Brand consistency and integrity is essential for any enterprise company, and the marketing team is the gatekeeper of this brand.
Unified branding helps you clearly communicate with customers, develop brand awareness, and improve brand recognition.
When you’re in a distributed marketing team, you’ve got the best bits of centralization and decentralization with a central marketing team that creates on-brand, professional resources and assets and local teams that customize and co-brand them.
If you’re tossing and turning over whether to make the switch to distributed marketing, take a look at our blog, The Pros and Cons of Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Marketing Teams. And if you’re ready to make the move, check out our blog, How to Move to a Distributed Email Team, to learn more.
For now, let’s assume that you’ve already made the great call of moving to distributed marketing. How can you ensure unified branding across these teams by making a few proactive changes?
Simplify your systems
Complexity and hundreds of systems won’t be your ally in a distributed marketing team.
Simplifying your systems and the way you work together will go a long way in smoothing relationships between the central and local teams, and ensuring any marketing materials are on-brand and consistent.
Examine your martech stack and determine the five or so tools that you can’t live without. Prioritize those tools and see how you can consolidate the rest into those existing tools or new tools that offer multiple solutions in one.
You should also streamline communications with teams through collaboration software like Slack, video calls, and a project management solution.
Centralize content
When you’ve got a variety of local teams who are leveraging your brand assets and customizing them, it’s imperative that you put guardrails in place.
These guardrails would include style guidelines, a strict approvals process, and a digital asset management library.
By centralizing these assets and ensuring that local teams are customizing assets within established guidelines and using approved images, you can cement unified branding and brand integrity across your local teams.
Make modular email templates your best friend
When it comes to email marketing, small changes on the local team level can quickly threaten unified branding, whether it’s a clumsy coding mistake or a simple color switch.
Avoid these headaches by utilizing modular email templates. These templates will empower your local teams to build emails with ready-made components or modules, picking the specific modules they need for an email and cutting out any new build time.
These modules set automatic guardrails in place so local teams can’t use any images that aren’t pre-approved, use an off-brand color, or remove legally required elements, like the footer.
Adopt an accessible approvals process
On the other side of the coin, you don’t want your central team to be a massive roadblock for your local teams.
While local teams may need to seek approvals from the central team, this shouldn’t slow down processes or impede workflow.
Once an asset or email is ready for approval, there should be a clear set workflow in place that prompts each stakeholder to finish their stage in a timely manner.
If your team decides to implement a centralized asset management system and modular email templates, then the approvals process should be even easier, with most elements already set in stone.
The approvals process, and the entire email generation workflow, can be simplified and streamlined when you use the right software.
Interested in learning about how you could decrease email production time by 90% and increase output by 10X? Reach out today to schedule your personalized demo.
