Sharing digital content seamlessly is not always easy. However, it’s very important when it comes to expressing your brand values to the world. This coherent marketing message helps to create a positive connection with your audience.
Here are our most important tips for smart brand management in the FMCG industry.
1. Start With a Strong, Centralised Strategy
Visual content is more important than ever these days. Your customers are scrolling through a newsfeed filled with endless images competing for their attention. It has become harder and harder to catch their eye and persuade them to take action.
One of the best ways to rise above the noise is to create consistency in your visual brand. This means thinking carefully about the colour, typography and design of everything you do - and applying it to every marketing asset no matter how big or small.
Your marketing campaigns should be like spokes radiating out from a central hub - all connecting back to the original strategy.
We see the importance of this approach in our work with Helly Hansen, a worldwide outdoor clothing provider. They are continuously working with new collections, so it’s important for them to have a solution that can provide them with total control of their marketing assets at all times.
Previously, the team at Helly Hansen were using several image banks - which made it difficult to find assets in one place. Now, they have combined everything into one (DAM) Media Bank, creating a one-stop shop for everything.
2. Use Templates To Quickly Create Variations
Each branch of your brand shouldn’t be starting from scratch when creating marketing materials. Not only does this steal time from other tasks, it is also a threat to your brand consistency, as each marketing manager can have a different approach. Before you know it, your colleagues are becoming self-proclaimed designers and your brand is having an identity crisis. A smart template has the power to save you a lot of time when executing your central marketing efforts locally.
Flexible templates allow you to change some details, while keeping the important aspects of the design the same. The templates can be deployed to anyone who is working on managing the brand, allowing for an easy workflow no matter how much you scale up. This helps to reduce the time to market, as well as reducing costs.
If we return to our Helly Hansen example, we see that this works extremely well, as they have a large number of marketing campaigns in their stores throughout the year - such as new arrivals, sale offers and much more. They use our Template Studio to allow all employees and partners to create marketing materials without needing any design skills.
The templates ensure that everything looks visually consistent - no matter what. For example, these templates can be applied to emails, print POS, social media posts, landing pages and more. The local marketers become more efficient, and the brand manager don’t have to worry about any of the campaigns being off brand.
3. Keep Your Visuals Up To Date
When you update your logo, colours or other visual aspect of your brand (for example, in the event of a rebranding) you don’t want the old brand materials to still be out there. These conflicting visuals will dilute the power of your brand and confuse your audience, and your colleagues.
If digital assets are outdated, or unavailable in the format needed, your local team members may have to use their own creative attempts. And let's face it, in most cases, this is more detrimental than anything. It’s important to keep your visuals up to date by taking control of all brand management assets across the entire organisation in one platform.
Keep all artwork and logos up to date in a centralised bank. That means these materials are available to your marketing teams and the wider organisation, no matter their location. Whether your team is split across different office locations or working remotely, a centralised, online bank will make sure that everyone can access important brand assets anywhere, at any time.
Whenever a visual is updated, you can use tools that will make the older images expire and disappear to end users but still have them securely stored for that all-important audit trail.
It is crucial for us that digital assets are stored in one central location, allowing us to manage usage rights and perform maintenance, ensuring that we always have the correct and most up to date assets available to our sales representatives, resellers and customers, says Rebecca Sjölander, Trade Marketing and Asset Production Manager at Helly Hansen.
4. Use Reporting To Measure Progress
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why it’s so important to use reporting features to get in-depth information about how your brand is performing.
There are a number of different reports you can access in BrandMaster, including data on usage and distribution that will show you how marketing efforts affect sales. You can track which brand and marketing assets are downloaded and shared, and see which pages and items are the most popular. You’ll even be able to see which items generate the most orders per year, quarter or month - as well as the items that stay on the shelf.
BrandMaster Reporting is also designed to be connected to advanced Business Intelligence software such as MicroStrategy, Qlikview or Tableau. You can combine this information with numbers from your Enterprise Resource Planning system, track your sales and adjust your marketing campaigns based on real data.
Need help managing your brand?
With the right brand management strategies, you can create a consistent and powerful brand that will resonate with your audience.
If you would like to learn more on how BrandMaster can help to manage your brand, get in touch now.
