MarcomCentral VP of Marketing, Matt Roberts, discusses Marketing Strategy in 2020

By: The Weekly Trends

“Brand enablement (Branding) is a strategy that proactively ensures a strong brand personality, identity, and voice through every customer touchpoint. The core philosophy behind brand enablement is ensuring that every interaction with your brand is a good one. That can be difficult to achieve in reality, because there are hundreds of ways your brand is exposed and distributed in today’s world. Marketing is often responsible for the distribution of assets and so the best way to protect the brand is to centralize all outbound collateral. The centralization of content acts as not only a convenient repository for marketing, sales, and other teams, but also can come with workflows and rules to make sure branding standards are in place before distribution.

Brands are strongly tied to the company’s values and if the outbound efforts of marketing are misplaced then the values of the company will be misplaced as well. The value of a brand is sometimes difficult to measure, but the strategies behind brand enablement can be an easy win. We can all think of a time when a company has taken a wrong turn and the value of that company plummets. The realization of the value of the brand becomes so clear at the moment of its steep decline when it might not have been known before. Why is that?

The power of a brand grows over time. It is both a prerequisite and a culmination of a strong company. As a company’s brand grows, every aspect of the business improves. Revenue may increase because the awareness of the brand is strong, retention of customers is high because consumers give allegiance to companies they align with, and the presence of a strong brand can demonstrate control in a market. It takes years to get to a point where a brand can hold this much influence. Unfortunately, a single event can bring it crashing down and that’s why the value is evident after such a collapse.

Small businesses or startups benefit in a lot of ways because their brands have a clean slate. The most important thing they can do is to establish branding goals and organize a team to protect the brand. However, the main challenge small companies face is getting their name into the market and that struggle will only intensify if branding is inconsistent. Getting buy-in from the executive team and having them be aligned on the company’s branding goals is a major step in the right direction. Once that understanding is set, implementing processes will be easier and more efficient. A Digital Asset Management system is an easy way to implement brand enablement and help protect the brand – and having a DAM system is as valuable for a small company or a large enterprise. The scale of usage changes, but the core issues it solves for does not.

Contributor: Matt Roberts, VP of Marketing at MarcomCentral”

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