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How Can a Marketing Portal Support a Successful Rebrand
In the New Year, many organisations consider a rebrand or a brand refresh to help elevate their brand for the coming year. Rebranding for many organisations can be a daunting task to undertake but if executed correctly, it can be a rewarding process that delivers significant commercial benefits leading to new business, more revenue and a more motivated workforce.
Whether you are looking to change a significant element such as the logo or brand name, or if you are simply looking to alter your messaging to better communicate a more relevant brand promise, you’re going to need to plan your strategy for success. It takes a lot of time, energy and care to launch a rebrand, but careful planning and finding the right tools for the job can mean the difference between success and failure.
During a rebrand, two of the biggest challenges faced by large, multi-site organisations is updating the existing marketing assets with the new branding and ensuring each team member has access to these updated assets. This can be a very time consuming task but is vital as ultimately an inconsistent brand will struggle to distinguish itself in a competitive market. Whether you are still in the planning stages or if your rebranding is already underway, you’ll need to have a solid strategy to address these challenges.
So how can you be sure that a rebranding runs as smoothly as possible? Well that is where a marketing portal can help. While many marketing portals will offer a platform for you to store, design and distribute your own marketing materials in house, they also come with a wealth of other features that can support a rebrand from start to finish.
So how can a marketing portal support a rebrand?
Central Asset Repository
One of the most important the stages of a rebrand is distributing new marketing assets to the appropriate teams. This can slow down the rollout massively, especially if you have multiple teams in various locations, nationally or internationally. With a marketing portal though, you will have a central repository where you can store all of your latest assets. This enables teams instant access to the newest assets, meaning time to market is decreased and you can then concentrate on the more important business activities.
Keyword Tagging
On average, a marketer will spend up to an hour a day fielding requests for design files and marketing assets. With a marketing portal, finding branded assets has never been easier. This is because all you need to do is tag your assets with keywords so that your staff can find them as easily as possible. Gone are the hours spent trawling for assets- they are right at your fingertips whenever you need them.
Improved Brand Consistency
One of the hardest parts of a rebrand is ensuring that everything stays on brand. Consistency ultimately contributes to brand recognition which is vital in the early stages of a rebrand. Inconsistent branding can be very frustrating but can be very easily eradicated with the implementation of a marketing portal. With a marketing portal, brand managers can decide what assets can be made available to employees and which assets can be edited, which will prevent anyone from making unapproved changes or using the wrong version of an asset.
Online Accessibility
Many marketing portals are hosted online which means all updated assets can be uploaded to the cloud. This gives every team member instant access to the newest assets, wherever they are in the world. This means you don’t need to worry employees not being able to complete projects because they can’t access all the files they need. And because many marketing portals work away from your internal IT systems, you can rest assured that your files are safe in the cloud.
Reduced Errors
One of the biggest headaches related to branding is employees not sticking to brand guidelines. With a marketing portal, this headache can be alleviated as employees will only be able to work from pre-approved templates. Brand elements that shouldn’t be changed can be locked down while others can be edited with no design skills necessary. This means you can trust your employees to design marketing collateral and rest assured that it is on brand. This is further supported by the approval process, so nothing is printed or published without going through the processes you set in place first.
Streamlined Print Process
During a rebrand, the likeliness is you will have to reprint many of the existing print assets such as brochures, flyers and business cards. Starting prints runs however can be a notoriously laborious tasks, especially if you have to find a vendor, get quotes, send design files and await proofs. With a marketing portal with web-to-print capabilities, many of these steps are remove. You will have one vendor to handle all your printed materials, you will be able to get real-time quotes online and because you are using pre-approved templates, you don’t have to wait for them to be approved before starting a print run.
And because the portals are hosted online, print runs can be started at the click of a button. Assets can also be instantly converted into either a web-version or a print-ready PDF, meaning they are already in the right format to be sent to the printers.
CRM Integration
When rebranding, it is important to keep you existing customers in the know. Most marketing portals will allow you to integrate with your existing CRM system or update existing databases. This will enable you to send out personalised, direct communications to keep them in know about the rebrand. This is especially important is you are changing critical elements such as your brand name or logo.
Brand Centurion
Whether you’re going through a rebrand or simply want some more support with your current brand, Brand Centurion can help.
The intuitive nature of Brand Centurion allows, anyone, anywhere the capability to submit customised print ready artwork whilst maintaining and adhering to strict brand guidelines. Brand Centurion also allows business with multiple locations a portal to access, create, monitor and print their latest marketing assets quickly and efficiently. This includes everything from posters to leaflets, business cards to digital assets.
