Product, Thought Leadership

A template is not just a template – ensuring your brand can evolve over time

A template is not just a template

A “template” can cover a lot of area and be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. It can be a simple “change the name and address” ad all the way to using advanced layout engines to make multi-page documents of various sizes and pull information and images from integrated databases.

We’ve been at the forefront of evolving design templates for content creation for some of the world’s biggest brands to empower teams and scale content. Find out below the key ways in which templates keep brands agile and on-brand.

Pay now or pay later

Everything is a compromise and has trade-offs. Simple templates can be made in minutes, but more complex, bespoke templates can require over one hundred hours for a developer to create in order to implement all the logic. So when does spending 100x more time on a bespoke template make sense?

A simple template can produce simple outputs — there can be variation in content, but little more. A complex, bespoke template can handle many variations in centrally controlled messaging, languages, colours themes, brands, layout logic and sizes. Using the formula of (conservatively) five of each possible variation, a complex, bespoke template can output 5^5 variants (i.e. 3125 variants)! Even just a handful of colour variations combined with sizes can output 20-30 variations, making the numbers of hours to implement quite valuable.

By investing in and utilising complex, bespoke templates, you have the ability to update the templates as your brand evolves over time, ensuring that all of your present and future templates are consistently up to date. This feature provides an added level of simplicity and a return on investment, making it easier to maintain brand consistency and coherence across all of your materials, while giving you time back on creating simple templates for every possible variation.

Production time is also time spent

It’s the total cost that counts, and while you may be saving on template creation, that helps little if those savings result in more time required by end users (who are potentially not designers) to actually create collateral. Many simple templates can do the same job as a more flexible bespoke one, but what are the trade-off?

Imagine you create a few social media (SoMe) posts for Facebook and LinkedIn. Using simple templates for either, you can quite easily copy and paste the text, choose the same image, and crop the image to fit the size requirements defined by Facebook and LinkedIn. The post will be done in less than ten minutes, but will require the knowledge of how Facebook and LinkedIn limit posts (in terms of size, length of text, etc.). If you compare that process to a flexible, bespoke template where you can select new size (already set-up with the size requirements of the SoMe platform), verify that the text still fits, and “save as new”. This process was done in less than a minute.

While each individual task does not save that much time, everything counts in large amounts. With an organisation that produces hundreds of SoMe posts per week across all locations, the savings become significant. Not only are you getting a significant return on investment, you’ll have happier, more efficient employees who will have spent less time on cumbersome processes and more time on more important work.

Papirfly goes above and beyond by offering an additional time-saving feature: continuously and proactively monitoring sizes of various social media channels. With this approach, you can rest assured that all of your social media templates are consistently up to date, ensuring that your brand is always represented accurately and consistently across all channels.

Create templates without InDesign

Everyone starts their exploration of templating systems somewhere, and it’s natural to assume that creating templates from InDesign or similar design tools is the best way to go. In some cases that would be correct – e.g. if your need is to produce a vast quantity of very different templates that need only a few edit options, and you have designers that know your brand well.

Another appropriate use case for a design tool like InDesign may be that you need to provide end users with many SoMe and/or print templates, where the content — text and imagery — varies. In this case, using one bespoke template to create all needed variants could be the quickest way to reach the goal. Creating content variants with Papirfly’s Create & Activate product (and the amazing products we can wrap around it) is literally as easy as editing a document, where an administrator (non-designer) can easily create a content variant in minutes. The best part is that the end user gets the same quality, bespoke user experience (UX) in each and every one of these templates.

If you require more control over how these templates are used (e.g. locking the background image or heading), we provide solutions for this as well. Template creators can have additional granular controls that let them lock elements down, to the extent that even which parts of the element are editable. An image element can, for instance, be set to fill its frame and the end user can only select images from a specific set of predefined backgrounds. When the template creator has approved the final version of the template, the template is immediately available for the end user.

So what about InDesign?

An InDesign document is a static design, but allowing for different amounts of text and various images requires careful thought and design, as design for dynamic content is important, but easily overlooked.

InDesign to template offers a very quick way to distribute templates throughout an organisation, but the use cases are narrow. The lack of flexibility in designing for content makes it mostly appropriate for stamping logos or addresses on locked designs.

Bespoke templates can be so much more than InDesign-based templates. It may seem like a template is a template, but the value of flexibility and easy-to-use bespoke templates offers should not be underestimated.

  • Enormous amounts of combinations of sizes, layouts, colours and brands.
  • Keep content intact when changing the above allows for quickly and efficiently pushing out variants for wider use
  • Keep content aligned when your brand is updated, as bespoke templates be changed in terms of logo, font, colours, etc. (e.g. when opening a document saved with an older version, the document is updated to the latest version of brand)

Additionally, bespoke templates can have bespoke integrations with external data sources and use them intelligently. Whereas Chili templates can only simply replace text and images, bespoke product elements can react to the content, which allows for a larger range of settings and change in size and proportions while staying effortlessly on brand.

An InDesign file can become a template in minutes, but it is restricted and not a truly usable template. To implement a template that requires a text size change that moves elements and shifts the content around of the template around, the customer either needs trained staff (~2% of our customers) or consultant to do the implementation — exactly the same as with a bespoke template. With bespoke development, all templates are packed into a single application that shares fonts, text styles, colours, etc. This means that the second template will be drastically faster to implement than then first.

Templates that empower

Design templates are more than just InDesign files; they are powerful assets that drive creative excellence, operational efficiency, and brand consistency. They provide a roadmap for crafting visually stunning marketing materials, from landing pages to social media graphics, and empower companies to deliver compelling visuals that captivate audiences. Design templates save time and effort, enabling rapid content creation and iteration, and facilitating seamless collaboration among teams. They also serve as a critical component of brand management, ensuring consistency in visual identity and messaging across various marketing channels. As companies strive to stay ahead in a competitive landscape, design templates are indispensable tools that foster creativity, streamline workflows, and elevate marketing efforts to achieve remarkable results.

Want to learn more about how Papirfly’s templating technology can save you time, ensure consistency in your marketing, and make your team more efficient? Discover how Templated Content Creation will benefit your teams today.

Brand strategy

How real-time marketing materials elevate your social media strategy

So what makes a good social media strategy? The buzzword is responsiveness – reacting quickly and positively. Social media goes at pace – news breaks on Twitter, in particular, far faster than it will reach other media, and it enables the audience to respond to what’s happening.

High-profile celebrities can get into hot water when they comment on current affairs, for example, and the rise of the citizen journalist has been very evident on this channel – which puts brands in the firing line. 

As a brand, you need to react – fast. When this happens, you need a robust social media strategy that will dictate how (and why), and where you react, so that you can develop marketing materials that resonate with your audience. This is when turning to brand management software that enables you to develop that response in real-time is not just a nice-to-have. You need effective marketing materials at your fingertips, and templates you can use to create new ones. Everyone is watching – which has its pros and cons.

Why you need responsive digital content

Say you’re a B2C brand and a customer, who is a key influencer with a significant following, gives a damning tweet about one of your products. How do you respond? Firstly, if you don’t have a good social media strategy in place, you risk being inconsistent in your language or imagery, which is a mistake for brand recognition. Secondly, if you’re too slow, or don’t respond at all, you will potentially be seen as obstructive or lacking in customer empathy. This can also make way for your competitors to step into the limelight and gain advantage if their response is more favourable. 

In this instance, you won’t have days, or even hours, to reflect and create – so you need to plan ahead for this as part of your social media strategy as this will help you save time. This strategy should contain the blueprint – everything from your goals, audience, channels and content, right up to how you will listen, engage and measure your performance.

You need to create a detailed content plan for proactive work. Our whitepaper will show you in more detail how to create a social media strategy, as we outline the difference between organically growing your social media followers and using paid-for solutions. We also demonstrate how you can use social media marketing in the B2C and B2B spaces.

As a proactive aside, creating marketing materials at speed also benefits your employer brand as it empowers your employees to share their experiences of what it’s like to work for you in real time. When you consider a brand management platform that enables fast on-brand social media images and videos as part of their messages, you come across as a responsive employer too – consider future talent working for your brand as your customers.

Listen and respond

It’s not all about the planning. You need to ensure that you’re listening to your audience as much and as often as possible. There are tools out there to help you with this, and this will enable you to be as responsive as possible, as you will pick up on the chatter around your brand – good and bad – and react accordingly. Social media is all about nurturing conversations, and a two-way approach is best for all communications.  

What else can you do to achieve success with your social media strategy? If you use Papirfly’s brand management platform, you can have all of your planned content ready to go at the click of a button, as well as the ability to create professionally designed printed and digital assets in-house. 

Speed is necessary in this digital age, as stories move fast in the media and if you want to capitalise on something relevant to your brand, you want to be able to move quickly with your content. However, also relevant is nurturing a sense of community amongst your audience, prompting the positive emotional response you seek to trigger in them, from the conversation that emerges. Creating such a following demonstrates true customer resonance – the ultimate aim when building brand loyalty and reaching the all-important goal of brand equity.

Making multichannel marketing a priority

Social media marketing remains an essential, targeted way to share the message of your brand, with multiple channels you need to consider. This can be time-consuming for marketers who are typically time-pressed, so any brand management platform that can empower your people to support your strategy is a win-win. The social media, and media landscape generally, is ever-changing and unpredictable, and if you don’t have a plan, your competition could capitalise on that. Marketing experts need to be ready for the next shift in focus.

However, what’s universal across all media is the need to foster a conversation, and by doing so, a community. Therefore it’s imperative that marketers keep an eye on the latest trends and learn the language of these media, whether that’s in video, memes, audio and so on, so that you can use the right language to connect with your audiences. 

By using Papirfly’s brand management platform you can create social media posts with ease enabling you to keep up with the conversation. Multichannel marketing materials create powerful customer journeys – and if you can build brand equity, your customers will stay with you and continue to follow and support your brand on every step of the journey.

Product, Thought Leadership

Co-op advertising model – professional services powered by unique innovative technology

What is co-op advertising and why do companies need it?

Co-op advertising is the sharing of the advertising costs between a major brand or manufacturer and its local retail channel partners. The local retailers get the benefit of additional marketing dollars to attract customers to their stores, and the manufacturers get the benefit  of local targeted marketing to increase sales. 

There have to be rules set up for this to be beneficial – manufacturers want marketing to be consistent with the brand corporate identity and marketing philosophy, and therefore will provide the marketing dollars to incentivise the retailers to market ‘on-brand’. The local retailers can target the specific demographic locally for the product and can increase their marketing power with a shared marketing dollars model. 

Usually the manufacturer will outline the potential funding available to a particular retailer and detail a set of rules to follow. The retailer will then get reimbursed at an agreed rate for marketing efforts that follow the rules. 

Local retailers may not have the resources or expertise to develop effective marketing strategies themselves, so the manufacturer will provide access to brand assets and run campaigns from which the local retailer can select and tailor to their needs. These assets will have the blessing of the brand leads, legal departments, and are accessible by retailers across the market at a fraction of the costs that the local retailers would incur doing it themselves. Manufacturers can also incentivise local retailers to target particular marketing strategies or products by increasing the reimbursement rate. 

While the co-op advertising model incentivises retailers to follow the brand rules by submitting for reimbursement of costs, this is often coupled with a compliance activity whereby the marketing activities of the retailer are checked via audits of their websites, social media sites, etc. to see what potential customers will actually experience. 

Why companies need co-op?

  • To control brand consistency across all franchises, dealers, and retailers. The financial support is a very strong motivation for individuals, dealers, and stores to follow corporate identity and advertising guidelines.
  • The budget each dealer is allocated depends on the volume of cars sold (that’s the logic used by a major car retailer). The more cars sold, the more money is reiumbursed, but only under the condition that the brand guidelines and other rules are followed.
  • Thanks to the co-op program and managed audit, there is a guarantee that the money a major car retailer’s centralised marketing function invests into each dealership is being used only for compliant and eligible marketing activities. In cases where the dealer doesn’t spend the money, the unused money is forfeit after a determined time period. 
  • To have one centralised place for money distribution, not only for tracking purposes, but also for approval process and auditing.
  • The side effect is that brand leads and regional managers can supervise and have an overview of marketing activities realised across hundreds of subjects, which allows them to see the whole market, or individual marketing efforts. The overview also helps for money redistribution.
  • The tool comes with statistics, which is useful to brand leads and managers to understand on which kind of activities the dealers are in investing the co-op funding.

How Papirfly is supporting our customers with co-op

Papirfly works with a number of customers on their co-op advertising programs and can support with SaaS platforms for complete brand management.

We can provide the DAM, where advertising assets are held, and the SaaS platform for the presentation and distribution of advertising assets to the retailer network. Retailers are able to quickly gain access to the appropriate brand assets and tailor them using our Create & Activate solution to their own local campaigns while staying on brand. Retailers can download the imagery and creatives and use that as the basis of the local campaign, and even utilise a local ad agency to finalise the ad. This removes the possibility of ads not being on brand, not aligned to the brand corporate identity and, potentially delivering messaging that is not inline with the brand.

We provide a co-op platform, seamlessly linked to the DAM (our Manage & Share solution), that enables all the retailers to access and download the co-op rules, corporate identity guidelines, and brand bulletins. These integrated solutions also provide access to the co-op and compliance platforms.

The co-op platforms that we provide can be configured to your needs, and are built to allow for easy set-up of the necessary workflows to guide the retailers through the co-op processes. 

This platform provides the process for retailers to get assets they have created to be reviewed and submit claims for co-op advertising funds, but the platform is only half the story. Just as important is the need for a team to run your co-op program who can audit that your brand rules are being followed and are compliant.

Papirfly provides the experienced professional services to run the co-op program, with a dedicated team of brand specialists that are proven and reliable.

How a major US client works with Papirfly’s co-op funding model and Professional Services team

For one of our major US automotive clients, we provide the platform that can handle the requirements and volumes of a major brand marketing in the US market. 

We also provide the Professional Services to run those co-op programs for the client:

  • We studied the brand philosophy and rules to understand the brand vision
  • We established a dedicated team that reviews creatives submitted by the retailers to ensure their brand compliance
  • We worked with the retailers to suggest improvements that can be made
  • We reviewed the co-op advertising payment claims and determined whether the claim rules have been followed 
  • We also provided a compliance review team that will actively review the marketing of the local retailer
  • We provide a dedicated support desk to answer retailers questions
  • We align with the clients business processes to ensure that the payments to retailers go through the required approval processes of the manufacturer and align with the back-end systems to create a seamless payment process

Using the co-op funding model for other use cases outside of car manufacturers

  • Any franchise business with multiple locations, besides automotive industry may also include fast-food restaurants, hotels, gyms, spas, or any other organisation with a franchise model
  • Manufacturers can support their retailers to increase in-store sales
  • Travel and tourism franchises like hotels, airlines, car rentals, etc. could partner with local attractions, restaurants, events, etc. to promote their destinations and packages
  • Education franchises like tutoring centres, language schools, online courses, etc. could partner with local schools, libraries, community centres, etc. to promote their programs and services
  • Health and wellness franchises like gyms, spas, clinics, etc. could partner with local doctors, nutritionists, therapists, etc. to promote their facilities and treatments
  • It can be used for governmental institutions/organisations to control budget handling. e.g. European Parliament and reimbursement of expenses to members for various activities, trips, food, etc.

Other possibilities and variations on how the co-op funding model can be used:

  • The managed service can be tailored to what the customer needs. The audit can vary depending on the media category etc. (e.g. a major car manufacturer offers financial support only for events, but dealer can still enter a marketing activity for CI compliance check to get support/advise on anything he is trying to publish)
  • The program can serve for CI compliance check only, but the motivation for dealers to submit creatives for review is higher when supported  with marketing money reimbursement
  • The co-op portal is linked directly to ‘My Creatives’”, which means that the brand leads can decide to only support (or offer higher reimbursement) for activities that use official templates that are available for dealers at dealer marketing portal (brand hub/point). The dealer can select a predefined template in brand hub, use it for his marketing activity and at the same time send a request for funding into the co-op portal. 

The benefits of having a Papirfly-run co-op model

  • Fixed contracted costs for the service
  • Experienced team with strong product knowledge
  • A world leading product suite focused on branding and co-op
  • Adaptability – with an experienced professional services team we can provide insights when you get challenges and adapt to meet your needs
  • Running all ads through the co-op portal guarantees how the money is spent thanks to the compliance audit there is a guarantee that the money is not being spent to promote other brands, for example
  • The audit team can control minimum advertising price and check that the advertised product is not being offered/sold below MSRP
  • The budget each retailer is allocated depends on the volume of sold products, which ensures return on investment of marketing budgets and ensuring local marketing efforts are given the time and attention they deserve
  • Through co-op, the brand leads can offer ‘certified providers’ for certain marketing activities – the logic being to have limited number of authorised agencies that work for the retailers. This is not only for better brand consistency and control, but is also often more cost efficient, e.g. cheaper cost for broadcast when you buy media in huge quantities, centralised creation of the marketing materials which can give you lower costs per ad

Reach every customer with co-op advertising

Want to know more about co-op advertising? With automotive, hospitality, retails and finance among the host of industries with companies thriving from a co-op model, take a look at how brands have successfully adopted this initiative.

Your next step is to take control of brand consistency, master the art of helping others speak directly to your target customers, and build strong relationships with those that sell your branded products and services. The potential to activate your brand in every location you serve, and achieve significant growth, is possible with Papirfly’s platform and support.

Book a demo today, and talk to us about how we can help you with your co-op advertising programme.

Brand equity

The 4 key steps to building brand equity

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for branding and marketing teams to establish and sustain customer loyalty in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive market.

Regardless of whether your business operates in a B2B or B2C environment, building a reputable and recognisable brand can be a challenge due to constantly evolving consumer behaviours.

Today’s customers are more informed and empowered than ever, with access to vast amounts of information at their fingertips. Consequently, brand equity has become a crucial factor for any brand’s survival and success.

This article will delve into brand equity, and the four essential steps for building it to achieve amazing customer loyalty.

What is brand equity?

The value added to a product by its branding, known as brand equity, is a reflection of its true worth. As a brand expands, maintaining and building brand equity becomes increasingly complicated. Although metrics such as revenue, profit, loss, and sales can quantitatively measure brand equity by resulting value, they may not capture the complete picture of how the brand is perceived over time.

Today’s customers may be loyal tomorrow, but potential customers may already be considering other brands. Ultimately, qualitative factors consisting of the overall consumer perception and the positive and/or negative effects on the actions of a brand, can affect reputation, and therefore brand equity.

Components of brand equity

Consistently crafting and promoting a unique brand story while responding positively to changes in the market can set your brand apart and inspire customer loyalty. 

Creating positive customer-based brand equity (CBBE) is crucial for sustainable growth, ensuring that customers continue to choose your brand and are willing to pay a premium for it. While it may seem complex, marketing pioneers are at hand to pave the way to brand equity success.

Keller’s brand equity model

The standout CBBE model was developed by Kevin Lane Keller. In his 1993 book, Strategic Brand Management, Keller, a Professor of marketing, introduced a framework that explains how consumers perceive and evaluate brands – the journey of the customer-brand relationship.

Keller’s brand equity model

The model provides an easy-to-understand strategic roadmap in the form of a pyramid. From base to tip, the four key steps to follow a successful brand-customer journey.

1. Brand identity – who are you?

A very good question – especially considering you’re asking customers to consider your products or services now, with a view to buy and remain loyal for the long-term.
Becoming a recognised brand is the first step – otherwise known as brand salience.

To achieve salience, your brand needs:

Distinctive branding

Standing out. Unique logos, colour schemes and other visual elements make you immediately recognisable. Be memorable,

Differentiation

What is your unique value proposition? Establish what makes your brand special – else your competitors are ready to capitalise. 

Consistency

Every employee must use your brand in the same way – across every customer touchpoint. One or more unreliable or inconsistent assets or changes in tone may cause you to lose out. 

Presence and accessibility

Brands that are easy to find, use, remember and interact with are more likely to have customers return and spend money for more experiences. Become top-of-mind by meeting your target audience where they already operate.

2. Brand meaning – what are you?

Is it clear what your product or service actually does? With a brand identity established, focusing on meaning is the next key stage. The static and video imagery you use combine with visual and sensory cues like logos, colours, packaging, sound, scent, and touch to help bring it to life.

That’s why this section of the pyramid is made up of two components – brand performance and brand imagery – that go hand in hand to shape meaning.

To establish what your product should mean to customers, your brand needs:

Emotional connection

Whilst quality, reliability and price are important, an emotional connection with customers comes through great storytelling, shareable content, and social media engagement.

Unique value proposition

What problems do you solve, and what benefits does your product or service offer? Communicate this effectively and you become relevant and memorable to your target audience.

Personality and symbolism

Brands use visual symbols and metaphors that help communicate personality and values. Being clear in your meaning helps you memorable and customers feel familiar with your brand.

3. Brand response – what about you? 

A brand is always vulnerable, even when strong and established.  In this step, you must understand and take action on customers’ judgements and feelings – their emotional connection to your brand. 

Consider judgement as the perceived quality, integrity and relevance your brand has to your customers and their needs. Informing such judgements are feelings. Responding to such judgments and building positive feelings means consistency is key. In every campaign. At every touchpoint

To positively influence customer responses to your brand, you need:

Customer-centric approaches

Respond to customer feedback and trends. More personalised experiences can result in raving fans that feel valued, appreciated and connected to your brand.

Positive emotional appeal

Pay particular attention to key feelings. Uplifting or inspiring communication creates a feeling of community and belonging your customer will want to keep revisiting. 

Clear brand meaning

Positive judgements and feelings develop when people know why you exist, and why they should consider you over time.

Commitment to integrity

Brands with a consistent, cohesive and credible message through multichannel marketing, and reinforcing a responsible and positive message, will be remembered for the right reasons.

4. Brand resonance – what about you and me?

Do your customers believe you will continue to commit to fulfilling their needs, and benefit their lives or businesses over time?

Ultimately, resonance is what you’ll achieve for your brand if you’ve successfully delivered on the previous stages in Keller’s model.

To achieve sustained resonance, your brand needs to build and prove:

Active engagement

Having the data to back up which materials are being used by your marketing teams, and which messages are getting the most audience engagement, is key to understanding whether your brand strategy is working

Behavioural loyalty

Remain focused on the customer experience. You should always try to avoid mis-steps, but no person or brand is perfect. Know when and how you’ve made the occasional slip. Rectify any damage with a quick and efficient response. 

Community spirit

Community is built and strengthened over time, and knowing whether and why your customers feel collectively loyal to you allows you to realign with them as times change.

Attitudinal attachment

Your customers love your brand or your product. Repeat purchases are reassuring. Gathered data can give peace of mind that you’re doing the right things and are not neglecting any cracks in the brand-customer relationship.

If you build it, they will come

Ultimately, the success of your brand lies in delivering a consistent message, creating emotional connections, and forging a deep, emotional bond with customers. 

Building brand equity in unpredictable times calls for MarTech tools that you can rely on – empowering businesses to respond in real time, to build deep and trusting connections with customers and employees. 

Long-lasting and profitable relationships are there for the taking – and Papirfly provides the brand management platform and guidance to unleash the brilliance of your brand and outshine the competition. 

how to build customer-based brand equity
Product, Thought Leadership

The recipe for successful data-driven decisions

The importance of analysis in the digital era

In today’s fast-paced business environment, disruptive technologies and new innovations have become the new normal. These technologies are characterised by their ability to challenge the status quo and, in some cases, significantly alter the way businesses and industries operate – creating new markets and disrupting existing ones.

These changes represent opportunities. In having the ability to quickly and accurately analyse and understand the situation, organisations can stay ahead of the curve by making decisions that capitalise on the moment and give them the competitive edge.

Everything is digital. Now what?

Digitalisation is the process of converting information into a digital format. It has been a core business strategy in companies for years. No wonder, with promises of automation of manual processes, streamlining of tedious workflows and access to real-time data-driven decision making.

In today’s digital world, there exists a reporting system for almost any business activity. The challenge, however, is no longer to convert activities into a digital format. Instead, the challenge is to access and relate data across systems. Identifying the most relevant reporting system and accurately relating its data to your goals and objectives are key activities to capitalise on the opportunity to become a data-driven company.

How can you engage in data-driven decision making?

First, you have to clearly define your goals and objectives. This helps identify the metrics you need to monitor in order to ensure you stay on target. Furthermore, this helps identify areas and specific activities that provide you with the most reliable data.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Say you want to measure how many people attended a conference. The first assumption is to count the amount of tickets sold for that event. This will give you the number, but not how many buyers actually attended the conference. The most accurate data would instead be to measure how many tickets were QR scanned at the entrance. Therefore, the system you want to access is the ticketing system at the entrance door, and the data you want to measure are the number of scanned tickets compared to tickets sold.

Thinking of data in this way means you can speed up the process of finding relevant systems and activities to be used in data-driven decision making.

What are the success factors for data-driven decision making?

Data-driven decision making is the process of using data to inform decisions and business strategy. The quality of the decision can only be as good as the quality of the data. Making sure the data quality is at the highest level becomes a key success factor for any data-driven decision:

  • Ensure data is accurate and reliable – data needs to be verified for accuracy and come from error-free records that can be used as a reliable source of information.
  • Ensure data is relevant to the decision at hand – clearly defining your goals and objectives can help you identify which decisions you need to make to stay on target, and consequently identify which focus areas, products or user activities need to be measured to provide you with the most relevant data.
  • Ensure data is timely and complete – data usually consists of many smaller pieces of data – referred to as data fields – that, only when combined together, contribute to a useful dataset. Therefore, when collecting data fields from an operational log or system, you need to make sure you collect it along with enough supporting data fields. This means that when transferred to a business intelligence tool, it does not lose its context and, consequently, its value in reports and analysis.
  • Ensure you have a complete set of data necessary to inform the decision, as well as making sure the data is up-to-date and reflects the current situation.

By ensuring that our customers have the right data to back decisions, track their output, and are able to stay on top of daily activities, we’re giving them the tools to operate with the utmost speed and time to market – and ultimately maintaining their competitive edge and continuous growth.

Papirfly’s Measure & Optimise solution can support you and your team’s performance to reach their goals and objectives. Get in touch today to find out how.

Product, Thought Leadership

Setting a product vision for growth

A solid product vision is existential for any company

When I first joined Papirfly in the summer of 2022 I joined an exceptional group of people. Through various mergers and acquisitions we had strategically assembled a dream team with a fantastic group of products. 

With the new larger company only being a few months old – yet with a heritage stretching back more than 20 years – it was the perfect time to create a long term product vision; one which would underpin our growth planning.

There are many traits and attributes that differ between successful companies but one thing that unites those who grow the fastest, offer the best customer experience, and continuously innovate is a strong product vision.

What I looked at when creating a product vision for Papirfly

With industry leading products we had a great starting point. For brand control we had Brand Portal and Brand Hub, both of which will become Point in 2023. Our enterprise-grade asset management products include award-winning DAM tools we’re combining to create Place in the next 12 months. And our best-in-class template creation products – that will come together as Produce in the year ahead – help our customers activate their brand.

Add to that the collaboration, planning, workflow, and approval functionality within the product group (all of which will be relaunched as Plan in the coming months) and the Papirfly product offering has everything marketers need to build, launch, scale, defend, and control their brands.

But we didn’t quite yet have it all within one product suite. Which is why we launched Unification; our major program to unite and unify the best of everything we’ve ever built into one cohesive product suite.

Unification, which started at the end of 2022 and will be launched to the market in May 2023 (be the first to get access), will see us bring all of our products’ strengths together for the first time. Where customers might have only used – and loved – one or two products in the past they’ll be able to access all of them in one enterprise-grade tool. One access, one look and feel, one ecosystem. Further, we’ll be able to add our latest product – deep analytics and reporting capability – to the heart of the joined-up product, launching what will be known as Prove simultaneously.

Completing the vision of having one interoperable product suite – designed to put the greatest brand management tools at our customers’ fingertips – is our integrations bench strength, Plus. A marketplace of connectors, plug-ins, and integrations, designed to extend the power, flexibility, and scalability of Papirfly.

Power. Flexibility. Scalability. These became the pillars of our new product vision. The newly unified Papirfly product suite offers customers the ability to do everything they need to in one place, move simply and swiftly between different functionalities, and access a product offering that is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

Deciding on, and believing in, Unification

It was relatively obvious from day one that Unification was the right strategy. Why? Because we had a market-leading product in each of our service areas. We didn’t have glaring gaps, we didn’t have to focus on ‘fixing’ broken products, and we didn’t have significant innovation gaps in the market either. Which meant we knew, very quickly, that our primary task was to bring everything together in one family.

The best automotive brands do this – with the commonalities of platform sharing used to build competitive advantage. The best retail groups do this – with shared services, logistics, and scale all used for leverage and to build the best customer experience. We’re doing something similar and Unification is how we’re doing it.

Creating a product vision that works

One thing worse than having no formalised product vision is – of course – having one that doesn’t work. When I, and the product team, set out to create a vision that worked for all of our products, all of our people, and – most importantly – all of our customers, we did our research thoroughly.

The resulting product vision reflects what our customers need, what our people can build (better than anyone else), and where we sit in the market. We have ensured product-market fit by collaborating with customers (including via our new Customer Council), working hand-in-hand with partners (including via our new Product & Partners group), and partnering with industry tone-setters like Forrester.

The result of this multi-pronged approach is that we have a product vision that anyone at Papirfly can communicate to anyone we work with. Indeed our internal studies show that 99% of Papirfly employees, when surveyed, know exactly where the product team is taking our product.

Aligning external with internal

We have worked hard on communications – which is one of the not-so-secret secrets of successful product development. Rather than doing it in isolation we have communicated, collaborated, and engaged with all of our stakeholders. What product builds affects what sales sells, how customer success delivers customer experience, and how marketing talks to the world. So we’ve made sure everyone has been involved in the process.

One of our key outputs has been the opening up of our product development process. Our product roadmap is public and allows all of our customers to feed in ideas, thoughts, and feedback. Our RoadmapTV channel on papirfly.com brings together all of our product assets transparently and simply – from release notes to webinars, from whitepapers to ‘how to’ videos, and from ‘meet the maker’ content to the latest news on our product suite’s evolutions. And our internal program of product knowledge, education, information, and engagement means that everyone at Papirfly knows everything about our product at Papirfly.

The result is a product vision that directly translates to product innovation and one which builds a customer experience we can be proud of – reflected in statistics like 99% of Papirfly customers saying they would happily recommend us to a friend or colleague.

We’ve only just started but our product vision is guiding us for customer-led growth. Find out more about the future of brand management by booking a demo today.

Product, Thought Leadership

The power of integrations

Integrations bridge the gaps between all marketing operations, enabling all our products to work seamlessly with applications in our customer’s ecosystem. No matter where data is coming from, integrations empowers people to complete tasks with better workflows – removing hacks and workarounds.

The aims for integrations are three fold: 

  1. Have an ‘out-of-the-box’ plugin for the most popular tools in include them in our price list e.g. Adobe or MS Office integrations.
  2. Create commercial synergies with partner integrations, such as Ciloo (print distributor) and ZetaDisplay (digital signage).
  3. Improve customer collaboration with future-proof API to all our services to help them drive their business goals. 

The long-term goal for our integrations is to make Papirfly become the dominant integration enablement player for all our customers.

What is an integration?

An integration is a way of enabling different systems to work seamlessly together. Papirfly has supported many new and existing customers by integrating different systems they need to work together to ensure a seamless workflow and powerful output.

Time to market time savings and quality improvements

How Papirfly helped a customer’s marketing department cut down on time to market and ensure quality in their online product images

Our customer’s marketing department stores all their product images in Papirfly’s DAM product and then uses the platform to distribute product images to resellers around Europe.

Seasonal photoshoots are done three to four times a year. The amount of new product images per shoot can often add up to thousands of images. 

Main areas to address:

  • Handling of thousands of images is time consuming
  • Ensuring that the data quality is high
  • Securing the data transfer
  • Sheer amount of data means that transfer and import is labour intense

The solution:

We worked with the customer to automate the import of the images, adding of metadata, and synchronising the data with the master data PIM system.

The result: 

We succeeded in addressing all the customer’s main problem areas by returning a full time employee’s effort of a couple of weeks down to one or two hours for each import. Also importantly, the quality of the import is high, and does not rely on human effort, which has the potential of introducing errors or security risks.

Gathering the requirements

The current customer presented the problem to us and, based on our experience with similar customers and our ability to recognize the sheer amount of work effort that our customer devotes to the problem to be solved, that enabled us to think up a solution that works for the customer.

Often while trying to support a customer’s needs, the solution tends to become over complicated and adds too many layers of technical elements, which we work hard to avoid. In this case we narrowed down the transfer to a basic Excel file (least common denominator).

What did the customer need?

All products due for a photoshoot are listed in the customer’s PIM system. An Excel sheet with product information and all products due for the photoshoot is distributed to the photographer. During the photoshoot the photographer names each photo with the correct unique product number.  When finished, all images are sent to Papirfly and, based on the Excel sheet, a process imports the images and corresponding metadata. This batch import process saves weeks of manual work.

Who was part of the requirement gathering process?

The team consisted of the Marketing Director at the customer (problem holder), our Integrations Product Leader, and the accounting team on the customer side (who also use the solution).

Why is gathering requirements so important in this way?

Often, an overly technical solution is not required, a usable one is. We work with our customer to find a middle ground between extremely technically layered solutions and simple solutions that meet the customer’s needs and are easily used by everyday users. The key feature of a successful integration is meeting users where they are at, with the key to success being that the end user can explain it to co-workers, train other team members, and easily use the solution without extensive technical know-how and training.

How we got a PoC up and running so quickly

What is a PoC?

A proof of concept exists to allow customers to test the solution, provide feedback, and allow Papirfly to iterate on the customer’s needs. In building a “Proof of Concept”, we manually work through the entire project step by step, to ensure that we’re thinking correctly, that each step works separately, and then we can automate the process in the final and full solution.

Why was this PoC so important?

With the majority of SaaS solutions, the idea is to “push the button and something will come out the other end”. In integration development, we are pushing the button every step to make sure each step works and cut out things that aren’t optimal, which enables us to be more cost effective. Think about it like a car journey from point A to point B, everything in between should be clean with as little “stops” along the journey, so that the destination is reached faster and more efficiently.

How will we use this for future integrations/product development?

We’ve set-up a process to enable future integrations and product development, as well as reusing building blocks from other integrations. This makes each and every integration more cost effective and stable for our customers. We’re using tried and true methodology and components.

Working with Papirfly’s integration team

This successful integration cut down on the customer’s costs, ensured a secure manner of transferring and uploading of images, made the quality of the process higher, and cut down on time to market from weeks to a couple of hours. In a web shop world where products should be accessible to customers immediately (as most online shops don’t have to wait for the customer to come into the shop), time to market is a key driver of success.

We help our customers on a daily basis with building a more effective work environment, minimising repetitive tasks, lowering time to market, and eliminating the risk of errors being created. All of these factors will help companies grow and evolve through efficiency gains and improved processes.

We’d love to meet with you to understand your integration needs, book a demo with one of our integration experts!

AI, Product, Thought Leadership

AI beyond the hype, – Adaptation and adoption

Papirfly has worked with AI for some time and has successfully implemented it in the production of illustrations for one of its customers. The company used the customer’s brand guidelines to train the AI to create new illustrations that are inline with the brand’s look and feel. This allows the customer to quickly generate new illustrations at a low cost and with a faster turnaround time compared to the traditional workflow of requesting and waiting for an illustrator. The AI-generated illustrations are still subject to manual approval.

The above intro text was written by ChatGPT. Our Product team took this text and asked ChatGPT’s AI for an executive summary on how to use AI to write marketing content as an experiment. We’ve all spent the last couple of weeks getting mind blown by the text and copy that a chat AI can write. But what now? The sharing hype is over, can this be used for anything useful?

AI: Looking deeper

At Papirfly we’ve been looking into AI use cases and the theory behind it for some time and similarly to others, we’ve been fascinated and impressed. AI has been, theoretically at least, hailed as the solution to many problems currently being dissected and analysed within “big tech”. It may seem obvious, but trying to implement the technology to fix those problems comes with its own challenges. It’s theorised that “AI can solve anything,” but we have some questions!

  • Where are the use cases that are suitable for it?
  • Why should AI solve those things?
  • Does the problem really need AI to solve it, or are we throwing technology at something because it’s “new and cool”?

Addressing the technology adoption curve

At Papirfly, we believe we’ve found a killer use case for AI (you could say we’re the “Innovators” on the technology adoption curve), but we need to help the technology find its rightful place where it can stand on its own in the product ecosystem, and support other companies in how to use the technology properly and responsibly.

What’s next on AI from Papirfly?

This short blog is Papirfly’s introduction to our longer series on AI, “AI: beyond the hype” where we’ll dig into more wide ranging topics on AI and how it might affect our customers and their customers. We want to ensure that we’re researching, analysing, and using AI in a responsible and sustainable way, and have some exciting use cases and thought leadership coming in the new year. Stay tuned!

Contributions by Natalie Wilding, Martin Pospisil, and Yngve Myklebust

Watch our on-demand webinar

ROI

The Total Economic Impact™ of Papirfly

A positive return on investment (ROI) is one of the only metrics that matters – simply put, do your gains outweigh the cost of your investment?

Concerning brand management tools, searching for online solutions that provide great value can lead to trying many ‘shiny new objects’ that address key business challenges – brand consistency, reliance on expensive agencies for assets, a bird’s-eye view of campaign activity, gatekeeping brand guidelines, to name a few.

In reality, few solutions generate a positive ROI whilst creating long-term business benefits that support advancing your brand strategy – allowing you to maintain gatekeeping control of your brand. In short, having the right information before you invest in brand management tools is pivotal.

That’s why Papirfly commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to determine the financial and business benefits our customers experienced from our brand management platform.

And the results are in.

212% ROI over three years

Combining the results of four customer representative interviews and the financial analysis of their business, a composite organisation was formed.

The study found the composite customer experienced benefits of $1.72 million over three years versus costs of $553,000 – adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1.17 million and an ROI of 212%.

Improved asset creation efficiency

Whilst external agencies can be important collaborators, Papirfly have empowered brands to reduce the requirement, and therefore cost, of regularly using external agencies when a high quantity of fast, high-quality marketing materials are needed across any location that brand operates in. Prior to adopting Papirfly, the study reports that customers’ global and regional teams primarily worked with agencies to create branded collateral – and the composite Papirfly customer saw a three year-benefit of $455,400 in reduced agency spend.

three year benefits

In addition to less reliance on external agencies, the interviews from the Forrester TEI study showed that, prior to adopting Papirfly, our customers experienced limited brand governance, a single source of truth for the brand was lacking, and brand guidelines and assets were stored in disparate systems or folders across the organisation.

Interviewees confirmed that after investing and using Papirfly, they had advanced asset production processes – to the benefit of $1.2m across three years for the composite organization – and reduced costs by enabling teams to create assets in-house. By centralising brand assets and guidelines in a single portal, content distribution was improved thanks to the centralised brand hub – to the benefit of $27,800 in three years.

Long-term on-brand benefits

Whilst an all-important ROI figure is key, it’s important to highlight some overall improvement that showed in Forrester Consulting’s findings as a result of the customer interviews:

  • Increased brand adoption granting all employees access to view assets in the centralised brand hub 
  • Improved brand consistency – interactive experience with the brand hub to more fully embrace guidelines
  • Maintained gatekeeping control – the ability to quickly and easily validate and approve any material created from our on-brand template technology
  • Enhanced content quality and improved business outcomes users across brand, marketing, talent acquisitions, and communications could increase focus on crafting relevant messaging and engaging content

Discover how Papirfly delivered significant ROI

Determining the value of your brand management platform is made easier with a study such as the Forrester Consulting TEI study. Whilst the results are from a composite organisation, the specific impact Papirfly can have on your business will be unique to you.

Download the study, and talk through the findings with one of our brand management experts.

Marketing

5 marketing focus areas when facing an economic downturn

Cutting marketing budgets can feel like an obvious decision when facing a new economic downturn. Yet companies that do go down this road often perform worse than their competitors – the brands who understand that working smarter is more beneficial than working harder with less resources.

Recently I’ve been thinking of a friend in my youth. He would only spend a fixed amount when refuelling his car. He said it was his way of navigating high prices. When prices suddenly rose enough, I remember asking him if was going to cut down on driving. “Stop driving? Never!” he said. Then, with a knowing smile, he told me he would in fact be doubling his fuel budget. After all, he was a busy young man.

I wouldn’t have said my friend was wise at the time, but he came to mind after reading many recent articles on preparing for the economic downturn. The common message from the most successful brands seems to be “Don’t stop marketing!”. Perhaps my friend with the car came to mind as one writer’s article questioned Henry Ford’s insistence that “Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping the clock to save time”. My guess is he had the same knowing smile as my friend had when he said it.

Looking up and ahead when facing a downturn

Luckily, academic research can support businesses when the immediate impulse is to stop. The data reveals that there is a real cost in doing nothing – in fact opportunities are lost when the focus is in the wrong place.

For example, in German professor Peter Steidl’s 2009 book, Neurobranding, he points out that companies that increase their advertising budgets as part of their corporate strategy in times of recession, can really pay off. In fact, some have actually increased profits by 4.3 percent – while those that cut back only increased by 0.8 percent.

A more extensive study, carried out by two professors from Harvard among others, followed 4,700 listed companies in the USA through the 2008-2009 recession. They found that 80% of the companies took a minimum of three years to return to approximately the same level as before the recession – while 9% flourished and delivered at least 10% better results than their competitors quickly after the downturn was over.

The secret, according to a Harvard Business Review article summarising the study in 2010, consisted of what the professors called “pragmatic behaviour” – strengthening the organisation’s internal efficiency, and investing significantly more than competitors in marketing and R&D. However, this is not simply about maintaining the advertising budget. Reassessing the multichannel strategy, taking a closer look at what works, and in short, adjusting to get the most bang for your buck, is what works.

Prepare for the future, today

Positive results for businesses that not only aim to survive the downturn, but also make the effort to prepare their brands for the future was evident in both studies. To save you from sifting through a pile of academic papers, I’ve narrowed down 5 key action-focused pragmatic points to consider to help your business to more than survive, but also thrive when facing the downturn:

Don’t cut advertising

Marketing and advertising are not “nice to haves” – they are a vital prerequisite to maintaining operations. Remind management that this attitude cannot change during economic downturns. If the strength of your brand cannot be maintained at every touchpoint – and even made stronger in the minds of your customers – both sales and profitability will fall.

Look closely at the technology stack

Recessions provide the opportunity for a holistic, scrutinising look at your company’s portfolio of ICT tools and software solutions. Do any have overlapping functionality? Are some expensive in relation to the value they provide. Or have competing solutions with better features emerged? As the number of advertising channels has exploded in recent years, is the company still equipped to operate effectively in the ones relevant to you business? “Work smarter, not harder” can be an important mantra to adopt, as there are modern brand management tools that can significantly improve efficiency and provide the value, available to even small marketing departments on reduced budgets. Getting these in place before austerity measures take hold in earnest is vital to survive and thrive through the challenging times ahead.

Focus on ROI analysis

Is the marketing department (and the company) equipped to make useful, traceable analyses of channel use, tactics, partners and campaigns, so that you know what promotes the brand and turnover? Two developments make this necessary. Firstly, marketing now encompasses so many parameters that few companies get far with gut feeling alone – experience must be linked with data so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. And secondly, most CEOs and CFOs have now gained great respect for the importance of data analysis in most decision-making processes. So much so, every CMO must now be able to show solid data analysis to justify their actions and decisions – that is if they want to be taken seriously by the rest of the board of directors.

Experiment, learn and try again

In many contexts, brands can go a long way by trying out a few simple moves, seeing what works and then doing more of it. Here, it is not necessarily a question of gambling with large sums. Start small. Measure the effect. Increase the effort on what is working. Following what your customers are doing, and looking for trends in target groups’ behaviour, keeps the customer at the front and centre – and your brand’s responsive attitude has a great chance of being rewarded with loyalty.

Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.

In economic downturns, it is extremely important to be able to adapt quickly – it has been proven time and time again. Have you invested in a direction that suddenly turns out not to work? Make sure you can quickly turn around and drive in a different direction. Does an unexpected opportunity align with your brand in a way no one had anticipated? Make sure you can grab the opportunity – fast.

I was catching up with my old ‘fuel-smart’ friend this past summer. It was in the middle of pump prices reaching record highs across the country. He told me that long ago he had switched to an electric car. One that automatically smart-charged when the electricity price was at its lowest. Yet toll rings, parking and other considerations meant that he tended to cycle to work on a daily basis. Still working hard to think smarter.

He gave me the same knowing grin as he gave me all those years ago. If I’ve learned anything from him, it’s that even when facing hard times, with the right attitude there can still be plenty to smile about.

This article was originally published on 25 October 2022 on kampanje.com.