Brand consistency is vital to establishing a clear voice, tone, and identity as a company. In fact, maintaining brand consistency across all marketing materials is one of the greatest challenges distributed marketing teams in large organizations face. With resellers, agents or franchisees spread out across the country, it becomes increasingly difficult to oversee and ensure adherence to and consistency with brand guidelines.
Customers’ experiences with a local branch–good or bad–reflect back on the brand as a whole. Brand consistency is just one of the ways companies can assure customers they’ll get the same level of service no matter where they are. Here are four ways your organization can maintain brand consistency:
1. Maintain consistent inventory of brand collateral.
The first step any company should take to maintain brand consistency is to take stock of their existing collateral. This basic housekeeping will ease the process of internal collaboration and allow your teams to identify gaps in current marketing materials. Regular maintenance is key.
For added ease, look for a printing partner that stores and fulfills branded inventory and allows you to view data on your inventory. You’ll want to ensure they have an inventory management system that allows you to customize users’ access to the information they need most–saving you time and money in the long run.
2. Develop style guides for brand adherence.
Next, dive deeper to assess brand adherence across all forms of marketing materials, including for print collateral, promotional items, apparel, digital media, and signage. Pay close attention to copy and design. What types of fonts are you using? What color palette do you gravitate toward? What voice and tone will your messaging convey to reach your target audience? How can you communicate changes in these preferences across internal and external teams?
These are the questions you need to ask yourself as you develop consistency across your organization’s materials. To facilitate these efforts, consider using mood boards and brand guidelines to coordinate design teams and stakeholders. Use nationally recognized style guides or draft your own style guidelines, so your editorial teams understand the writing style and formatting conventions in place for a wide variety of content. Finally, most importantly, develop a clear system for communicating updates to your stakeholders.
3. Empower stakeholders with good communication.
With stakeholders spread across different locations, it is important to ensure they are off to a good start by providing them with the proper guidelines and communication they’ll need to find the right collateral, participate in upcoming campaigns and understand how to execute them effectively.
If they have to comb through endless folders on an FTP site, they are going to feel frustrated and may be less likely to adhere to brand guidelines. Providing relevant and timely updates will make it easy for them to understand what they need to do and make it seamless to activate your brand.
4. Make maintaining brand consistency simple.
While the thought of devising a new system for maintaining brand consistency may feel daunting, you don’t have to go it alone. This is where brand and marketing asset platform comes into play. They empower your local stakeholders to streamline their own process and find the approved brand collateral they need exactly when they need it.
Additionally, with a single print partner, you’ll have the added advantage of a full-service, one-stop shop—not merely a vendor but a true branding partner with an ordering portal that can help you manage inventory, develop guidelines, and provide quality assurance for all of your printed branding collateral and digital assets.
And that’s exactly what Southeastern delivers. We offer a turnkey, single-point-of-contact solution to help you manage printing, finishing, fulfillment, mailing, and distribution so you can get ahead and keep up with your company’s latest marketing efforts.
Thanks to our brand and marketing asset management platform, we offer personalized marketing, flexible integrations, social media control, and reporting—all housed under one roof. Take your print assets to the next level and consolidate technologies to decrease your time to market. Take control of your brand’s future without lifting a finger.
We’re here to help. Interested in learning more about Southeastern? Contact us today.
