The power of personalisation for brand marketing in 2024
Papirfly
8minutes read
“Personalisation – it’s not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.” – Dan Jak
No customer wants to feel like a stranger or a number. They want the brands they engage with to understand them – their needs, their pain points, their goals. They want to be seen as individuals.
That is what creating personalised content is all about. It’s about tailoring customer experiences around specific consumers. It’s about building trust through more focused, familiar interactions. And ultimately, it’s about making sure customers feel special.
Better brand personalisation should be a goal in any organisation, and thanks to the tools available today, achieving this is more attainable than ever. Yet, a recent Papirfly poll found that just 25% of respondents classed their marketing efforts as highly personalised and on-brand globally and locally.
More must be done to deliver the personalised experiences modern consumers want. Here we’ll explore the benefits and challenges of personalised brand marketing, and how you can add a personal touch to your campaigns on a global or local scale.
What is personalisation in brand marketing?
Personalisation is when you adapt your brand marketing around the information you know about your customers. Their interests, preferred products or services, shopping habits, pain points – anything that enables you to speak directly to your customers on a one-to-one level.
Personalisation isn’t a new concept. In 18th century London, customers at Lock & Co. Hatters, the world’s oldest hat shop, would simply shout “hat” outside the shop, and the staff would deliver a new hat to them, matching their size and style preferences.
But in the digital marketing age, the ability to understand customer preferences through data and analytics has never been greater. How often have you searched for a product on Google or Amazon, and suddenly seen that same product appearing in your emails, social feeds and banner ads when you next hop online?
With the right tools and ethical techniques, you can gather the data to craft messages for specific target audiences, with the potential only limited by time and resources.
Is brand personalisation only relevant for e-commerce businesses?
Absolutely not. While personalisation is rightly attached to e-commerce and the wider retail industry, this approach is relevant for any organisation looking to generate more sales and loyalty from their target markets.
5 reasons brand personalisation is so important
1. Modern customers want and expect personalised experiences
Firstly and most importantly, customers expect campaigns to be tailored around them.
87% of marketing professionals say consumers desire personalised content from their preferred brands, while 76% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from brands that deliver these personalised experiences.
While there’s always a risk of entering “creepy” territory – by and large, customers want to be presented with personalised products and offers.
2. Personalised brand marketing boosts revenue
With today’s consumers more inclined to buy from brands that personalise their campaigns, naturally this approach encourages more sales. It just makes sense – if you as a customer are presented with a bespoke offer or discount based on your interests, you’re likely going to take it (or at least consider it).
3. Personalisation improves the ROI of your marketing campaigns
Beyond revenue, personalisation can also noticeably improve the ROI of your marketing. By targeting customers with content and offers tailored to their wants and needs, you remove a lot of the speculation associated with less focused, generalised campaigns.
If you speak your customer’s language and understand their wishes, you’re more likely to secure an efficient conversion. That’s why 89% of marketers say they achieve a positive ROI when their campaigns are personalised.
4. Personalisation leads to more effective customer retargeting
Retargeting is crucial in today’s landscape to keep your message in front of your audience amidst a tidal wave of advertising and content. Personalisation and effective use of customer data enables you to customise your retargeting campaigns around your marketing segments.
This achieves better results, builds brand awareness and leads to more satisfying, familiar customer interactions.
5. Personalisation encourages stronger brand loyalty, recognition and equity
Finally, personalisation supports your brand marketing in ways that are difficult to measure, but still hold value.
For instance, more personalised, positive experiences for your customers encourage loyalty and repeat business. 78% of consumers say personalisation makes them more likely to repurchase from the same brand, and loyal customers offer much more value to your business.
This more engaging content also enhances brand recognition among your core audiences, which in turn raises your brand equity and allows you to sell your products and services for a premium value.
What challenges do brands face in implementing effective personalisation strategies?
Although personalisation in brand marketing is more attainable than ever, numerous challenges can hinder your efforts:
Capturing customer data can be difficult due to strict GDPR and protection guidelines
Becoming too familiar with your audience can put off prospective customers
Bringing individual customer data together to form distinct buyer personas can be challenging
Customer data silos in your organisation can lead to duplicate messages or prevent useful knowledge from reaching your marketing teams
Strong brand management can help you overcome these hurdles, and give your teams the power to personalise your customer journeys with speed and precision.
How to deliver personalised experiences across your customers’ journeys
If you are keen to unlock the full potential of personalisation in your marketing efforts, here are our key pieces of advice you need to consider:
Conduct market research and collect customer data
The heart of any brand personalisation strategy is solid, well-researched customer data. How can you tailor your messages if you don’t understand who you’re talking to?
Collect, analyse and scrutinise everything from demographics and past purchases, to preferences, behaviours and beyond. Carry out surveys to understand the specific wants of your target audiences better. By recognising the characteristics of your customers, your personalisation efforts become more relevant and powerful.
Segment your target audiences based on the information you gather
Once you have a bank of data, use this to segment your audience appropriately. Particularly for larger, global organisations, it’s unfeasible to meet the precise needs of every individual customer. Strong market segmentation is the next best approach.
Dividing your customers by their shared characteristics empowers you to produce personalised content and experiences that connect with a select group really well, which should encourage purchases.
Invest in tools for real-time asset creation and customisation
Agility is essential for effective personalised campaigns. With your knowledge of your target audiences, you must be prepared to capitalise on any event or opportunity in your marketing.
Internally, you must also demonstrate agility by organising teams around specific customer segments or journeys with efficient collaboration.
Identifying and investing in brand management solutions and technology is key to achieving the flexibility your personalisation efforts require. In particular, prioritise on-brand asset creation software that makes it faster and simpler for your teams to personalise your global assets, and Digital Asset Management (DAM) to give people instant access to relevant content.
Centralise your brand identity in one accessible location
Personalisation should never come at the expense of your identity – brand consistency must be at the foundation to ensure a harmonious experience for your customers.
With this in mind, it’s useful to establish a centralised brand hub that your teams worldwide can access and refer to at all times. Brand guidelines, tone of voice, colour palettes – by containing everything in one location, your professionals can comfortably personalise materials knowing they can never stray from your core identity.
Develop distinct personalisation strategies for each stage of the customer journey
It can take many steps to capture a customer, so you should aim to personalise each part of their journey.
Measure and refine your personalisation efforts
Our final tip is to keep your personalised marketing from stagnating. Conduct A/B testing on your communications, track the performance of your campaigns and encourage customer feedback to see where your personalisation efforts could be improved.
Useful metrics to measure the success of your personalised content include:
Customer satisfaction
Customer loyalty
Brand differentiation
Campaign ROI
Customer lifetime value
Perfecting personalisation both globally and locally
A personalised approach to brand marketing is especially important for global brands with numerous local outlets. With variances in languages, cultures, backgrounds, environments and beyond, a one-size-fits-all marketing approach simply cannot work.
Take Rabobank as an example. Headquartered in the Netherlands, this cooperative bank today has locations in over 20 countries across all continents. This means they must adapt content for each region to resonate with customers and promote relevant services, while keeping their global brand identity intact.
Access on-brand assets from one central DAM system, with user permissions based on an employee’s position, region or country
Streamline on-brand asset production so their teams can execute in minutes, enabling them to stay agile and customise content at scale
Improve campaign execution to capitalise on industry trends with personalised content that engages audiences in real-time
With the right platform in place, Rabobank is making personalisation achievable in every market, while simultaneously strengthening its overall brand presence.
4 brands who personalise with passion
1. Amazon
As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has constantly refined its algorithm to present personalised product recommendations to shoppers. This understanding ensures that Amazon is always pointing customers towards compelling offers, resulting in more positive experiences and an increased likelihood of conversions.
2. Coca-Cola
The famous “Share a Coke” campaign was a masterstroke in personalised marketing. Allowing people to customise bottles with whatever name they wanted, this was a campaign that could resonate in every country and culture.
It did more than personalise products, it tailored the entire customer experience and encouraged people to share their bottles on social media with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.
3. Shutterfly
Shutterfly’s approach is all about personalisation, allowing its customers to create custom gifts using their photos. To do this, a customer simply downloads the Shutterfly app, permits it to access their photos, and the app automatically identifies images with faces to place on items.
This bespoke product is then sent to the customer, encouraging them to complete the purchase.
4. Matsmart
Through a series of highly segmented, dynamic Facebook ad campaigns, Swedish food retailer Matsmart achieved an 84% increase in website revenue in just three months, as well as a 4x ROI on the campaign over six months.
This example makes Matsmart a pioneer of how serving the right content to the right person at the right time can maximise your sales potential – something many brands have adopted since.
Ready to reap the rewards of personalised brand marketing?
Personalisation is one of the most powerful ways modern marketers can connect with customers and build loyal, engaged fan bases. As customers’ expectations grow year on year, having the tools and knowledge in place to adapt your content for specific locations, generations and audience segments is key to maximise the ROI of your campaigns.
We cannot stress enough the value of branded design templates in achieving this aim. Creating personalised content can massively drain costs, time and resources when attempted manually, especially against the demands of multichannel marketing.
Make this your priority, and crafting messages that speak to your audiences directly will soon be a seamless, painless process – one with the power to make a huge impression on the success of your campaigns.
Graduate recruitment: 4 major employer branding mistakes to avoid
Papirfly
11minutes read
Mistakes are important. They help us learn, grow and improve over time. Unfortunately, many brands fall into the same bad habits in their attempts to attract, recruit and retain an evermore sophisticated wave of graduate recruits.
At the same time, today’s graduates can access and assess potential employers more closely than ever before – researching company culture, values, career development opportunities and more in a matter of clicks.
Repeating the same mistakes with your graduate brand prevents you from engaging this fresh, hungry generation and losing top talent to your competitors. To help you better tap into the graduate talent pipeline in an increasingly fierce job market, this guide will help you steer clear of common blunders.
As a company with years of experience empowering organisations worldwide to unleash their employer brand, below we outline 4 major graduate recruitment mistakes and our top solutions to avoid them.
Graduate recruitment mistake #1: Not understanding your audience
The core of a strong employer brand is knowing your audience. What are potential new hires looking for from an employer? What do they know of workplace culture? How do they like to be communicated with?
These questions will encourage very different answers, depending on the age, experience and background of whom you ask. A graduate fresh out of university or college will have different wants, ambitions and tendencies than someone who has worked for 2 or 3 decades.
So, to ensure you connect with the next generation of candidates, you must tailor your employer brand strategy to meet their expectations. And for that to succeed, you must understand what Generation Z wants from employers.
What do today’s graduates look for in an employer brand before applying?
Today’s graduates are firmly Gen Z, a generation that is estimated to make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025. They’re as digitally-driven as it gets – the first generation that doesn’t recall a time before the Internet was widely available.
As such, how Gen Z consumes content and judges an employer’s reputation is far removed from those who came before them. They are hypervisual, resilient and less entitled – and have preferences that modern organisations must prioritise in their graduate recruitment campaigns:
Gen Z candidates want transparency over salary
While Gen Z is less single-minded on salary than past generations, they still want to be paid fairly and well. 65% of Gen Z candidates say that pay transparency is one of their biggest motivators for applying for a job, so you should make this prominent in any job descriptions and adverts you share.
Gen Z candidates care about workplace diversity and inclusion
Today’s graduates prioritise a diverse, inclusive work environment more than generations before. According to research by Monster, 83% of Gen Z candidates say a company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion influences who they apply to, and 69% are more likely to apply to jobs where the employer branding reflects an “ethnically and racially diverse” workforce.
Beyond this, graduates also have strong feelings toward sustainability efforts, environmental practices and social responsibility initiatives, and want to work for companies whose values align with their own.
Gen Z candidates are tech-savvy
Gen Z has been brought up on smartphones and social media, so employers must focus on these devices and channels to reach graduates on their level. But beyond this, Gen Z also cares about the quality of technology they’ll use in their job – 70% of these employees would leave a current role for one offering better technology.
Gen Z candidates want flexibility
Work-life balance is one of the major concerns of graduate recruits. Gen Z candidates are 77% more likely to check a vacancy that mentions “flexibility” than one that doesn’t, while 72% of Gen Z employees have either left or considered leaving a job because their employer didn’t offer a flexible work policy.
Gen Z candidates want to learn and grow in a role
Finally, Gen Z is conscious about upskilling and evolution. 67% of younger recruits want to work for companies that actively teach skills to advance their careers, so promoting learning and development programs in your employer branding is a powerful incentive for today’s graduates.
The solution? Tailor your graduate recruitment strategy
Taking what we know about graduates, Gen Z and their employer preferences, you should use this to craft a distinct employer branding separate from your other campaigns.
For example, graduate recruits typically want to see diversity and inclusivity, so ensure the imagery of your campaigns makes this immediately apparent. They want career development opportunities? Dedicate a whole section to this on your recruitment website or brochures.
By tailoring your graduate brand around this audience’s priorities – adjusted according to your specific industry and company values – you are far more likely to leave a positive impression on top candidates.
Graduate recruitment mistake #2: Failing to use the right marketing channels
As mentioned earlier, Gen Z is the most tech-savvy generation to date (until Generation Alpha enters the workforce in a few years). Old-school approaches to promoting roles and your overall employer brand are becoming less and less effective – advertising in newspapers is hardly effective when 46% of graduates apply for jobs on their mobile phones.
Where you promote your employer brand is just as crucial as how you promote it, so you must consider the right channels to get your message across.
Social media is a standout example. 95% of the UK’s leading recruiters in The Times’ Top 100 Graduate Employers utilise social media in their talent attraction efforts, while over 50% of college grads use LinkedIn to research graduate job opportunities.
Videos are another powerful tool to connect with graduates. With Gen Z having grown up on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, video content stands out as a powerful way to communicate your messages in a way they actively enjoy.
But these aren’t the only ways to successfully reach modern graduates – also consider:
Creating a dedicated portal or page on your website dedicated to graduates, highlighting the perks and information that resonates with them
Attending university career fairs and campus engagement events, where your representatives can speak to interested candidates one-on-one
Developing graduate internship programs that allow them to understand your company culture and help you assess their potential
Using online job platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster and more that graduates readily turn to when seeking out opportunities
Distributing brochures and leaflets at local universities and colleges to offer something different and more personal to today’s digitally-centred recruits
Furthermore, make use of your existing employees where possible. Younger candidates are far more likely to believe the experiences of a current employee when researching an employer than the employer themself.
Clever usage of employee testimonials, interviews and videos on your recruitment feeds can help graduates truly understand your work environment, and inspire graduates to examine your opportunities more closely.
But this poses a problem – with so many social networks, forums and channels you can use to reach graduates, how do you maintain an active presence on these while staying within time and budget limitations?
Investing in a powerful employer brand platform can empower your teams to produce high-quality assets for all potential digital and physical channels remarkably quickly. With smart, predefined branded templates, your teams can produce content faster for every touchpoint, giving you greater coverage for your graduate recruitment for much less effort.
Today’s job-seeking graduates know the importance of protecting their own online presence. 70% of employers use social media to screen potential hires, so top recruits understand they must keep a clean, unproblematic image on their profiles.
Similarly, modern companies must take the same sensible approach to communicate a clear, unified and consistent image across every recruitment channel they use.
Think of your employer brand as your promise to potential recruits and existing employees. Any inconsistency or deviation in this image can quickly erode the confidence and trust of your audience. This costs you applications and sends top candidates to your competitors.
What causes breaks in brand consistency? There are multiple reasons, but some of the most common include:
Departments and locations working in silos, resulting in individuals misusing your graduate brand or making errors, which over time will cloud your brand’s identity
An overreliance on external agencies, who are not as closely tied to your employer brand, causing misinterpretations
An abundance of recruitment channels can cause inconsistencies to creep in – having one look on your website and another at a campus presentation can create a disconnect
You never want potential candidates to get the wrong impression of your mission, values and company culture, or perceive your employer brand as chaotic or disorganised. Brand consistency is key to building trust, so how do you maintain this?
A central home for your employer brand guidelines
Establishing a distinct online destination for everything that dictates your employer branding – brand guidelines, colour palettes, your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) – means everyone responsible for producing your campaigns can refer to this whenever necessary.
Developing a true brand hub keeps your content consistent and aligned according to your core identity.
A single source of truth for your digital assets
Next, investing in Digital Asset Management (DAM) can give your teams worldwide access to a dedicated library of approved, on-brand assets, imagery, videos and beyond.
Again, this provides a single source of truth for your graduate recruitment collateral, so your campaigns never deviate from your brand message.
A collection of locked-down design templates
Using templates does more than accelerate asset creation; it also ensures certain elements such as your logo, design elements and imagery are formatted correctly on every new asset produced.
Having these as part of one comprehensive brand management solution boosts your efforts to attract top talent across the globe.
Graduate recruitment mistake #4: Having a poor onboarding process
Imagine this – you’ve successfully attracted a hungry, motivated graduate to your team, and they passed their interview with flying colours. The hard work ends there, right?
Wrong. The recruitment process may be over, but your graduate brand must still work hard to nurture a sense of belonging within your latest recruit.
Especially because Gen Z is a generation of job-hoppers. 83% of Gen Z employees describe themselves this way, while over 22% of workers aged 20 and older spent less than a year at their jobs in 2022.
Retaining top talent for the long term is a persistent challenge, and starts with your onboarding process. This sets the tone for new arrivals, and a negative experience can instantly have them eyeing the exit door.
Poor onboarding experiences may also hinder your efforts to attract graduates in the future if someone shares their negative experience online. On the opposite end of the scale, a positive onboarding experience is estimated to improve retention rates by as much as 82%.
So, what steps can you take to enhance your hiring process with effective onboarding?
Establish company mentors and “work buddies”
Entering the workplace is a daunting prospect for many graduates. Providing a mentor or buddy can help them ease into this transition and allow them to settle in far sooner.
Plus, it helps build a community within your organisation, providing your graduate hires with reassurance and familiarity from the outset.
Provide everything they need from day one
No new employee wants to arrive on their first day flustered about what they’re doing or where to go. Ensure new hires feel comfortable from the get-go by preparing everything they need to get started, including:
Setting up their workstation
Printing off all required paperwork
Organising all login details and entry cards they need
Presenting them with a schedule or calendar
Creating a dedicated employee handbook
Invest in introductory videos
As we highlighted earlier, Gen Z is much more accustomed to video as their preferred form of content. Creating accessible, repeatable videos that explain your company culture and your new hire’s responsibilities helps them understand your business sooner, while allowing your existing employees to focus on their tasks.
Introduce new hires to relevant training programs
Finally, demonstrate that you’re invested in their career development by setting them up with training programs and courses related to their work.
By giving new hires access to these learning courses, they will feel more empowered to deliver for your organisation. Your company benefits from a more motivated, skilled employee, while they form a more positive impression of your brand.
Support your company’s future with a great graduate brand
Your graduate brand is an integral part of your organisation’s long-term strategy. Ensuring you can consistently attract, engage and appeal to the next generation of candidates is key to a sustainable, lasting workforce – so it’s vital you get your campaign execution right.
By dodging the mistakes above, you go a long way to stealing a march on your competitors to seal the services of top, up-and-coming talent. Applying the techniques and strategies we’ve outlined, coupled with effective brand management software and a solid recruitment team, you can keep yourself firmly in the focus of young, aspirational job seekers.
18 powerful employer branding tools to activate your campaigns in 2024
Papirfly
9minutes read
With job seekers increasingly selective about who they work for, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of a strong, consistent employer brand.
It’s your unique selling point against a wave of competition. Your window into your company culture. Your vehicle to excite and build trust with potential candidates. Simply put, it’s the heart of modern recruitment, and something that demands a great deal of attention.
Fortunately, today there is a plethora of software, tools and platforms designed to streamline your efforts, unite your global teams and maintain a consistent, regular flow of content to recruits and employees.
In this guide, we break down 18 standout tools you should be paying attention to in 2024, so you can activate your employer brand with complete confidence.
Papirfly’s brand management platform empowers you with the tools to create and communicate your employer brand in one comprehensive solution.
This platform offers numerous features to unleash your employer branding on a global scale, including:
A dedicated online brand portal for your employer brand guidelines, Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and other key documents that define your brand’s identity
A comprehensive, industry-recognised Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, allowing you to store and share on-brand assets for your recruitment campaigns
Intuitive design templates that enable fast, cost-effective content creation without any risk of breaking your brand guidelines
The capacity to rapidly adapt assets for local markets with the right language, imagery and cultural nuances to connect with job seekers globally
Collaborative, easy-to-use campaign execution tools that keep your marketing activities aligned and well-coordinated
Rally® Inside™ is a similar employer branding platform that employs real-time data and best practices to develop campaigns that attract and retain top talent.
Allowing you to identify and engage with potential candidates wherever they are online, Rally® Inside™ also helps you understand the topics that resonate with your target audiences. This can play a role in focusing your employer brand strategy around your specific goals and ambitions.
Plus, it’s free for a single account user, making it a good entry-level option for smaller employer brand teams with limited budgets.
One of the world’s most recognisable names in content creation, Canva’s wide range of templates and design tools empower your professionals to produce high-quality graphics to support your employer branding efforts.
From infographics and visual storytelling assets for your digital channels, to presentations and posters to inspire your existing employees, Canva can help you maintain brand consistency and generate engaging campaigns for your audiences.
Did you know that job postings with video content receive 34% more applications than those without it? This makes tools like Seenit incredibly valuable, allowing you to collect, create and distribute user-generated video content from your employees, customers and beyond.
By encouraging your employees to submit video testimonials, behind-the-scenes footage and clips that showcase what it’s like to work at your company, you can develop a library of employer brand videos that capture the imagination of ideal candidates.
As AI continues to evolve and expand our horizons, ChatGPT can greatly speed up the production of written content across your employer brand campaigns, from feeder text on your social posts to job descriptions and email marketing.
With effective prompt engineering, you can train ChatGPT to write in your precise tone of voice, allowing you to go from raw notes to brand-consistent first drafts in minutes. Especially for teams with no dedicated copywriter or content agency, this can feel like a new member of your team.
Recruitee is a tool that promises to reduce hiring times and increase the reach of your recruitment campaigns. This includes the ability to create a dedicated careers page through their tried-and-tested templates, empowering you to present a strong employer brand to desired candidates with little effort or coding skills.
Furthermore, Recruitee allows you to automatically post job listings on the most active job boards, including Indeed, Monster and Glassdoor. This again eases the recruitment process, and ensures your ads are where they need to be to attract top talent.
Rather than a careers page, Jobbio encourages its users to create a company channel. Similar to a social media channel, this approach lets you create a distinct profile, share employee-driven content, and gradually build an audience of relevant candidates.
From this channel, you can directly communicate with followers to maximise employee engagement, as well as create an unlimited number of job ads targeted around your ideal candidates’ skills, experience and preferences.
Cliquify is an employer branding tool that enables companies to generate assets for their social recruitment campaigns. Primarily a content creation platform, Cliquify’s templates guide your teams to produce on-brand collateral for your various channels, highlighting your company culture, values and achievements.
This solution also allows you to measure and monitor the performance of your social media assets, helping you to refine your campaigns over time.
It cannot be overstated how valuable your existing employees are to your long-term recruitment efforts – up to 86% of candidates will check employee reviews on Glassdoor before applying. An army of brand ambassadors can greatly elevate your hiring process, and a tool like Social Sender helps you build one.
A dedicated employee advocacy solution, Social Sender makes it simple to send targeted company news, events and posts to relevant employees based on their positions and interests. From here they can push this content on their social networks, sharing positive employee experiences with prospective candidates.
Another effective employee advocacy tool is Sociabble, a platform offering multichannel content distribution for your employees’ social media channels. Leveraging their networks, this tool extends the reach and awareness of your employer brand through fresh, compelling content delivered by your workforce.
Plus, to keep your team members active advocates, Sociabble adds gamification to this process, letting you track your most effective ambassadors and reward them appropriately.
Maintaining a consistent employer brand across every channel and location requires a single source of truth for your assets. Brandfolder’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution gives you a central repository of on-brand, up-to-date collateral, so your teams worldwide can access the latest approved content for their recruitment campaigns.
With the ability to categorise assets according to type, location, language and much more, your marketing materials stay well-organised and your marketers can identify the assets they require instantaneously.
Candidates want to work with a reputable employer; a perspective backed up by 84% of job seekers who consider reputation before applying for a job opening. The Employer Brand Index (EBI), developed by Link Humans, uses data from over 6,000 user-generated sources to measure what past, present and future employees are saying about your company.
This helps you gain an objective view of your employer brand reputation, benchmark this against your competitors and address any negative feedback directly. With this insight, you can adapt your communications strategy where required on your path to becoming an employer of choice in your industry.
Another in the growing wave of employer branding AI tools, Olivia is an innovative assistant designed to optimise candidate capture, screening, scheduling, communication and engagement.
Guided by your brand’s tone of voice and communication strategy, Olivia automatically answers candidates’ questions and eliminates repetitive admin tasks. This streamlined approach frees up time to create a more bespoke, one-to-one recruitment and onboarding experience for each candidate, helping you nurture them into your team.
Pathmotion enables better candidate experiences by letting your existing employees directly engage with your prospects, answer their questions and share content. This supports a more comfortable, seamless onboarding journey for new recruits, and helps candidates self-exclude themselves, saving you time and money on unsuitable applications.
Pathmotion can also host virtual events for candidates, automate nurture emails, send out onboarding materials, and integrate with your company and employee social media channels. This makes it a great tool to build a community between your current team and your future hires.
Greenhouse is an excellent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that helps you present candidates with a consistent, reassuring experience. To do this, the platform includes several features, including:
Talent sourcing that scales with your organisation
Customisable career sites and application processes
Tracking for candidate interactions and communications
Schedules for follow-up activities and onboarding activities
Smoother talent acquisition workflows
Candidate scoreboards for better hiring decisions
It also tracks and measures several key employer branding metrics, including time-to-fill positions, cost-per-hire and candidate conversion rates.
Another effective ATS solution is TalentLyft. This system can reduce the time associated with posting job ads, screening applications and scheduling interviews through one all-inclusive platform. Handling this all through one portal helps you preserve consistency across both your employer branding and candidate experience.
TalentLyft also enables you to track applications to measure the performance of your job adverts, and create a branded career site illustrating your company’s values, culture and mission.
In our attempts to achieve more for less, Monday.com promises to significantly increase the efficiency and productivity of your employer brand workflows. Through this planning platform, your teams can gain a bird’s-eye view over all tasks, from individual job postings to large-scale recruitment campaigns.
For optimal productivity, Monday.com lets you hone in on each distinct task of your employer brand initiatives. This empowers you to manage your resources more effectively, and keeps everyone aware of what must be done and when.
Want to know if your employer branding efforts are reaping results? Ongig offers up this valuable insight by scoring your job descriptions and adverts in real-time, suggesting improvements to support your diversity, equity and inclusivity (DE&I) hiring.
In addition to analysing the performance of your content, it offers templates for future job postings, and handles the publishing of hundreds (or even thousands) of job adverts automatically.
Can you have too many employer brand tools?
These 18 employer branding tools merely scratch the surface of what’s available to help you attract, recruit and retain the best available talent. Hopefully, this has helped you consider where you can streamline your processes and unlock your brand’s potential.
However, a word of warning. While these tools can benefit your employer branding in numerous ways, introducing too many can become a detriment to your long-term recruitment efforts. That’s because an abundance of employer brand solutions can:
Increase the complexity of managing your brand and campaigns
Confuse your employees with too many logins
Eat away at your budget
Make maintenance and upgrades a hassle to complete
Require significant amounts of time to train your teams
Cause inconsistent messaging on your various channels
And consider, if you do choose to invest in your employer brand, be sure to think about integration. If you can seamlessly bring solutions together into one united platform, activating your employer brand becomes a lot less complicated.
Take steps to activate your employer brand
Technology can play a valuable role in the reach, consistency and performance of your employer brand. But, this must be accompanied by a well-constructed employer brand strategy, high-quality assets and the support of your existing employees.
If you’d like to learn more about how to attract and retain top talent in this highly competitive landscape, read our ultimate employer branding guide.
Your essential guide to consistent branding on social media
Papirfly
7minutes read
Whether we like it or not, social media is a fixture in our daily lives – and a space marketers can’t afford to ignore.
Here’s why: more than 5 billion people worldwide use social media channels at least once a month – and that number is expected to touch 6 billion by 2027. It means social platforms have become one of the most powerful ways for brands to communicate directly with their audiences, tell their story, and build long-term trust.
A strong, consistent brand presence on social media is no longer optional – it’s essential. When your audience can clearly recognize who you are and what you stand for, they’re more likely to trust, follow, and engage with you. But when that consistency breaks down, your brand reputation can suffer real damage.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to keep your social branding consistent across platforms, and offer you practical tips for building a long-term social media strategy that strengthens every interaction.
What is social media branding?
Social media branding is how your brand shows up across your social platforms, and about how you use them to promote, evolve, and bring your brand identity to life.
Because social media is often the first touchpoint between a brand and a consumer, it’s critical that your content reflects your values and voice just as clearly as your website or ad campaigns do.
What are the key elements of social media branding?
To build an effective social media brand, there are several key elements you need to get right.
Content creation: You must develop and share relevant and compelling types of content, including imagery and video content, that connects with people and aligns with your branding.
Engagement: You must actively interact with followers, responding to comments, messages, and mentions to foster relationships and build long-term loyalty.
Brand voice: You must establish a distinct, authentic brand voice that reflects your organization’s personality and values.
Community building: You must cultivate a community through user-generated content (UGC) and create opportunities for your followers to participate and support your brand.
While each element is important, brand consistency is the most essential piece of the puzzle – and often the most challenging to enforce.
The importance of social media brand consistency
Consistency is key for any stable, trustworthy relationship. The relationship between you and your social media followers is no different.
People want to connect with brands that reflect their own values. They’re looking for authenticity, shared priorities, and a sense of familiarity. Social media, with its more personal tone and real-time nature, amplifies these expectations. It’s where your audience gets to know your brand – not just what you sell.
If your content sends mixed messages or feels disconnected from previous posts, it creates confusion. And confusion leads to doubt, which ultimately damages your brand reputation.
An inconsistent presence can also make your brand look disorganized. Jarring shifts in color palette, typography, or format signal a lack of alignment behind the scenes. And for potential customers, that can be a red flag.
Further problems caused by inconsistency on your social media platforms include:
Reduced brand recall when customers are ready to purchase
Lower engagement and interaction with organic posts
Less effective performance of paid social campaigns
How often should I post on social media to maintain brand consistency?
Brand consistency isn’t just about content – it’s also about timing. Your audience is more likely to engage with your posts if they follow a predictable rhythm.
Think of your posts like a favorite TV show. If new episodes drop at random times, audiences lose interest. But when they know what to expect and when, they’ll come back for more.
That said, every social channel is different. Algorithms, demographics, and engagement patterns vary across platforms. Here’s a quick breakdown of best-practice posting frequencies to help guide your approach:
Whatever content creation schedule you adopt, make it intentional and stick to it. A consistent calendar helps your team stay organized and ensures your audience has a reliable brand experience.
8 tips for building a consistent social media branding strategy
1. Lock down your brand identity and goals
Before posting anything, make sure everyone is aligned on your mission, values, and visual identity – and on what social media is meant to achieve for your brand. It could be for raising awareness, generating leads, or managing customer service. The important thing is that your global teams, local marketers, and community managers all understand this.
A centralized brand hub makes this easier. Give your teams access to up-to-date brand guidelines, digital assets, and style templates so every piece of content stays aligned.
2. Establish your target audience
Your brand can’t speak to everyone in the same way. Get clear on who you’re talking to, and how they behave on each platform.
Ask:
What age groups are we targeting?
Which platforms do they spend time on?
What problems are they trying to solve?
Different channels appeal to different demographics, so create specific personas for each platform to keep your messaging relevant and on-brand.
3. Define your social media channels
Not all platforms will be right for your goals – or your audience. Based on your personas, you need to select the channels where your efforts will deliver the greatest return.
For example, B2B brands often find strong engagement on LinkedIn, while younger audiences may be more active on Instagram or TikTok.
Focusing your efforts allows your team to go deeper, understanding platform nuances, content performance trends, and optimal posting times.
4. Create a social content calendar
When it comes to creative content marketing, timing matters. Here are some best practices that can help you get it right:
Keep feeds engaging by switching between a variety of content themes
Research each platform to identify optimal posting times
Follow the 80/20 rule – 80% of content should be about providing value, 20% promoting goods or services
Include space for user-generated content, special announcements, and more
Align content with holidays, events, and special dates
5. Build social post templates
For consistent digital content creation, you need dependable templates. By using pre-approved templates that align with your visual identity, you reduce the risk of off-brand content slipping through.
As well as locking down the position of your logo, brand colours, design elements and more, branded design templates enable you to create marketing materials for multiple channels and locations. Your templates can match the optimal size and layout of each platform and allow users to switch up the language or imagery for different countries and cultures.
Fundamentally, templates empower your social media marketers to work faster, confidently and cost-effectively, all while preventing inconsistencies.
6. Produce communication guidelines
Consistency isn’t just for posts – it’s also key to conversations. When followers interact with your brand, they expect a consistent tone and level of service.
Establish guidelines that cover:
Tone of voice for replies and DMs
How to respond to complaints or negative feedback
What kind of UGC can be reshared
Escalation processes for sensitive issues
By standardizing your engagement practices, you ensure every interaction strengthens your brand experience and brand equity.
7. Centralize your digital assets
Consistency can be a real challenge when teams are spread worldwide. It only takes one rogue post to disrupt your communications and damage your brand reputation. That’s why it pays to have everyone in your organization working from the same bank of digital assets.
The easiest way to achieve this is through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Your DAM enables you to store, share, and manage all approved social assets in one place, ensuring every team is using the right version, every time. It should also allow you to tag and categorize brand assets, so your teams can find what they need faster and easier:
By managing your digital assets effectively, you can lock down consistency across every social media channel and campaign, without proofing-related bottlenecks.
8. Regularly monitor your social media channels
However carefully you’ve followed the previous steps, inconsistencies and errors can still slip through. That’s why frequent monitoring is so important. It allows you to react quickly to any problems before they cause any harm to your brand reputation.
Monitoring best practice says you should:
Monitor and track your social media channels multiple times a day
Give every post one final sense-check before it’s published
Respond quickly to any negative comments or feedback, so your audience can see you listen to feedback and don’t sweep poor reviews under the rug
Maintain a consistent social media presence on all platforms with Papirfly
Building a strong brand on social media isn’t about going viral. It’s about showing up consistently, with content that reflects who you are, what you value, and how you connect with people.
With Papirfly’s Digital Asset Management and templated content creation suite, you can empower every team to produce on-brand creative content marketing, so your social media becomes a space where your brand not only shows up but also stands out.
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
