Any marketing executive at a multi-location enterprise brand understands the balancing act of empowering local teams to produce great marketing that speaks to their local customers while also ensuring that they adhere to your brand standards.
Exert too much control over local marketing and you’ll get generic, uninspired work from your local experts. Give your local marketers free rein and you run the risk of missteps that reflect poorly on your overall brand. Many organizations have a difficult time striking a balance that results in insightful, effective, and compliant local marketing.
Ensuring brand compliance doesn’t have to be a headache. You can reduce stress and confusion for your distributed, local marketers while simultaneously reducing the amount of time you need to spend on oversight by simply structuring your brand compliance process the right way. Here are four tips that will show you how to get your organization on the right track.
1. Give Your Local Teams Room to Breathe
Any business can benefit from customizing their marketing to appeal to local-level audiences. If you know that your customers in one area have different priorities and concerns than customers in another area, then why wouldn’t you plan your marketing accordingly?
However, as companies grow, it often becomes nearly impossible for one centralized marketing team to distribute enough approved, customized content to all the local teams. For multi-location enterprises, it makes perfect sense to distribute some of the local marketing work to teams in those locations. After all, who knows the local market better than the people who are working in it every day?
As a marketing executive, it should be your goal to empower your local teams to create great, customized marketing, and that means that they need to have the freedom to express your brand’s values in a way that makes sense for their own customers. If the rules you give them are too restrictive, it makes it easier for you to ensure that your local teams will comply with brand guidelines—but you’ll be wasting all the potential insight they can offer.
Your goal should be to give your local teams enough room to create great local marketing, while also establishing a compliance process that makes it easy for them to understand the rules.
2. Have Clear Brand Compliance Standards
Your first line of defense when it comes to brand compliance is to establish clear brand guidelines that are firmly enforced across the board. If your local teams know exactly what is expected of them, it makes it easier for them to meet those standards.
This is important because, while customized local marketing is more effective, you also want your marketing campaigns to all be working together to help bolster your brand. It’s all too common for enterprise-level firms to farm out their marketing to national or regional teams without any real coordinating oversight.
According to research by MarcomCentral and DemandMetric, fragmented marketing campaigns are 11% less effective than more coordinated campaigns. Ensuring that your local teams are working to meet established standards means that their work will generate more revenue, better enhance your brand’s reputation, and help you avoid the kind of marketing missteps that result in pulled campaigns.
3. Make Brand Compliance Easy
A common problem for local teams producing branded marketing is that they don’t have easy access to the brand resources they need. The result is marketing which uses outdated logos or other brand materials, or that is simply missing these critical components altogether.
Without some kind of marketing portal in place, employees waste time searching for the right asset or submitting work for review that is obviously incomplete. This is an issue that can be easily avoided by simply creating a central brand depository that will give your distributed team access to all the up-to-date, relevant resources they’ll need to create effective marketing.
Many enterprises choose to simply set up a brand portal that contains the brand guidelines and all the relevant material. There are also a number of dedicated software solutions. However, whichever method you choose, the important thing is streamlining the process as much as possible. If you make brand compliance easy, it will happen more often.
4. Streamline Review
For companies with a large number of distributed marketing teams, the review component is often the biggest logjam in the entire process. If you have any more than a handful of teams running intermittent small campaigns, automating the review process will save you an enormous amount of time and effort.
Simplifying and streamlining the review process means that your distributed marketing teams will have more time to produce great work locally while you will have more time to focus on marketing the brand. There are a number of software options that will help you streamline this process, including Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform.
Achieve Brand Compliance By Making Distributed Marketing Work For You
Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform has a marketing resource management solution built in to provide you with powerful role-based access to marketing assets and workflows. Help your corporate marketing team enforce brand compliance and enable easier budgeting and tracking by:
- Controlling access to, and customization of, marketing assets
- Simplifying remote teams’ marketing processes
- Collaborating seamlessly with agencies and remote sales and marketing teams
- Tracking marketing assets’ use and effectiveness
- Archiving marketing content for compliance audits
- Easily searching marketing content for global or regional updates
In reality, brand compliance is just one aspect of an effective channel partner marketing plan. To discover more about how distributed marketing can help you ensure brand compliance while also driving more revenue, market share, and customer satisfaction, read our Ultimate Guide to Distributed Marketing today!
