Your brand’s voice and image are integral to your company. A lot of time and thought has gone into crafting these parts of your business, and you want to make sure there’s consistency in the treatment of your brand across your collateral, that your process is running smoothly, and that your teams can access what they need when they need it.
So how do you proceed with all of these things in mind? A dedicated brand collateral management platform will help your assets stay consistent while ensuring your teams can access these materials.
But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You must think carefully about what you need in a brand collateral platform to ensure you have the right fit for your brand.
Determine Your Team's goals and Needs
Determining what you need in a brand collateral management platform is not easy, nor can it be done overnight. You must evaluate your goals, needs, and must-have features, consult your team, and demo platforms of interest. The key points you should consider when deciding on a platform include:
Amount and Type of Users
Consider what your team needs from your platform and if the platform can handle the amount (it can be unlimited!) and types of users you need. Also, consider what team members should have access to on the system—including ordering and budgetary restrictions—and whether the platform allows you to set different permissions based on a team member’s role.
Approval Workflows
Determine what you need for approval workflows to keep your processes running smoothly. An automated process can save you plenty of time. For example, a reputable partner will allow you to customize and automate your approval process, whether it is for every order or certain spending or quantity thresholds.
Amount and Types of Collateral
Evaluate if the platform needs to handle your entire catalog and a variety of assets, such as print, apparel, and digital. Making sure the platform can handle the type and amount of brand collateral you need is essential. Otherwise, you may find yourself looking for a different platform down the road as you scale or even searching for multiple platforms right now.
Asset Management
Did you know approximately 60 percent of brand collateral goes unused? With a reputable brand collateral partner, you’ll be able to audit and organize your assets to clear out the unused collateral cluttering your inventory. With 24/7 access to your inventory, you can also monitor your inventory levels and track where your orders are at all times. You can also streamline processes, allowing orders, packing, and distribution to be coordinated through the same platform.
Identify Must-Have Features
What are the features your platform must have? The features you come up with in this list are the ones that you don’t want to sacrifice or compromise on. A lack of these features could make or break a partnership.
Direct Mail Campaigns
Reaching out to buyers is integral to a business’s success. Direct mail campaigns are an important component of this. With an easy-to-use marketing platform, you can create and deliver the powerful campaigns you need to drive sales.
Personalized Storefront
A customizable, personalized storefront engine will allow you to create and manage all of your assets, no matter what they are—sell sheets, pre-approved social media posts, promotional products—in one platform that will ensure consistency of your brand standards while still allowing teams to customize collateral as needed.
Warehousing and Shipping
With the right tools in your platform, you can automatically consolidate orders into as few shipments as possible. Minimizing operational costs is a top benefit of a platform that offers print-on-demand technology. Your jobs will get printed quickly while having a single storefront for all your assets.
Real-Time Reporting
With robust real-time reporting, you can see where all your products are and how they are being consumed and receive alerts when any of your products are running low. Real-time reporting is an efficient capability that you should consider because of the value it can add to your business. These reporting capabilities can optimize your operations, allowing you to cut lesser-used items and increase the production of more popular items.
Choosing the Best Partner for Your Needs
Once you’ve narrowed down your brand collateral partner choices, it’s time to evaluate who offers the best user experience, including powerful search and filtering capabilities for team members to quickly and easily access collateral.
It’s also important that your partner provides implementation and training support. Make sure you choose a supportive, proactive brand collateral partner that will be there for you instead of a “hands-off” partner that leaves you struggling while learning their platform.
Ready to choose the ideal brand collateral platform for your brand? Discover the essential questions you should be asking, how to navigate challenges, and how to find the right platform with our eBook, From Print to Digital: Choosing the Right Brand and Marketing Collateral Management Platform!
