paris 2024 as an example. The upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games have raised over €1.2 billion in sponsorship revenue, with worldwide partners including Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Samsung and Toyota.
A few months earlier at Super Bowl LVI, companies paid on average $7 million to air a 30-second commercial during the broadcast.
Advertising and sponsorship are among the biggest revenue streams for high-profile sports events. So, it stands to reason that they are keen to protect the best interests of their sponsors and prevent others from piggybacking off their reputations.
The challenges of capitalising on sporting events in your marketing
With so much money invested into sports events by advertisers and sponsors, other brands must tread carefully if they want to use these in their own campaigns.
Again, let’s use the Paris Olympic Games as an example. In their guide for non-Olympic partners on commercial opportunities for participants, also known as Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, they outline what non-sponsors can and cannot do in their advertising.
This document includes everything from parameters on using Olympic athletes in brand marketing before and during the Games, to guidelines on what is considered fair “generic advertising”.
This is only scratching the surface. You must also consider the core Olympic and Paralympic IP, as well as the IP of Paris 2024 specifically and the teams/athletes participating.
As you can imagine, these rules are not exclusive to the Olympic Games – every high-profile sporting event has similar brand guidelines to ensure non-sponsors cannot hijack its identity.
So, before you even think about hopping on the back of this summer of sport, keep the following in mind:
Avoid using any official or licensed imagery, designs, colour palettes, or footage in your advertising
Ensure there is little chance your campaigns could mislead your customer base into believing your brand is connected to the sporting event
Restrict the use of elements that could be seen as connected to the event, such as the French flag in connection to the Paris Olympics
Closely examine any laws surrounding social media and the sporting event you want to base content around – for example, using event-related hashtags and emojis, or re-posting official content, may be illegal
Check the timing and scale of your campaign does not attract unwanted attention from the relevant organisation
4 things to consider before using sports in your marketing
With these tight restrictions in place, you might be wondering if it’s even worth trying to capitalise on sporting events in your brand marketing. While there are risks, the rewards can also be significant.
For instance, at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Nike’s smart, sustained campaigns, including the creation of “Nike Town” on the edge of the Olympic Park, meant that more people thought Nike was the official sponsor of the games instead of the actual sponsor, Reebok.
When deployed intelligently and consistently, these real-time marketing campaigns can generate short-term buzz that leads to long-term brand recognition. But before pressing ahead, we recommend you consider the following:
1. Is your campaign relevant to your target audience?
First, ask if the sporting event you’re attempting to capitalise on is one your target markets are interested in. If it’s not, your efforts are likely to be in vain, and at worst, could even damage your reputation with loyal customers.
So, assess the interest of your audience before getting started, based on your pre-existing customer data or by conducting market research.
2. Are you being authentic and genuine with your content?
Next, is the sport you’re using aligned with your brand identity and values? If it’s completely detached from what you stand for, it can immediately make your campaigns look like a desperate grab for attention rather than a smart, fresh move.
Always know what you’re trying to do and what you hope to achieve from your campaigns. If it doesn’t benefit your long-term goals or resonate with your brand’s personality, then it may be safer to stay out of the conversation.
3. Will this short-term approach damage your brand’s consistency?
In a similar vein, your campaigns should always be brand-consistent, regardless of the subject matter. Modern customers expect a consistent experience every time they interact with a business, and it’s one of the biggest hallmarks of brand loyalty.
If piggybacking on the Olympics or the Euros risks breaking the consistency of your tone of voice or visual identity, then it isn’t worth it in the long run.
4. Do you have a plan in place and the tools to be agile?
Real-time marketing requires forward planning and an agile process. It’s no good to create content about a gold-medal performance in the 100 metres or an incredible goal several days after it happened – you need to strike when audiences are invested.
Consider Oreo’s ingenious blackout ad after the power outage that affected Super Bowl XLVII – they had a social media team ready to pounce on anything that happened.
Having high-quality brand management tools and dedicated teams ready to monitor every minute of the action are key to fully capitalising on this summer of sport.
7 ways to take advantage of the summer of sport in your brand marketing
With our challenges and final considerations out of the way, here are our 7 standout ways to make your brand marketing shine during this year’s sporting spectacles.
1. Focus on digital channels for younger consumers
The latest generations of shoppers, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, consume sport much differently than even a decade or two ago. Studies show that 79% of global sports fans exclusively watch sports online, while 53% of sports fans access other online sports content while watching a match or tournament.
Capitalise on this by placing banner ads and other collateral on sports-adjacent websites across the summer of sport. These may be at a slightly higher premium at these moments, but they can put your product or service in front of engaged audiences, boosting your brand awareness.
2. Accelerate social advertising during events
Similarly, approximately 70% of Gen Z sports fans say they prefer to watch sports on social media platforms. It’s a growing phenomenon for fans to comment on events and seek out others’ thoughts instantly, so capitalise on that added attention.
Ramp up your social media marketing at these peak periods to capitalise on your audience’s heightened engagement. Even if they are too preoccupied to click at that moment, it can plant valuable seeds for long-term brand equity building.
3. Tap into stories surrounding the sport
If the rules around high-profile sporting events prove a headache, then you could capitalise on stories tangentially connected to the events.
For example, after Cristiano Ronaldo removed two bottles of Coca-Cola at a press conference (causing their share price to drop 1.6%), IKEA swiftly produced a reusable water bottle called ‘the Cristiano’ as a nod to his preference for water.
Alternatively, events like Wimbledon have become as synonymous for celebrity viewers as the actual tennis, and several fashion brands have used this to create content around their attire.
4. Get clever with your collateral
When creating content loosely attached to sporting events, you must be clever to navigate the restrictions. Encourage your teams to think outside the box for campaigns that tap into fans’ sporting instincts, while keeping enough distance to protect you legally.
Glasses retailer Specsavers set a good example with their Digital Out of Home (DOOH) campaign depicting an eye chart with the phrase “It’s coming home” – a popular chant among England football fans.
Examine all angles and find unique ways to engage with this summer of sport. Keeping a calendar of when events occur can give you the breathing room to brainstorm.
5. Use former athletes as influencers
Did you know that 69% of consumers trust influencers over information coming directly from a brand? In substantial periods of sporting activity, reaching out to a former athlete can recapture nostalgic feelings among older fans, with zero risk of compromising guidelines connected to current sports stars.
6. Time offers around match days
When you know what time football matches or Olympic events are taking place, you can time your campaigns, offers or emails to tempt people during breaks in the action.
For example, say you’re marketing a local takeaway restaurant. Establishing special offers during game days or sending out limited-time offers based on results can capture some additional orders from sporting fans.
7. Prioritise local marketing
With many of this summer’s sporting events tied to national teams and local pride, it’s important to tailor your campaigns for the specific fan bases you market for. The earlier Specsavers example was perfect for an English audience, but wouldn’t mean much to their customers in Denmark or the Netherlands.
Invest in brand management technology and smart templates that allow you to adapt your core messaging to particular audiences. This will make sure you can connect with fans across your global audience with campaigns that resonate with the teams they’re rooting for.
Additionally, consider organising community events and initiatives, such as watch parties for big occasions and mock competitions, to create memorable experiences for your local audiences.
Kick off your brand marketing for the summer of sport
As you’ve read above, high-profile sporting events can provide a short-term boost to your long-term brand marketing goals. If you’re clever with your collateral, harnessing the right channels and authentic to your values, these moments can be a springboard for your brand awareness.
But just as it takes more than raw talent to make an Olympic athlete, these opportunistic campaigns require more than an ingenious strategy. They demand an agile process, rapid asset creation and a firm commitment to consistency.
To set your teams up for success, technology like smart design templates and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems give you the foundation for swift, on-brand communications. With the right tools in your camp, crafting timely assets around the major moments this summer of sport can be as simple for your teams as scoring a penalty into an empty net!
Your brand is your most valuable differentiator in a highly competitive landscape. Your unique personality, values and promises set you apart from the crowd, and enable the consumers, employees and stakeholders in your target market to emotionally connect with you.
But to achieve that ambition, it demands nothing less than full-time management. Working with over 1,500 global and growing brands, we recognise the immense importance of brand management in generating loyal customers, raising awareness and building brand equity.
In this ultimate guide, we’ll explain exactly why brand management is something today’s companies cannot overlook, and share our advice on how to set up your brand for lasting success.
Discover what brand management involves and who’s responsible for it
Explore the 6 defining principles of brand management
Follow our standout steps for successful brand management
Overcome the key challenges affecting modern brand managers
Ready to become better at brand management? Then let’s get started…
What is brand management?
Brand management is a very broad term. In a nutshell, it’s the strategies, techniques and processes your organisation uses to maintain and improve your brand in the long term.
Everything from your brand guidelines, strategy and overall identity, to the individual marketing materials that reach your audiences, must be carefully structured, directed, adapted and analysed to maximise your brand’s potential.
Is brand management the same as branding?
No. Your branding is the process of building your brand. It’s where you establish your brand positioning, visual identity, tone of voice, and the many other facets of your overall brand identity. Brand management is the process of monitoring, maintaining and evolving this identity once it’s established.
In other words, think of brand management as the vehicle that drives your branding to its true potential.
Marketing and brand management are not the same either. Brand management extends far beyond your marketing team – it incorporates your salespeople, customer service reps, HR professionals, recruiters and more. Essentially, any department that engages with your customers, staff or wider audiences has a role to play in brand management.
What does brand management involve?
So, what does strategic brand management mean in practice? Again, there’s a wide range of areas this touches, but typically it will involve:
Developing and continually refining your brand strategy
Adapting brand assets following any switches in strategy, graphics or tone
The evolution of your brand identity
Maintaining brand consistency across all communication channels
Monitoring your brand health and reputation among audiences, including crisis management
Overseeing the development and execution of brand communications
Strategies to improve brand equity and grow loyalty among your consumers
What is brand asset management?
Brand asset management is the specific management and monitoring of the various assets and marketing materials that promote your brand. It’s essentially how you organise and administer the logos, campaign assets, colour palettes, graphics and more to ensure these are completely consistent on all platforms.
Software such as Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are essential to fulfilling this important task, allowing you to govern all approved assets your organisation creates in one central location.
Who should be responsible for brand management?
As noted earlier, the responsibility of brand management should not fall at the feet of your CMO or marketing manager. It’s a completely different animal, and demands a dedicated brand manager or brand management team to oversee.
Your brand manager should have a good understanding of marketing principles, including digital marketing and market research, but also maintain regular communication with your various customer and employee-facing departments. They may also be responsible for:
Identifying and installing brand management platforms and software
Managing any updates to your branding or a full-scale rebrand
6 defining principles of brand management
Now we’ve discussed the basics of brand management, it’s time to dig a little deeper into the core principles of this topic. These 6 standout principles outline the purpose of brand management, and the positive impact good management can have on your organisation.
1. Brand equity
Brand equity is what separates a startup tech firm and Apple, or a generic local soft drink from Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It’s the value that your brand adds to your product or service, setting it apart from comparable offerings in your market.
The more you build brand equity, the more power you have in your industry and the more market share you enjoy. It’s what every switched-on organisation strives towards, and is only achievable through careful, deliberate management of your brand.
Any break in the continuity of your communications, or negative customer experience, harms your brand equity. By consistently monitoring and managing your branding, you reduce the risk of losing face with your devoted audience.
If you’d like to know more, check out our blog post explaining customer-based brand equity and the power it offers your organisation.
2. Brand reputation
A key part of brand equity is your brand’s reputation with consumers, employees, stakeholders and beyond.
The latest generations of customers and candidates place a much higher value on reputation and ethical consumerism, with many wanting nothing to do with companies that hold a negative reputation. In fact, 94% of customers say they avoid businesses after reading a bad review.
Brand management is vital to building a strong brand reputation. It helps to reduce the frequency of miscommunications and inconsistencies that impact your standing, and ensures you know how to handle a crisis or public relations challenges.
3. Brand loyalty
Loyal customers are worth their weight in gold – in some cases, quite literally. When 65% of the average company’s revenue comes from repeat business, having a devoted audience is the foundation for consistent, stable profitability.
Poor brand management can get in the way of growing a loyal fan base. By delivering consistent brand experiences and on-brand campaigns, you build trust and emotional connections with your most active buyers. This improves retention, boosts referrals, and supports your sales, helping ensure buyers stay beyond Christmas and other high-traffic occasions.
This is also key to the success of your employer branding. Employees who buy into your company’s vision and values are more likely to stick around and work to the best of their abilities.
4. Brand awareness
Does your brand exist if no one knows about it? One of the major objectives of brand management is to raise the profile of a brand, ensuring it has a clear, distinct presence everywhere your target audience is looking – from search engines to posters and billboards.
But, it’s not enough to simply be present with your audiences; you must make sure your company’s brand is presented consistently to build meaningful brand awareness. Otherwise, different people will have a different perspective of your brand depending on the channel they engage with – this confusion breeds mistrust.
So, brand management is critical to not only maintain a steady flow of content across all marketing channels, but also to monitor that this is aligned with your overall branding.
5. Brand recognition
Strong awareness leads to better brand recognition. This is when your audiences, through regular exposure to your branding, start to recall and think of your organisation without prompting. This is valuable in generating a loyal, trusting customer base, and from there converting consumers into fully-fledged brand advocates.
Brand management helps you build that familiarity by keeping your brand communications in lockstep at every touchpoint. From consistent TV spots and paid media posts that enhance ad recall, to maintaining the same tone across your social media comms, effective management of your brand presentation helps you become a recognisable name in your market.
Remember – it takes between 5 and 7 impressions for someone to remember your brand on average. Their journey with your brand must be managed with real care and attention.
6. Brand consistency
We’ve referenced this several times already, but it’s impossible to overstate the importance of brand consistency when managing your brand.
This is when your messaging, graphics, designs and overall brand identity are coherent on every platform. Your website, social media channels, advertising, brochures, emails – every piece of branding must sing from the same hymn sheet.
Effectively overseeing brand guidelines, templates and company portals, is an essential part of achieving this unbroken flow of communication.
Successful brand management makes a tangible difference in each of these critical areas – and gives you a competitive advantage over others who don’t prioritise this control.
Why is brand management important for modern companies?
As the developers of our own brand management platform with over a million unique users, we know how important this is in growing the value, understanding and equity of your brand.
But the benefits don’t stop there – here are 5 more reasons why brand management is an essential practice for your organisation.
5 benefits of effective brand management
1. A platform for market expansion
A well-managed brand creates a platform for your organisation to grow. Whether you want to expand your product and service offerings, or go through the rebranding process, having a loyal customer base formed through consistent, structured branding makes these efforts much simpler and more likely to succeed.
In addition, the stability of a well-managed brand can help make your position in the market less volatile over time. As every industry’s landscape shifts, this can provide a great layer of security.
2. Improved workflow and cost efficiency
Efficiency is the heart of better productivity and performance, and brand management software helps you achieve this both in your workflow and cost efficiency.
Having a team or platform in place to oversee the creation, sharing and usage of brand assets makes campaign execution significantly more seamless. No back-and-forth email chains, ad-hoc meetings and constant rounds of proofing – everything becomes smoother and more streamlined with brand management.
This enhanced workflow naturally leads to greater cost efficiency. With the support of a brand management team and/or solution, your marketers can find the assets they need and produce new collateral faster, all with the reassurance they are always on-brand. Campaigns get turned around quicker, and you achieve more for less.
3. Empowered and engaged employees
Modern employees seek engagement and purpose – a sense of belonging beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Strong brand management cultivates this, helping ensure that all internal communications and branding are aligned, so that your teams stay connected to the vision and values at the core of your brand identity.
Furthermore, a dedicated brand management platform encourages collaboration across departments, which is essential for a brand that works on every level – from what your customers see, to how you engage existing employees and top candidates.
In addition to increasing sales and enabling you to upscale prices, great brand management also helps you achieve more value from your customers across their lifespan.
When consumers are presented with a consistent, continuous presentation of your brand identity and enjoy positive brand experiences, they are far more likely to purchase other products and services you offer.
5. Enhanced marketing strategies
Coherent brand management helps teams coordinate and strategically plan campaigns in real-time. Without a proper approach or the right tools, your teams can quickly end up working disparately, resulting in inconsistencies and miscommunications that damage your brand.
With a central, all-encompassing brand management strategy and platform, your marketing strategies become clearer and simpler to execute. This then leads to greater brand recognition, more loyal customers, and robust brand equity.
How does brand management contribute to long-term business success?
By delivering the expertise, tools and framework for a strong brand identity, brand management sets your organisation apart in your industry, and fosters a loyal following.
Naturally, forming deep emotional connections with your customers, employees and wider stakeholders is an ideal foundation for long-term business success:
Encouraging repeat purchases
Permitting premium pricing
Sustaining profitability
Improving brand advocacy
Building employee retention
Improving resilience to market fluctuations
Bolstering general reputability
These and so much more become attainable goals with better brand management.
6 steps to succeed at brand management
Now we’ve established the value that successful brand management can bring to your organisation, how do you achieve that success? Here are 6 steps we know can make a difference in keeping your brand under control and working for your business.
1. Define your brand positioning and identity
Start with the basics – how do you want your brand to be positioned? What is its unique tone, personality and visual identity? While this is more “branding” than brand management, knowing this sets the framework for the values and characteristics you want to present to your various target audiences.
After all, if your brand manager doesn’t have a firm grasp on what your brand represents, then how can they know if it’s being well managed?
Make sure all aspects of your branding are nailed down and documented, including:
Brand name
Logo
Graphics, designs and visual elements
Tone of voice
Mission and vision statements
Colour palettes
Typography
Brand story
2. Create effective brand guidelines
Speaking of documentation, arguably the most important document for a brand manager to keep on top of is your brand guidelines. This is your Brand Bible – the rules and parameters that ensure your brand is never misconstrued or misrepresented on any channel.
Amazingly, 15% of companies report not having brand guidelines, which is a huge oversight. Making sure you have these in place, and that they contain at least everything mentioned in the previous point, is essential to keeping your brand consistent at every touchpoint.
To succeed, they also must be accessible. With this in mind, establishing a dedicated digital brand hub – a single point for teams to locate everything they need to know about how to showcase your brand – can make managing your brand simpler and more comprehensive.
3. Focus on your corporate communications
Coordinating your corporate communications – both to your internal and external audiences – is one of the biggest responsibilities for brand management professionals.
From your marketing materials, email campaigns and customer service tools, to crisis communications at a pressing time, it pays dividends to craft templates around every style of message you generate. Not only will this speed up the time it takes to produce assets, but it also helps you stay on top of the consistency of your communications.
It’s also important to give your brand management and corporate communications teams goals to help ensure the performance of your comms never dips.
4. Bring your digital brand assets under one roof
Against the ever-growing demand for content among consumers, managing the sheer volume of assets your company produces can be extremely hard. Especially for global brands who want to tailor their messages to local audiences, it can feel practically impossible to keep track.
For brand managers, the solution can be found in Digital Asset Management (or DAM) systems. These platforms allow you to store, share and oversee every digital asset your marketing teams produce in one location – a single source of truth for your organisation.
For brand managers, this means much less stress following email trails and manually sending assets to your locations worldwide. Everything becomes much more manageable with integrated DAM solutions, establishing a structure that brings order to any asset-based chaos.
5. Regularly measure the success of your brand management efforts
Brand management is a broad topic, and there’s no universal metric that indicates whether you’re doing a good job or not. But there are several brand management KPIs you can monitor that will indicate the success of your approach, and guide you to worthwhile adaptations. These include:
Plus, examining analytics about the usage of branded assets, how often your digital brand guidelines are visited, and campaign behaviours can help you prove your team’s adoption of your branding – helping make sure your global on-brand culture is maintained.
6. Implement a brand management system
A brand manager’s job is tough, requiring oversight across multiple departments to keep branding consistent and coherent on every channel. That responsibility becomes a lot less daunting with the right software on your side.
Implementing a brand management system can make building your brand and expressing it consistently far easier – empowering everyone in your team to become their own brand manager. Through this technology, you can gain the ability to:
Contain all elements at the heart of your brand in one easy-to-access destination
Store all digital assets in a single location for your teams globally
Produce on-brand assets efficiently and accurately with smart, sophisticated templates
Plan out campaign execution in a streamlined, coherent way
Monitor how closely your teams are adhering to brand consistency
Fundamentally, the right brand management solution can streamline many stressful, manual tasks associated with keeping a brand stable. It also automates some of the tedious, granular aspects of brand management, meaning teams can focus more on bigger-picture matters.
3 common brand management challenges – and how to beat them
A brand touches every aspect of an organisation; managing this is already a tough challenge. However, in our conversations with brand managers across the globe, the same hurdles tend to come up in their bid to secure the consistency and performance they’re looking for.
Here are 3 of the most prominent brand management challenges we hear about, and our advice to combat them.
1. Multichannel marketing
First, the huge volume of marketing channels modern companies are expected to be present on is a major burden. Websites, emails, videos, digital adverts, social media marketing – today’s customers expect a consistent experience at every touchpoint. Any break in this chain can damage trust, forfeit sales and hurt your reputation.
So, how do you maintain this consistent voice in all areas, while still fitting your assets to the best practices of each channel? For brand managers, intelligent templates can provide reassurance that every asset your team produces is aligned with company guidelines, reducing the time, money and stress associated with multichannel marketing.
2. Globalisation
In addition to the plethora of communication channels, global brands must contend with adapting their messaging to meet the specific culture, language and expectations of local audiences. Without careful management, the risks of going off-piste in a particular location can harm your reputation – like when Ford informed customers in Belgium that every car has a “high-quality corpse”.
Here, brand managers should look to DAM systems to reduce the risk of these cultural blunders. Having a platform that allows you to store imagery, videos and more for a certain audience, and put in fail-safes to stop these from being used inappropriately, DAM technology simplifies how you manage your messages to every target market.
3. Rebranding
A complete company rebrand can be a minefield to navigate, even if pursued for the right reasons. Most people are naturally resistant to change, so this kind of upheaval must be managed expertly to prevent a costly failure – just look at Gap’s experience to see what can go wrong.
Reaffirm and settle on your company’s vision, mission and values
Audit existing brand assets
Secure buy-in from key stakeholders
Assign a team to oversee the rebrand
Update your brand guidelines
Communicate the change with your customers
Plan an effective launch campaign
What should you look for in a brand management platform?
Looking to invest in brand management software, but you’re not sure what the right system looks like for you? Here are 14 key questions to ask a potential vendor:
Does your platform allow me to organise, store and manage all types of brand assets?
Can the platform centralise our brand guidelines and other brand-related documents?
Does it allow our teams to work collaboratively?
Is the user interface intuitive and easy to navigate for team members?
Will it speed up the time it takes to locate branded collateral or create assets?
Can you customise templates for specific audiences while maintaining consistency?
Does it include Digital Asset Management capabilities?
Will it reduce our dependence on designers and external agencies?
Does it back up all assets and information contained in case something goes wrong?
Can the platform scale and adapt to evolving brand management needs?
Are there built-in analytics and reporting features to track its performance?
Can you prove that it will deliver a meaningful return on investment?
Can your platform integrate with various software our teams currently use?
Does it prioritise data security with features like role-based access controls and encryption?
Brand management is a massive priority in every organisation, so it’s important to ensure the software you select fulfils your expectations and helps make life easier, not harder.
5 companies harnessing the power of brand management software
Unilever faced inefficiencies in brand asset management, lacking centralised coordination. This led to redundant efforts by local teams, creating assets from scratch and relying on external agencies.
With a brand management solution, Unilever gained greater oversight over their brand communications. By enabling custom workflows and approvals, fostering better collaboration, and reducing reliance on external agencies, they enhanced brand consistency while cutting costs.
Helly Hansen revolutionised their brand management with a seamless global solution, integrating online brand guidelines, Digital Asset Management (DAM), and templates.
This unified approach maintained brand consistency across markets and stakeholders, vital for a brand with extensive distribution such as theirs.
Faced with maintaining a uniform brand identity across 65 regions with disparate marketing teams, IBM brought management of their employer branding under one all-encompassing platform.
With this central location to oversee asset standards and design templates, IBM now enforces consistent branding that has benefited their recruitment efforts.
Vodafone achieved greater brand clarity, enhanced consistency in employer communications, and reduced time-consuming approvals by implementing brand management software.
Transitioning from a “telco to techno” brand, Vodafone is empowered by this technology to explore digital transformation opportunities for talent attraction and skills development.
BMW NE employed a brand management solution to automate and centralise their branding, enhancing campaign execution for local dealers with efficient communication and coordination.
With this tool, stakeholders can access and adapt marketing collateral with complete consistency, tailoring local materials in line with BMW’s core brand strategies.
How will AI steer the future of brand management?
The ongoing evolution of AI is influencing every industry; brand management is no exception. While this is still in its infancy, we’re already seeing how AI can further streamline and simplify brand management for teams worldwide – here are just a few examples:
Customer service automation
As AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants grow more sophisticated, they will be able to provide 24/7 customer support, answer questions and resolve issues, all while communicating in your brand’s unique tone of voice.
Automatic asset production
The growing sophistication of prompt engineering and AI-driven image generation will soon enable marketers to generate high-quality, on-brand assets at the press of a button. This will reduce companies’ reliance on external agencies, allowing them to produce at pace in-house.
Instant asset identification
Within a Digital Asset Management solution, “contextual search” is a developing trend that will empower teams to locate the exact assets they require from an extensive library just by inputting a relevant prompt.
Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis
AI tools can monitor online mentions, reviews, and social media conversations about your brand in real-time. This allows companies to manage their reputation and respond promptly to emerging issues or crises with greater immediacy.
At Papirfly, we’re constantly experimenting with AI to discover how we can unlock further efficiencies for our clients. If you’d like to know more, explore our AI solutions for brand management.
Empower your people with one brand management platform
We hope that this ultimate guide to brand management has shown you the importance of directing your brand at every touchpoint, and provided some helpful tips for approaching this vital task in the future.
At Papirfly, we are helping over 600 companies worldwide build an on-brand culture, create unlimited enterprise assets, and activate their brand everywhere with absolute control and consistency.
POINT: Control every aspect of your brand and deliver unbreakable brand guidelines
In the fierce battle to recruit and retain the best talent available, a company’s reputation means more than ever. With the latest generations of candidates becoming increasingly selective about the employers they work for, it’s imperative that today’s organisations pay close attention to the strength of their employer brand.
Without positive employer branding, hiring and retaining talent becomes a real challenge – and very costly. To put yourself at the front of the queue for top prospects and establish yourself as a great place to work, a solid employer brand is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.
With decades of experience helping global organisations maximise the potential of their employer brand, we know its value and the huge benefits it can unlock. After reading this complete guide, you will as well.
Learn what employer branding is and what it includes
Discover the advantages of a strong employer brand
Explore the steps to building better employer branding
See what the top employer brands are doing to attract recruits
Want to identify, engage and secure the right talent for your organisation? Then let’s get started…
What is employer branding?
Employer branding is how you shape and promote your company’s reputation as an employer. It’s the assets, processes and values designed to attract top potential candidates, retain high-performing employees, and create an inclusive, productive work environment.
Fundamentally, a strong employer brand encourages job seekers to explore your openings and makes your existing employees feel like part of a united entity. Conversely, a weak employer brand damages your ability to attract top talent and keep employees around long-term.
What does employer branding include?
Employer branding is more than your career site or your Glassdoor profile. It’s a multi-layered approach across numerous channels:
Essentially, your employer branding covers anywhere a potential candidate or current employee would engage with your organisation. So this must all be carefully considered and interconnected under one strategy to reap the best possible results (more on this later).
What is your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)?
One of the most important aspects of any employer brand is the Employer Value Proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the core document outlining the benefits, values and reasons why a prospective recruit should join your company. It’s the shining beacon of your talent acquisition efforts.
While the contents of your EVP will be unique to your organisation, these often contain:
Company mission, vision and core values
Compensation, benefits and perks
Work-life balance initiatives and details
Flexible or remote work opportunities
Training and career development prospects
Social responsibility and charity initiatives
Company social events and activities
Employer recognition efforts
Simply put, anything you believe would entice candidates and encourage your team members to stick around should be featured in your EVP. If it doesn’t include these key elements or is failing to connect with recruits, then maybe it’s time to consider an EVP refresh?
What is company culture?
Your company culture is the “personality” and identity of your organisation. It encapsulates the various values, activities, communications and more that shape how your employees engage with their work and each other – ranging from internal newsletters, training and career development, to company outings and social events.
Typically, a good, diverse and inclusive company culture improves productivity, wellbeing and talent retention. On the other hand, a poor company culture can negatively impact your team’s performance and encourage high turnover.
What are employee ambassadors?
Employee ambassadors are employees who actively promote the advantages of working for your organisation, whether that’s on social media, review websites or simply word of mouth. They are your biggest advocates in appealing to the competitive talent pool.
Ideally, you want every member of your team to be an employee ambassador, but this is often unrealistic, especially in large, global organisations. So, it’s a good strategy to introduce perks and benefits for employees to actively showcase your company’s brand in a positive light, giving them an incentive to organically share their experience with others.
How does employer branding differ from consumer branding?
Your employer brand focuses on attracting and retaining talent in the same way your consumer brand is designed to connect with your customers and generate sales.
However, while they appeal to distinct audiences, they can often influence each other. For instance, a brand that presents a welcoming and inclusive company culture will often reflect well on today’s more socially aware consumers, who want to feel good about the brands they buy from.
Why is employer branding important?
As noted earlier, your employer brand is essentially your employer reputation. A great reputation puts you in an advantageous position to attract and retain top talent. A poor reputation means you face an uphill battle in the intensifying battle for the best candidates.
With 9 out of 10 employers struggling to fill jobs in the current landscape, the importance of a fleshed-out, compelling employer brand is greater than ever. But its benefits extend beyond your recruitment strategy.
What are the benefits of a strong employer brand?
Improves your attractiveness to potential recruits
First and foremost, a solid employer brand helps you stand out to job hunters. The more you can say, share and promote the benefits of working for your organisation, the more likely you will appeal to the job market ahead of your competitors. When nearly 85% of candidates consider a company’s reputation before applying, this is an area you cannot afford to ignore.
It’s not only active job seekers that check out your employer brand. Approximately 82% of employees say they would switch jobs for a company with an excellent reputation. So, it not only raises your attractiveness to available talent, but also catches the eye of high performers already working in your industry.
Reduces your recruitment costs
You likely know how costly the recruitment process can be. Research by CIPD has found that the average cost of filling a vacancy is around €7,000 (£6,100). For managerial roles, this grows closer to €22,000 (£19,000).
Good employer branding can trim these costs in a big way, as you may be able to avoid employing hefty advertising campaigns or hiring recruitment agencies. Candidates who consider your brand attractive are more likely to apply of their own accord when opportunities become available.
Furthermore, if they have a better understanding of your brand’s culture, perks and values, those who don’t align with these will deselect themselves faster. This means you don’t waste time pursuing ill-fitting recruits, further benefiting your bottom line.
Increases your employee retention rates
Of course, the best way to minimise your recruitment costs is to keep your top-performing employees on board. Strong employer branding supports this by fostering a sense of belonging among your workforce, aligning people around shared values and business goals.
Research shows that better employer branding can reduce staff turnover by as much as 28% – resulting in a more experienced, stable work environment and less stress on recruiting and training new arrivals. So, by building an employer brand that addresses the reasons why people leave jobs, you can set your company up for a solid future.
Fostering a sense of belonging and pride naturally inspires employees to work harder because they believe in the values their company stands for. In fact, it’s estimated that employees connected to their organisation’s mission and values are 67% more engaged.
This greater engagement inspires greater productivity. If your employees feel part of a rewarding, comfortable and inclusive culture, they will likely feel motivated to do their best day in and day out.
Creates a more positive company culture
Have you heard of quiet quitting? It’s a growing trend in companies worldwide where employees focus on doing the bare minimum at work, with no ambition to evolve or pursue further opportunities. This often develops from a negative company culture, something a good employer brand helps address.
Better employer brand management can help reinforce the benefits and opportunities for progression within your organisation. This in turn can inspire reductions in stress and burnout, and positively impact employee health and wellbeing.
Encourages better company reviews on third-party sites
Did you know that 86% of job seekers look at company reviews and ratings to decide where to apply? Sites like Glassdoor, The Job Crowd and Work Advisor hold a lot of sway over your company’s appeal to recruits – too many negative reviews can cause real damage.
A strong employer brand can help counteract this threat by encouraging employees to become advocates and ambassadors. With clearly defined values and a more appealing culture, your team will be more likely to leave positive reviews, which then grows your reputation among candidates.
How can you measure the strength of your employer brand?
So now you understand the value of a strong employer brand, it might be time to assess how yours is performing.
While there is no all-encompassing “employer branding” metric you can track, in our experience there are several areas you can use to judge how your brand is performing, including:
Job application rate
Job acceptance rate
Time to hire
Cost-per-hire
Employee retention rate
Source of hires
Third-party reviews
8 steps to building your employer brand strategy
Your employer brand strategy is the foundation for how you will set your company apart in the battle to attract, recruit and retain talent.
Establishing and documenting a set strategy is vital to ensure your employer branding efforts are aligned, consistent and effective at every touchpoint. Based on our close relationships with employer brand teams worldwide, here are our 8 key steps to a successful strategy.
1. Conduct an audit on your existing employer brand
First, determine where you are right now:
How is your brand perceived by candidates?
What do your employees think about your company?
Do you communicate your values and objectives well?
These and further reflective questions will help you understand where your existing employer brand succeeds and where it struggles. It will also help you settle on the main identity, values and USPs you want to communicate to your teams and potential recruits.
2. Establish your preferred candidate persona
Who is your ideal candidate? What traits, skills and characteristics do they possess?
Much like you build your marketing around your target customer, you must mould your employer branding around the talent you seek, ranging from experienced industry specialists to graduates and Gen Z candidates.
This helps you tailor your messages to your prospects, focusing on the benefits, values and goals that speak to them.
3. Define your unique EVP
As the centrepiece of your employer brand, your employer value proposition should be drafted with careful consideration. Earlier we noted what your EVP might include, from pay, perks and benefits, to describing your company culture and mission statements.
On top of this, it can be beneficial to enlist the support of your marketing, communications and HR teams to help you draft this. Modern-day recruitment is closer to marketing than ever before, so their expertise can help you strike the right tone and translate your EVP across every channel it appears on.
4. Select your employer brand communication channels
Speaking of channels, next it’s important to decide where you will communicate your employer brand. It can take up to 18 interactions between a candidate and a company before an application is sent. So your employer brand strategy should cover all potential touchpoints, including:
Career site or page
Social media channels
Job and review sites
Current employee profiles
Networking events and career fairs
Email marketing
Job adverts
Interview processes
Internal newsletters
By outlining all channels and how you intend to communicate on each, you put yourself in a strong position to achieve greater employer brand governance.
5. Develop your employer brand assets
It takes more than a career page and job descriptions to activate your employer brand. There’s a myriad of ways you can showcase your unique corporate culture:
Video interviews with employees about their experiences
Company newsletters sharing your team’s achievements and milestones
A dedicated career portal promoting your values and brand identity
Day-in-the-life videos or blog posts presenting your culture
Slideshows expressing the advantages of joining your team
This is only scratching the surface. The possibilities to promote your employer brand are practically endless, but it’s critical you stay brand-consistent across every channel. Inconsistent presentation is a quick way to lose the buy-in of a top prospect.
Don’t have the time or resources to give your employer brand the attention it needs? Find out how you can create infinite on-brand assets faster with our Produce product.
Social media and employer branding
Social media is an especially valuable tool in your employer branding arsenal. With a majority of candidates using these channels to research potential employers, you should harness social media to highlight your employee stories, company events, charity initiatives and more to resonate with your ideal recruits.
And don’t restrict this to your company’s LinkedIn page. If your team members are active on social media, provide them with marketing materials to share on their own channels. After all, modern candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than the company itself to understand what it’s like to work there.
6. Cultivate your onboarding process
You only have one chance to make a good first impression; this is just as true for an employer as it is for a candidate. A structured, well-organised onboarding process can make a meaningful difference to a recruit’s initial experience in your company, and lay the groundwork for a long-term career.
Remember, 77% of new hires satisfied with their onboarding process say they could envision a long career at their organisation, compared to just 29% who didn’t enjoy this process. So from how you handle interviews to developing introductory guides, training packages and other resources, mapping out your full employee experience can be a huge advantage.
7. Create an employee advocacy program
Your employees are among your best assets to promote and reinforce the benefits of your organisation. Setting up an employee advocacy program helps you formalise the ways you encourage your team to share materials in their social circles, with incentives including:
Unique training and career progression opportunities
Public recognition
Tangible gifts and rewards
Exclusive content and information
8. Be authentic
Finally, for your employer brand to achieve lasting success, you must practise what you preach. It’s no good making promises on your EVP that you cannot deliver on, or presenting a rose-tinted vision of your company culture. In a landscape where employees feel more empowered to share their thoughts than ever, this is a recipe for disaster.
Therefore, before you rubber stamp your employer brand strategy, reflect on everything you’ve highlighted and question whether it’s attainable. Authenticity is essential.
6 organisations nailing their employer branding
As we’ve outlined above, employer branding is more than a fancy career site. Here are 6 brands who follow this mindset and are masters at employer brand storytelling.
This innovative series of videos, ads and other materials promotes the various roles contributing to Hilton’s high-quality hospitality. This has worked to both inspire potential candidates of the opportunities available, and showcase the skills of their existing employees.
2. Starbucks
As the world’s most recognisable coffeehouse, Starbucks employs close to 400,000 people globally. With this scale of operations, they firmly focus on employer branding, largely by harnessing social media to showcase employee experiences and success stories.
From a jobs playlist on their YouTube channel, to its celebrated College Achievement Plan, Starbucks is very effective at attracting younger generations of job seekers.
3. L’Oreal
L’Oreal is consistently rated one of the best places to work worldwide, and a large part of that is their commitment to refining and evolving their employer branding over time.
In recent years, they have adapted their EVP to raise awareness of L’Oreal as a tech-driven company as much as a beauty company. This, combined with their promise of delivering a thrilling experience and culture of excellence, helps set them apart as the thought leaders in their industry, and an attractive place to work.
4. Netflix
Netflix’s employer brand is well-known for its emphasis on creative freedom, responsibility and innovation. It promotes a company culture centred on autonomy and creativity, where employees are empowered to pursue bold ideas.
This vision and identity are coupled with tangible compensation and benefits packages, and a strong focus on diversity and inclusion. That is highlighted in Netflix’s detailed and engaging career site, making it easy for potential candidates to understand their culture.
5. Zappos
Shoe and clothing retailer Zappos focuses on employee happiness and wellbeing in their employer branding, as they understand that a happy workforce inspires great customer service.
Plus, they employ an unconventional yet strategic onboarding process: every employee hired, no matter the role, undertakes 4 weeks of training followed by 2 weeks as a customer service rep. Then, they are offered full pay for this training and $2k to leave if they wish. This aims to weed out people who are only there for the money, to build a more committed team.
6. Unilever
From its impactful career site, to its aspirational business strategy with sustainability at its heart. Unilever has a well-established global employer brand that instantly expresses its diverse opportunities and culture, with many testimonials from its existing workforce.
Furthermore, by utilising Papirfly’s brand management platform, Unilever has become incredibly adept at communicating its employer brand to its many local audiences. With this platform in place, Unilever tailors its global identity to each location, resulting in more personalised messages for its employees and potential candidates.
Adapting your global employer brand for local recruits
Today’s global businesses face a significant challenge in conveying their brand across diverse cultures and languages, both for employees and potential hires. These nuances and preferences must be considered to avoid alienating individuals and resonating with local audiences.
While maintaining consistent core values across locations is crucial, adapting these messages to emphasise the values most relevant to specific audiences achieves much better feedback. So, it’s worthwhile to invest the time to research and tailor content for specific candidates.
How can you achieve this?
Create specific candidate personas for each location you’re based in
Encourage your local teams to contribute to your employer branding and promote it on their profiles
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolves with each passing year, its influence on employer branding and recruitment strategies is also growing. Here are just some of the ways AI is already making a difference for employer brand specialists:
More personalised candidate experiences
Through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants, modern candidates can now receive more immediate answers they have about a prospective employer. This leads to more personalised and responsive experiences, making the recruitment process more positive for candidates and simpler for employers.
Streamline the creation of job descriptions and materials
Training AI prompt engineering tools on your EVP and other employer brand materials can greatly speed up the generation of assets, both for your internal teams and for job seekers. In just a matter of clicks, you can generate the copy, imagery and video for a suite of recruitment ads and employee guidelines, all aligned with your values and vision.
Analysing employee and candidate behaviour
The efficiency of AI means it can analyse vast amounts of recruitment-related data in seconds, from employee engagement levels and retention rates, to candidate behaviour across the onboarding process. This can provide powerful insights on where to adapt your employer branding based on the challenges you are experiencing.
Although the use of AI in employer branding is still in its infancy, the rate at which this technology is developing means that these possibilities – and many more – are emerging to streamline and empower your recruitment efforts.
Create and communicate a compelling employer brand with Papirfly
We hope you’ve enjoyed this complete guide to employer branding, and feel ready to use these insights to enhance the way you attract and retain top talent in the future.
One of the biggest challenges facing employer brand professionals is maintaining a consistent and constant stream of assets, while dealing with ever-tightening budgets. At Papirfly, we are making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to become an employer of choice – all from one all-encompassing brand management platform.
Point: Unite everyone on the values, visuals and voices behind your employer brand
Place: Store, share and access a complete library of your employer branding materials in our globally renowned DAM system
Produce: Generate on-brand, studio-quality assets at unrivalled speed and scale with intelligent design templates
Plan: Simplify campaign execution of all talent acquisition activities with one universal planner
Prove: Measure and refine your employer brand strategy with enterprise-grade reporting and analytics
What goes into a SaaS procurement journey for marketing, branding or communications teams?
Justin Diver
7minutes read
Implementing new ‘Software as a service’ (SaaS) solutions and processes into a business is an exciting prospect – particularly at a time with ever-evolving developments in innovative AI software. And although the time from enquiry to go-live can sometimes be lengthy, the outcome is, more often than not, worth it.
Many SaaS products can add incredible value to your business and marketing functions. Whilst most companies you interact with will work hard to get the process moving as quickly as possible, it’s important to understand what lies ahead so you can manage your team’s expectations – as well as your own.
It’s important you understand each stage of onboarding, the benefits these offer and the support you will receive. This plays a vital role in establishing your own timelines and internally organising when you can hit that green button.
Here we explore some of the documentation you may come up against and break it down so you know what’s needed of you. Many of the following processes may happen concurrently, others may be dependent on another part of the process.
Identifying your brand champion and stakeholder team
Successfully implementing a new SaaS solution requires strong internal advocate to spearhead the project. In addition, a broader team of individuals from across the business that perform the crucial role of ensuring the smoothest possible process to implementing the technology that can make a significant business impact. This set of people are known as your brand champion and stakeholder team.
Your brand champions
Typically the person who is driving the project will be your brand champion. They will have the strongest understanding of the software, its purpose and how it’s set to drive change within your business.
Your brand champion will act as a guide on your SaaS journey, and be the main point of contact for both parties, your company and the vendor. While they may not directly be responsible for signing paperwork – as that’s someone in the wider stakeholder team – they will coordinate what they need from various departments.
If capacity allows, we recommend assigning two brand champions, just to ensure there is more than one person completely up-to-speed – and to cover any holidays or absences should the process take several months, which can sometimes be the case.
Your stakeholder team
The stakeholders are the wider team of people who will also be involved in all of the following steps – usually across various departments including procurement, finance and IT. You may not yet know who these people of which your champion or teams will comprise.
Next steps in the procurement journey
What follows are key steps and anticipated timeframes for you to be able to set expectations for yourself, the key roles mentioned above, and the teams that will eventually be benefiting from the investment of your new SaaS solution.
Signing of a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
This is an optional but highly recommended step for your brand and, if required, will happen early on in the process. It’s at this stage a vendor can give you peace of mind that all discussions between you are confidential. This can range from ensuring any documents, visuals or other intellectual property shared are protected, to keeping new launches and information under wraps.
Many vendors will have a standard NDA already drawn up, but will usually be more than open to using your company’s template should this make you more comfortable.
Signing of a Letter of Intent (LOI)
This can happen anytime from a verbal commitment taking place. While this document isn’t legally binding, it can give both you and the vendor written confirmation of plans to kick-off the project, and begin your onboarding journey together. It will also help the vendor put in place provisional timelines.
Again, the vendor will likely have their own template ready for you to sign, but should be open to using your company’s own if preferable.
IT and Security Assessment
An IT and Security Assessment may sometimes be referred to as a Third Party Assessment or TPA. This will likely be the most challenging stage for your brand champion and vendor.
The vendor will supply you with information about their security, resilient technology, risk and mitigation strategies to demonstrate that their processes are all legal, compliant and ethical. Your team will be responsible for providing the questions they need to answer.
It may take some time for your internal team to gather questions, and be completely satisfied with the answers. Depending on the level of detail needed, it could take longer than expected. That said, it is a crucial step for your team to understand that the vendor has your best interests before making such a big commitment.
Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
Your DPA could fall under your main contract/agreement, but not always. In isolation, this document essentially helps to ensure that your company’s data is handled properly, securely and legally. While companies will have their own template for this, and could be open to using yours, it is more than likely they will want to provide their own document for total peace of mind.
Vendor onboarding
This is a common process for any vendor or supplier, but will be an important step in your SaaS onboarding journey. Without payment, there’s no service supplied. Ensuring the vendor is accurately set up as a supplier on your purchasing and finance systems will mean you’re ready to go once the rest of the stages are complete.
Your finance and procurement departments will be able to advise you of which information they need, but it is likely to include:
Company registration number
VAT number
Banking details
Registered addresses (which may need various proofs such as a letter from our bank)
Other countries may have additional procurement forms that need submitting such as a W9 form in the USA
Main Agreement or Contract
This is the core document that governs your agreement with the vendor and outlines the nature of your professional relationship moving forward. It may include SLA information, product and pricing information or any of the documentation we have discussed, but it is likely that they will be handled separately in more detail.
As your contract is the cornerstone of the SaaS implementation, it is likely to need many rounds of review. There will be questions from both sides and answers that need establishing before the final Ts are crossed and Is are dotted.
This is the lengthiest part of your SaaS journey simply because it includes the most detail, and it is a legally binding document, which means there is more at stake for each party. This will be what sets all expectations and delivery outcomes. While vendor or client template is likely to be acceptable, it will be a close collaborative process which will see a unique document formed.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Although this information is often embedded into the core agreement, you are within your right to ask for a more comprehensive and specific SLA document (sometimes requested as an Annex or Schedule to the Agreement).
Product and Pricing Information
You may also request more detail on product, onboarding and pricing outside of the core agreement. This usually includes a Sales Order Form and/or a Statement of Work. It is worth noting that no matter how far you are down the road, vendors are unlikely to budge on changing budgets and deliverables if details have already been agreed upon.
Purchase Order
A straightforward document that follows the core agreement being signed. This will need to be issued by your finance team once your internal teams are all happy to proceed.
The right SaaS software can change everything — so prepare for anything
The stages outlined in this article can all be straightforward, with the right support from your vendor. You may get assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager or Account Manager who will make each action clear for you.
For brand management platform excellence, we pride ourselves on delivering a thorough, straightforward onboarding process for our clients as part of the product and service Papirfly provides. As a global leader in all-in-one brand management solutions, our SaaS platform empowers teams to activate every element of a brand’s identity across the globe – so you can expect to experience first-hand the stages above, with each person and stage involved treated as equally important as the next.
Apple. Google. Starbucks. The world’s most famous brands don’t achieve this status by accident – they are masters of brand consistency.
Brand consistency is the foundation from which customers recognise, understand and trust your brand. From your visual identity and colour palette, to your tone of voice – keeping every aspect of your identity unified is critical for long-term success.
As developers of solutions that empower hundreds of global organisations to stay consistent, we’re experts in true brand consistency and how to achieve it.
In this ultimate guide, you’ll discover exactly why consistency is so important, and what you can do to maintain it across every marketing touchpoint:
See statistics that demonstrate the value of consistency
Learn what tools and techniques are crucial to brand consistency
Discover brands that have their identities locked down
Find out how to overcome common brand consistency challenges
Want to build a brand that resonates with customers wherever they see it? Then let’s get started…
What is brand consistency?
Brand consistency is when you present a unified, harmonious brand voice across all marketing materials. Websites, emails, social media platforms, brochures, posters – everything your potential customers see carries your unique identity.
Think of it as the glue that holds your brand messaging together, from a huge billboard in a busy city, all the way down to a single TikTok. Maintaining a consistent style across all your marketing campaigns and channels helps familiarise your target audience with who you are, what you stand for, and how you can help them.
4 essential elements of brand consistency
The most successful brands ensure that every strand of their marketing is woven with their distinct personality. That means every key element must be aligned…
Visual identity
McDonalds’ golden arches. The Starbucks Siren. The four fundamental colours on every Google product. Consistent visual elements are crucial if you want people to recognise your brand, as it’s often the first thing prospective customers will connect with.
From your logo and colour scheme, to the brand images, typography and design elements you utilise. These all communicate your brand’s identity, and should never deviate across any of your assets.
Tone of voice
How you communicate with your potential customers plays a huge role in how they perceive your organisation. Do you keep things simple and jargon-free like Apple? Are you motivational and aspirational like Nike?
No matter how you talk to your target audience, your distinct tone of voice and language must be reflected in every message, from a simple Instagram caption to a multi-page brochure.
Brand messaging
The core values at the heart of your organisation should influence every brand element you create. Your brand’s promise, vision and goals transform occasional customers into full-blown advocates, so these messages must be reflected in your marketing materials.
Social media
A go-to destination for billions, brand consistency on social media is essential to establish your identity to a worldwide audience.
Over 75% of consumers use social media to decide what brands to engage with, so you want to ensure everything you share on these platforms reflects your personality – from a YouTube video to a pithy Facebook post.
Remaining consistent across these elements gradually propels brands into people’s hearts and minds – ensuring that everyone understands who your company is, wherever they encounter your messaging.
Why is brand consistency so important?
Brand consistency is a long-game strategy, and vital to ongoing success in any market.
You want customers to think of you first and foremost for whatever product you sell, service you offer, or cause you represent. And in our experience, consistency in your messaging is the path to fulfilling that ambition.
But the benefits don’t stop there……
Brand consistency differentiates your company
Your brand is your most valuable asset in setting yourself apart from your competitors. By consistently presenting this across your marketing channels, you help people understand what makes you different and why they should choose you over anyone else.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, a clear, consistent brand presence can ensure your target market sees your unique proposition no matter what platform they engage with.
Brand consistency helps audiences recognise you
Did you know that it takes up to 7 interactions with a brand for the average customer to remember it? That’s a lot of touchpoints! So, if every one of these interactions is inconsistent, your audience might not attribute that credibility to your company.
Maintaining brand consistency across all channels ensures that, as your prospects take the gradual journey of ‘learning’ your brand, they get the same impression each time. This familiarity leads to recognition, boosting your odds of repeat business.
Brand consistency builds trust with your customers
As well as recognition, brand consistency is a hallmark of trust. Modern customers expect a seamless, coherent experience with the brands they engage with. This is the crux of a strong, lasting relationship – if each customer interaction with your brand is slightly different, it makes it much harder for them to understand what you stand for.
Consistent brands create loyal customers, where both sides always know where they stand. By staying aligned on all media channels, you help your audience truly understand you.
Brand consistency supports your bottom line
Loyal customers lead to repeat purchases, which in turn raises your profitability. Research suggests that consistent brands enjoy over 20% more revenue growth when compared to brands that don’t take this as seriously.
Need more convincing? Brands that consistently tell their story also often see their brand value grow up to 20% as well. Plus, inspiring loyal, repeat customers is a more fruitful source of revenue than having to constantly reach out to new audiences.
Beyond your ROI, strong branding also breeds authority, which in turn builds brand equity. Excellent brand equity is the objective for any commercial organisation and is a good indicator of how much your target audience loves, trusts and acknowledges your brand.
This is only achievable through sustained interactions and customer experiences, and a key step on the path to brand salience. In fact, becoming a thought leader is how brands like Google, Hoover, Velcro and more entered our everyday vocabulary.
Brand consistency brings your employees together
Brand consistency benefits more than your customer experiences – it also means a lot for your employer brand. In the competition to secure the best candidates, it’s a huge advantage that potential recruits are clear about who your company is and what sets you apart from others in your industry.
Staying consistent across all your employer branding – from your online recruitment page to your onboarding materials – reassures recruits and helps build a united identity among your existing team members.
What happens if a brand lacks consistency?
Inconsistency is a silent brand killer. If you fail to maintain a uniform presence across your various channels, it can:
Erode the trust between your brand and your audience
Limit your ability to turn occasional consumers into loyal customers
Negatively impact the stature and perception of your brand
Confuse and irritate buyers, leading to poor customer experiences
Reduce your long-term profitability
Affect your ability to consistently recruit top prospects
We’ve seen first-hand how inconsistency can severely hurt people’s marketing efforts, making it much harder to grow a core of repeat customers. Learn from mistakes like Coca-Cola’s “New Coke” campaign – make sure your brand message stays aligned.
Is brand consistency only important for large corporations?
Absolutely not. While many of the world’s most renowned brands have achieved this through unwavering consistency, they all started somewhere.
No matter the size or scale of your business, or whether you appeal to a local or global audience, consistent branding helps customers understand, recognise and trust you. It’s critical to building a loyal customer base – something every startup or small business should aspire to in a world of constant change.
Creating and maintaining brand consistency
Now you understand how valuable brand consistency is to the present and future of your organisation, how do you create and maintain it? Let’s break it down piece by piece…
Brand strategy
It all starts with your brand and marketing strategy. This establishes the identity, mission and personality you will project across all your marketing channels, so it must be carefully considered. So from the outset, ask yourself:
Who are our target audiences? What are their motivations and values?
What values do we stand for?
What colour schemes, language and more will resonate with our audiences?
What marketing channels and types of content will we utilise?
As well as these fundamental questions, your strategy can establish if your company’s branding adapts to different areas of your business. Consider Tesco – it’s a well-known multinational retailer, but also branches out into banking, mobile phones, photo printing and more.
Therefore, Tesco slightly adapts its brand messaging to suit each particular audience, while retaining enough of its core identity to flow its equity across all areas. If your company has distinct services for different audiences – say a service aimed at consumers and another at businesses – you may consider a similar approach.
Brand guidelines
If strategy is the base of brand consistency, brand guidelines are the blueprint to maintain that consistency. This iscrucial for ensuring consistency across all brand elements, setting the rules for how your brand must be presented.
What colour palette do we base our designs on? What is our tone of voice? Where do we place our logo on social assets? The answers to these questions and many, many more should be found in your brand guidelines.
So, what should you include in this essential user manual?
Brand identity
Logo, including variations, spacing and sizes
Colour palette, with specific hex codes or Pantone values
Typography, with font styles, sizes and weights
Visual identity
Imagery, listing approved photos, illustrations, icons, etc.
Graphic elements, including specific patterns, textures and design elements
Layouts, breaking down parameters for different content styles
Tone of voice
Brand language, describing what terminology your brand employs
Messaging, covering communications for different channels and audiences
Brand usage
Applications, explaining variations of your brand identity on different channels or materials
Misuses, clearly showing what not to do with your brand elements
But, it isn’t enough to have brand guidelines – you need to know people are following them. Over 85% of companies have brand guidelines; only around 30% actually use them.
So, it’s important that you make your brand guidelines accessible to anyone who produces branded assets, and train your team in how to use them, whether this is part of your induction process or ongoing rediscovery sessions.
Evolving beyond guidelines, truly consistent brands create dedicated brand hubs that contain every aspect of their unique identity into one centralised, digital resource.
This is effective as it offers an interactive, comprehensive breakdown of the components, templates and more that will keep your brand aligned on every platform. With FAQs for your users and examples of pre-approved assets, brand hubs are becoming increasingly vital for end-to-end consistency.
Brand templates
Smart design templates take the essence of your guidelines and put them into action in an automatic, second-nature way.
Harnessing templates removes the pressure on designers and marketers to constantly interpret or recall your guidelines. Instead, these fixed components, colour schemes and more are laid out as required, without any risk of deviation.
This unlocks numerous benefits beyond just a more consistent brand presentation…
Brand templates make producing assets quicker and more efficient
Brand templates allow designers to be creative and consistent
Brand templates reduce decision-making time and streamline workflows
Brand templates minimise the time spent proofing and amending assets before they are published
Brand templates help create a more professional, quality brand image
Brand templates help local outlets adapt company assets for their specific audiences
Simply put, digital design templates are a must-have for unwavering consistency and agile communications – two things modern customers expect.
Recycling assets
A great tip for maintaining brand consistency and streamlining production costs is recycling assets. This is not simply posting the same asset over and over again – it means taking an asset and repurposing it for another audience, channel or time of year.
For example, say you’ve produced a two-minute explainer video on a product for your YouTube channel. How many 10-second TikToks or Reels can you make from that video? Could you take visuals and parts of the script to create pamphlets or digestible social assets?
By regularly recycling brand assets, you stretch the value of each resource and help ensure a consistent, unbroken presentation across your platforms.
Digital Asset Management
A high-quality Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is another vital tool in your bid to stay consistent. At its core, a DAM is a central repository of all approved, compliant assets, providing a single source of truth in your organisation.
How does this support brand consistency?
It gives your marketers a clear guide of what brand images and assets are suitable for use
It lets you see the latest versions of assets, so any old or outdated branding is never shared
It allows you to tag assets for specific locations, channels and applications, so these are reserved for specific uses
It lets you review and see all assets in one place, and identify any issues before they are presented to the public
A solid DAM system is a powerful ally in the battle for better brand consistency. It’s why we dedicate significant time and energy to making our Place product one of the leading DAMs globally, as detailed in the latest Forrester Wave™ Report.
How do you measure brand consistency?
While there is no set metric you can use to measure brand consistency, there are some steps you can take to track this:
Run a brand audit, reviewing the assets you created across your channels in a set timeframe. This will highlight any brand assets that have deviated from your guidelines, so you can identify what went wrong and introduce measures to fix this.
Track the usage of your approved assets and templates, as this will illustrate how regularly your marketers are using your brand consistency software and services
Monitor the views of your brand hub, which again offers a window into how often your team is reflecting on the guidelines at the heart of your branding
6 brilliant brand consistency examples to learn from
So, you now know the value of brand consistency and what can help you maintain it. Now it’s time to learn from organisations that make consistency a cornerstone of their approach…
1. Google’s clever colour palette
Today, whenever we see the careful combination of red, blue, yellow and green together, our minds immediately go to Google. This ingenious colour scheme has spread from the heading of their search engine into their wide variety of apps to bring them all under one umbrella.
This consistent branding immediately adds authority to any new product Google brings out, and remains at the heart of their near-universal recognition.
2. Nike’s seamless simplicity
Just do it. Swoosh. Four simple words, all instantly attributable to Nike. One of the world’s premier clothing and footwear companies, Nike’s consistent application of their iconic logo on their products, brand materials, packaging and more was vital to achieving this status.
This is coupled with a familiar flow of language and imagery centred on achievement, motivation and empowerment – messages that permeate every piece of content they produce.
3. Starbucks’s standout identity
Starbucks’s globally recognisable brand centres on its consistent use of its iconic Siren logo, personalised customer experiences and cosy ambience. This stability has made Starbucks the go-to name in the highly competitive coffee industry.
This is the power of consistent branding. In terms of products, Starbucks isn’t much different from any other coffee cafe. However, their immediately identifiable visuals – and the meaning they hold to customers worldwide – place them head and shoulders above the competition.
4. Apple’s universal presentation
It’s arguable Apple is the standard bearer for the benefits of brand consistency. From its sleek product design to its minimalist advertising campaigns, every aspect of Apple’s brand communications promotes simplicity, innovation and premium quality.
This universal application extends from its websites and stores through to its social media platforms and, coupled with the intuitiveness of Apple’s products, has helped the company develop its cult-like following.
5. Patagonia’s powerful messaging (H3)
The best brands are founded on beliefs and values that connect with customers on a deep, emotional level. That is the secret to Patagonia’s growth over the decades, continuously pushing its commitment to the environment and ethical behaviours.
Placing this at the core of their brand guidelines, marketing campaigns and initiatives has enabled Patagonia to build a devoted fan base and a strong reputation.
6. BMW’s roadworthy branding (H3)
As the maker of “Ultimate Driving Machines”, BMW has long held a powerful, reliable reputation for quality, dependable vehicles. This is echoed in their brand identity and visuals, blending their superior engineering with their motto of delivering sheer driving pleasure.
But, with hundreds of dealerships scattered over Europe and beyond, BMW know the need to maintain consistency from location to location. Through Papirfly’s brand management platform, BMW NE has closed the distance between HQ and their individual dealerships, keeping communications coordinated and on-brand at all times.
3 common brand consistency challenges… and how to overcome them
Total brand consistency should be the aim of any organisation. But achieving it is easier said than done. Here are three of the biggest pain points to reaching this goal, and our specialist advice on navigating them.
1. Maintaining brand consistency across different marketing channels
Social media. Emails. Digital ads. Posters. Billboards. The nuances of each marketing channel can make it easy for inconsistencies to creep into your branding.
We know from experience that establishing design templates for every channel your organisation appears on is critical to fixing this problem. Rather than put all the responsibility on your team members, this approach ensures that certain brand elements, from your logo positioning to colour choices, are as they should be – from your display ads to in-store banners.
Using intelligent, high-quality templates, you can achieve a consistent presentation at every touchpoint – and make producing these assets significantly faster and cost-effective!
2. Remaining consistent on a local and global level
For organisations that operate in multiple regions worldwide, one of their greatest brand challenges is maintaining consistency on a global scale. It’s understandable – HQ can’t be everywhere at once, so what prevents individual stores and offices from going off-piste to appeal to their audiences?
The key is to find the right balance – a foundation of brand compliance, with room to personalise assets for specific target markets. Global branding with a local touch. Brand templates can play a crucial role here, setting parameters your local teams cannot stray too far from.
A centralised DAM system is also useful. This allows you to tag images and assets for particular audiences, so they can only be employed where relevant. Consequently, you maintain a consistent presence in each location AND achieve the personal touch today’s customers demand.
3. Rebranding your organisation
After a rebrand or a significant update of your branding, there’s always a risk that old brand elements are accidentally published at a later date, confusing customers who are adjusting to the switch-up.
To prevent this, your first step is to ensure your brand guidelines and/or brand hub reflect this new identity. As the home of your branding, this must immediately be aligned with the rebrand to keep your marketers on message.
Then, harness your DAM solution to file away any assets that no longer have the correct branding, or update these under your new guidelines. This will ensure your central repository is free of any old designs, so your teams can pick from these with complete confidence.
As AI continues to evolve, its benefits to the marketing industry aren’t going unnoticed. One area it can definitely play a part is nailing down consistency – making this a more effortless, intuitive process for marketers worldwide.
Here are some of the ways it can achieve this:
Chatbots that speak your language
As chatbots and AI prompts become more sophisticated, companies will eventually be able to program these to understand and mimic their brand’s language and tone of voice when responding to customers. Eventually, this will mean users receive personalised responses, which still align with your overall brand messaging.
Faster, more accurate asset location
In your DAM systems, AI allows for faster and more accurate tagging of assets, so you can identify the right one to use in any campaign or location. Plus, as contextual searches become stronger, users can find on-brand, relevant assets for their specific needs in seconds, streamlining your production processes.
AI-generated brand assets
Taking templates to the next level, AI technology is gradually gaining the ability to produce high-quality images, videos, designs and more, while working within set brand guidelines. With this greater degree of accuracy, marketers will one day have the tools to create branded assets with total confidence and outstanding efficiency.
At Papirfly, we’re constantly experimenting with the potential of AI to improve all areas of brand management. If you want to learn more about the latest developments to our platform, check out our regularly updated release notes.
Papirfly: A platform made for consistent brands
We hope our ultimate guide to brand consistency has helped you understand its value and showed you how it can be achieved.
At Papirfly, brand consistency is one of the fundamental driving forces behind our end-to-end brand management platform. Our solutions are helping over 600 brands worldwide stay on top of their assets, so they never stray from the guidelines at the heart of their brand identity…
POINT: Empowering every person who uses your brand with one online brand portal
PLACE: Establishing a single source of truth for your on-brand assets with our globally renowned DAM
PRODUCE: Intelligent templates that allow you to create an infinite number of assets quickly and consistently
With a phenomenal 14,106 tools available for marketing leaders to ponder over, if you’re not evaluating your current Tech stack and pondering any potential next moves, your competitors will be.
In the net addition of 3,068 tools from the 2023 report, it will come as no surprise that most of those additions are AI tools – with Generative AI exploration and implementation clearly the new normal to be embraced in MarTech over the next few years.
Aside from that obvious trend, composability was also a key trait i.e. tools that integrate with different components or elements – combining or connecting in various ways to create larger, more complex systems. Of course for users, these systems must be as easy to use as possible in order for the technology not to get in the way of the people using it.
The ever-evolving MarTech landscape of the past few years means that for CMOs, brand managers, and employer brand leaders – and the array of people responsible for empowering teams across their enterprise to activate their brand identity – it’s never been more important to ease tech-stack-anxiety for marketing and branding teams in the products and services that SaaS platform leaders provide.
Brand lifecycle management in 2024
Brand lifecycle management – the art of navigating a brand through its introduction, growth, maturity, and potential decline – is expected to see a focus on adaptability and data-driven decision making in 2024. Companies will need to be agile and responsive as teams continuously monitor market trends, consumer preferences and competitive dynamics in order to be able to grow at scale – never losing sight of the core brand identity and the potential availability to build brand equity.
With the report showing the MarTech landscape exploding with innovative products (2024 seeing a 27.8% year-over-year growth in MarTech tools), there are ever-expanding possibilities for brands to leverage technology in managing their life cycles. This will involve practices like integrated risk management and a more coordinated flow of information across departments. By leveraging data and new technologies, brands can aim to extend the maturity stage of their products, while also effectively managing decline and potentially reviving declining products – end-to-end brand management in every way.
End-to-end brand management
In order to make the most out of data capture, creating a dynamic ecosystem for teams within brands to remain agile to their customer’s needs and desired experiences is a clear priority to stay ahead of competitors.
As tools must deliver the all-important consistency every brand needs to resonate with customers – year in, year out – well-integrated and future-proof Digital Asset Management (DAM) sits at the centre of a MarTech ecosystem. By seamlessly connecting with various MarTech tools, a DAM empowers teams to adapt strategies quickly, personalise content across channels, and optimise campaigns – all essential for success in the always-changing, relentlessly innovative global landscape we live in today.
DAM as a MarTech priority
There is no doubt that innovative Digital Asset Management (DAM) is becoming an evermore crucial part of activating a brand. Traditional DAMs are well represented in the report and brand management space, with many vendors focused primarily on evolving customers’ asset repositories’ abilities to hold its brand’s images, videos and wider assets – away from a world with misplaced files in local folders and outdated logos and brand assets, and toward a centralised solution to keep all teams on-brand across their entire enterprise.
Yet when considering the future of your brand, a DAM must protect a brand for years to come. This year, the Papirfly Platform was included in Forrester DAM Wave™, where our ambition goes way beyond these traditional DAMs, including the adoption of AI technologies. You can read our recent article on being named in the Forrester Wave™, or hear from our CEO, Stefan Ropers, and our CPO, Thanh Nguyen, as they describe the future of Digital Asset Management, including AI, at Papirfly:
As the MarTech report shows, one thing is for certain – brands now require the foresight to consider AI as part of ensuring unwavering brand consistency across every touchpoint, to build and sustain customer trust. From meticulously crafted global campaigns to localised activations in diverse markets, products must offer brand and marketing leaders solutions that transcend the limitations of traditional DAM systems – with AI at the forefront of innovation.
Of course, end-to-end brand management should be the goal of any DAM system, and with brand portal technology, accompanied by on-brand templating, there are a wealth of brands who have taken the step to empower teams today, and future-proof team agility. Becoming the hero in a successful brand management journey – in both corporate branding and employer branding – is more possible than ever when the right MarTech choices are made by individuals in forward-thinking enterprises.
Corporate branding and a unified voice for Rabobank
For Rabobank, a leading cooperative bank with a presence in 43 countries, growing the brand at scale to maintain a unified brand identity while empowering local teams was proving a challenge.
Empowering local teams to activate the global brand
By centralising brand guidelines – readily available to all teams, regardless of location – it is ensured that everyone from seasoned marketing veterans to enthusiastic interns, can create content that flawlessly aligns with brand identity.
With a foundation set, Rabobank’s teams were able to streamline asset production, creating over 23,000 assets across one year by unlocking on-brand templating based on brand guidelines – empowering high-quality, asset creation without relying on external agencies and fostering a sense of ownership for global and local markets across the organisation.
Gaining a bird’s-eye view of campaign execution
Agile teams also saw campaign execution improve, with approval processes helping to improve workflows, where needed – saving time and money while empowering local teams to respond swiftly to market trends. This agility ensures brand messaging remains relevant while maintaining consistency through built-in approval processes.
With cost avoidance at 20 times the platform investment – such was the ability to create and activate assets in-house that would not have been affordable if given to an agency – Rabobank witnessed a significant increase in user-generated on-brand assets. This proved to support a cultural shift of brand ownership and empowerment for employees to become brand ambassadors – something not only vital for the corporate identity, but as Rabobank and other customers testify, is vital for activating and sustaining the foundations of a strong employer brand.
Employer branding success at SAP
Traditionally, employer branding efforts are often siloed within HR or marketing departments. Yet building a strategy that empowers employees to become ambassadors across the organisation, helps build the on-brand culture that’s so important for morale, retention, and recruitment efforts.
Empowering local brand ambassadors
Global brands like SAP need to cater to diverse local audiences, while maintaining brand consistency. In SAP’s case, they used their brand management tools to empower over 2,000 employees at SAP to become content creators across various global and localised campaigns – the Papirfly Platform is leveraged by teams in 5 global regions to adapt social media content to reflect regional languages and cultural nuances.
Employer branding tools that increase talent pools
With pre-approved, on-brand assets that are social media-ready, employees can shape the content to share across their own channels – laying the foundation to create curiosity and attract the attention of high-calibre talent, way ahead of any recruitment campaigns that attempt to enchant the talent pool from scratch. All the while saving the equivalent of $100,000 in agency fees if work had been done externally.
Executing talent acquisition campaigns across 5 global regions included empowering nuances to be added for local markets to deliver exceptional candidates . With a significant engagement improvement noticed from the assets created with Papirfly, SAP were on-brand and consistent at every turn.
A future-proof brand management platform
The marketing technology world is a whirlwind of innovation. As Scott Brinker’s MarTech landscape of 2024 report suggests, when it comes to brand management and nurturing the life cycle, staying ahead by empowering teams with tools that provide the agility to be responsive based on data-driven decisions is a priority – all while growing at scale with platforms that offer composability (integrations).
Papirfly fosters brand ownership and empowers employees to become brand ambassadors. This cultural shift strengthens not only your corporate identity but also your employer brand – allowing you focus on the business area that requires the most attention, and scale at the pace that suits you.
We see the future of brand management as empowering everyone to build a brand they can belong to – as customers and employees – using MarTech that’s easy to use and can help teams do more with less.
Hear more from our leadership team at Papirfly below, or read our article about what the future holds for Papirfly customers as we look to lead the way in brand management technology.
Mastering global brand consistency while empowering local markets – key insights from Rabobank’s strategy
Papirfly
2minutes read
Papirfly’s Brand Management Specialist Justin Diver was recently joined by Roel Smit Rabobank’s ‘Product Owner of Brand Portal’ for an insightful webinar “Elevating brand reputation globally while empowering local markets’.
During the discussion Rabobank shared effective strategies and experiences, offering invaluable insights for brands looking to balance global consistency with local relevance.
Webinar highlights and key insights
1. Strategic brand management across borders
Rabobank has successfully managed to maintain its brand identity across a global workforce of 43,000 by integrating strategic brand management tools that accommodate both global oversight and local flexibility. The discussion highlighted how technology can facilitate the decentralised execution of brand strategies, ensuring that local teams have the tools and autonomy needed to adapt brand messages to their specific markets.
2. Efficient asset production and campaign execution
The webinar delved into how streamlined processes for asset production and campaign execution can significantly enhance operational efficiency. By adopting a centralised platform for brand management, Rabobank has managed to reduce time-to-market for campaigns while ensuring that all marketing efforts are consistent with the brand’s core values.
3. Measuring success through brand metrics and ROI
Tracking brand metrics and understanding the return on investment (ROI) from brand management activities are critical for justifying marketing spend and guiding strategy adjustments. Rabobank’s approach to quantifying the effectiveness of their brand management strategies offers a blueprint for other organisations aiming to measure and enhance the impact of their branding efforts.
4. Navigating challenges in brand consistency
Maintaining a unified brand identity across diverse markets presents significant challenges. Rabobank explained how they address these issues and highlighted the importance of having robust systems in place that support both global brand consistency and local market adaptation.
Linking brand management to brand equity
For organisations aiming to mirror Rabobank’s success, understanding foundational steps to building brand equity is pivotal. Our detailed guide, The 4 Key Steps to Building Brand Equity, outlines essential strategies for strengthening market presence and achieving sustainable growth, reflecting the practices discussed during the webinar.
To discover more about how Rabobank utilised Papirfly’s brand management platform to achieve global consistency and local relevance in brand management, watch the webinar in full below.
Mastering brand salience begins with brand consistency
Papirfly
5minutes read
What is brand salience?
Brand salience is the multifaceted way in which your brand is thought of or noticed when a customer makes a purchase or a decision. It is a foundational component of achieving brand equity – the culmination of consumer perceptions, loyalty, and the inherent value attributed to your brand, forged through sustained interactions and experiences.
Brand salience then refers to the degree of which you are maintaining your brand’s position with key moments of interaction. When done successfully, your brand has firmly established itself in the minds of consumers, standing out prominently in the ever-crowded marketplace.
Mastering brand salience
At the highest levels of brand salience, the ideal is to have your brand name be synonymous with the solution that customers are seeking. For example, we don’t “search the internet for information using Google”. Instead we “Google” things. We talk less and less about watching TV, and more and more about binging Netflix.
These brands are so easily recogniseable that we’ll even refer to them when in actual fact we are using their competitors. We’ll “Google” a problem using Bing, or we might refer to “watching Netflix” when we may generally mean another streaming service. Similarly, we might order Coca-Cola or “a Coke” in a restaurant, be sold a Pepsi, and continue to refer to it as a Coke.
In these examples, a particularly strong brand has entered culture to the extent that it has become a household object. These are also the brands that will be referred to in films, music and TV shows. Their presence helps artists to quickly set a scene that audiences are familiar and intimate with.
When it comes to your industry and niche, whether your brand becomes a verb or not, the opportunity for your brand or product name to be at the forefront of your target audience’s mind when considering their pain point is always up for grabs – wherever they are in their buying journey.
What creates brand salience?
There are different ways to think about brand salience. One famous model, put forward by Kevin Lane Keller in his book Strategic Brand Management, frames brand salience as ‘how aware your potential customers are of your brand’. Importantly, this should be the right type of awareness – positive emotions and associations, not scandals and bad press.
In Keller’s model, brand salience can be summed up with the question “Who are you?”. To consider how salient your brand currently is, you should consider questions like:
Is our brand easily recogniseable?
How well are our branding efforts communicating a clear and consistent brand identity?
Is our brand clearly differentiated from its competitors?
The important thing is being at the top of your customers’ minds, with the emphasis on timing crucial for successful branding. In a digital economy where time is short and attention spans are limited, your window of opportunity is small – every moment, every thought, and every association counts, at every point of contact.
Achieving brand salience
The key is to have an easily recognisable and well differentiated brand, which customers recall the moment they need to make a purchase. This means brand consistency across memorable high-quality interactions throughout your marketing channels go a long way to help.
But how do you build this understanding into your branding efforts? There are two key points to consider here: memory, and attention.
A matter of memory
Quickly, think of a brand you use or buy from regularly. The chances are that several different memories of consistently positive interactions will come up.
Everything potential customers know about your brand, everything they have in the back of their minds, and everything they associate with it comes from a string of memorable moments.
Similarly, think of someone you trust in your personal life. In the same way you will likely recall several consistent, positive moments that confirmed this was someone you could trust – selflessly making you or someone feel good and therefore forging a positive connection.
While the people who make us feel good in our lives are close to hand, your brand may be far away from customer’s minds. Having a clear and consistent marketing strategy that builds trust with your target audience over time is essential. You want to associate your brand with strong, positive emotions which will be recalled when a potential customer goes to make a purchase.
Not only will customers be reminded of your product, they will also think of the types of experience associated with your marketing campaigns – as well as values, commitments and partnerships that they know you stand by.
Building up your brand with consistent messages and visual elements that reinforce positive and aspirational states of mind, you’re much more likely to be recalled positively at the time of purchase.
Are you paying attention?
However impressive the associations you’ve built up with your brand, they count for little if they don’t come to mind when it’s time to buy.
Whether it’s in a brick and mortar store, or via a digital platform, you need to make sure your brand jumps out at your customers. Successful branding stands out, no matter what the competition is doing, how you’re feeling, or what the weather is like.
This is where the work you’ve put in to build up positive emotions and associations with your brand pays off – and is paid forward by loyal customers, with 94% of consumers claiming they would recommend a brand to others with which they are emotionally engaged.
Trust and empathy plays an important part here too. We rate brands far more on feelings and associations than on information alone. Rather than talking just about what we do, gaining people’s attention by consistently placing them – or people that could be them – at the centre of the message is key. Often speaking directly to their needs.
For example, if we were told “We help you to just do it” next to a Swoosh, the brand (which we don’t even have to name or clarify the true slogan for – great brand salience right there) may not be as motivating and inspiring to millions of people worldwide.
Past experiences of a customer’s attention being ‘grabbed’ by a brand will shape the likelihood that a customer will pick up your product over one of your competitors. As a result, you need to make sure that every customer experience is consistent with your branding intentions – building momentum and trust with each experience.
Putting brand salience into action
Achieving brand salience is a complex and ongoing process that involves various factors beyond consistent branding efforts. The important thing is to remember that the aim of your marketing is not simply to persuade customers to buy your product. It is also to build up and refresh positive memory structures, so that your brand grabs their attention when the time comes to make a decision.
Being ready for those decisive moments means adapting to the needs of your customers, wherever they are in the world – by location and digital channels. Maintaining brand consistency, while being agile in your marketing operations, can empower teams anywhere in the world to activate your brand.
The best way to maintain brand consistency is to establish clear brand guidelines that are available and enforced across your business, as well as centralising all digital assets in one place so teams know where to find those images that are crafted into amazing assets that create positive memories and grab their attention.
Empowering your people to build brand salience in a way that is intuitive and effective ultimately creates the foundation of your brand equity success.
Navigating the future of brand management with integrated DAM solutions
Papirfly
3minutes read
Papirly’s recent webinar “Beyond DAM: Shaping the Future of Brand Management Strategies,” brought together a distinguished panel of industry experts to delve into the evolving landscape of Digital Asset Management (DAM) and its pivotal role in brand management and compliance. The session featured insights from Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst at Forrester; Jane Robinson, Global Employer Branding Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG); Priya Patel, Senior Market Research Analyst at G2; Thomas Larzilliere, CEO of Keepeek; and Papirfly’s own Max Sihvonen, CoSo.
The webinar explored three main areas:
the latest technological trends in DAM,
the increasing demand for personalised and localised content across diverse channels,
the significance of efficient asset management in creating on-brand assets
A consistent theme throughout the discussion was the synergy between DAM and brand management. This highlighted the need for solutions that not only manage digital assets but also ensure brand consistency across all platforms.
Emerging trends and consumer expectations
The panel unanimously agreed that consumer expectations are driving the need for more sophisticated DAM solutions. Chuck Gahun emphasised the societal shift towards interactive engagement, necessitating brands to centralise assets to deliver immersive experiences across multiple touchpoints. This is pushing DAM solutions to evolve, incorporating features like 3D models for virtual reality and API-driven content delivery to meet the demand for personalised experiences.
Priya Patel shared insights from G2’s user reviews, noting an increased demand for DAM features that support integration with marketing and creative software, digital rights management, analytics, and workflow management. These features are crucial for brands to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace by delivering high-quality, relevant, and on-brand content swiftly.
The integral role of DAM in brand management
Jane Robinson shared BCG’s journey of implementing Papirfly to drive global brand consistency. The DAM platform has become a “one-stop shop” for BCG’s employer branding needs, allowing for the creation of personalised and customised assets that adhere to global brand guidelines while enabling local teams to add a personal touch. This balance of global consistency and local relevance has been key to BCG’s employer branding strategy.
Thomas Larzilliere discussed the evolving role of DAM in content production and brand compliance. With the proliferation of content across various platforms, maintaining brand governance has become more complex. DAM solutions are central to managing this complexity, ensuring that assets are produced correctly, efficiently, and in compliance with brand guidelines.
Key insights and future directions
The webinar showcased not only the current state and evolution of DAM but also revealed key insights pivotal for the future of brand management:
The imperative for agile content strategies: One critical takeaway was the growing need for brands to adopt agile content strategies that can quickly adapt to market changes and consumer behaviours. This agility is facilitated by platforms that go beyond traditional DAM, offering robust analytics and insights that allow brands to pivot and personalise content in real-time.
Enhanced collaboration across teams: Another revelation was the increasing importance of fostering collaboration across creative, marketing, and IT teams. Integrated DAM and brand management solutions are breaking down silos, enabling cross-functional teams to work cohesively towards common branding goals, thus accelerating content lifecycle processes from creation to distribution.
Security and compliance in Digital Asset Management: With the rise in digital content, ensuring the security and compliance of digital assets has become a forefront concern for brands. The discussion highlighted how modern DAM systems are incorporating advanced security features and compliance tools to protect brand assets and adhere to global regulatory standards.
These insights highlight the journey beyond traditional DAM, emphasising the critical need for brands to adopt holistic, secure, and adaptable brand management platforms. This will be essential for staying competitive and thriving in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
For further exploration on how these trends impact your brand strategy and how Papirfly’s brand management platform can support your brand’s growth, catch the webinar below, or learn more about our platform.
