You’ve finally pulled the trigger. You’re growing your business and are adding a new location. You have all the bases covered; you did the market research, you found just the right spot, you have the funding, and you’ve hired the right people. You are good to go, right? One item sometimes overlooked is keeping your brand consistent for multiple locations. You need to make sure your customers will enjoy the same experience at your new location that they have had at your original one. In addition to the same quality product you deliver, you need a consistent color palette, logo, signage, marketing materials, and messaging.
But managing your brand from store to store is more than what the customer sees every day. You need consistency with your business cards, stationery, invoices, social media voice, and advertising – anything relating to your brand. You don’t have the time to do this yourself, but you also need to be able to trust employees and vendors to adhere to your strict brand compliance.
An affordable and reliable solution is the marketing communications portal. Sometimes called a digital asset management hub, the marketing communications portal provides a platform from which you can manage your communication assets and safely distribute all marketing materials to your local stores and franchisees. You simply load all your marketing materials, logos, digital assets and templates to your portal and then set access parameters for each user. In addition, part of this portal is web-to-print technology that allows you to print shorter runs on demand for marketing collateral, business cards, forms, etc. The result is saving money and reducing waste. A marketing communication portal provides many options including:
- Management of all communication channels, including print, direct mail, email, Personalized URLs, SMS text messaging and voice broadcast messages.
- Brand control over all downloadable materials
- Storage of ordering, billing and contact databases
- Customization for flexibility among variable levels, including the franchise, locations, users and accounts.
In addition, the portal allows users to access and download digital marketing assets such as:
- Photographs
- Customizable PDFs
- Audio and video files
- Print advertisements
- Commonly used forms and documents
- Logos
Besides saving time and money, and keeping your brand consistent from location to location, some additional advantages to a marketing communications portal include:
- Reduction in fulfillment errors
- Reduce errors and duplication in design
- Savings in print and postage
- Faster response time
- Improved marketing effectiveness
- Administrative cost savings
Here’s a video that can explain it even better:
If you would like to find out how a Marketing Communications Portal can help your business, read about our STUDIO marketing portal, download our free marketing portal ebook, How to Save Time and Money Using a Marketing Portal here or contact us.