What is Brand Management Software?

By: Jody Scheldt, Marketing Manager, 10/25/17

Brand Management is a critical priority for marketers who must ensure every touchpoint with a prospect or customer is consistent. Since content is often the first impression a customer has with our organization, every asset must reflect our brand promise in a cohesive way.

What is brand management?

Brand management is the process of setting standards and providing guidance for anyone developing branded materials, both internally and externally. Stakeholders here include vendor partners, printers, or agencies acting as brand and marketing extensions of your department. Brand management is a discipline that matters for anyone who represents your brand on any channel, including email, social media, print media, signage, and more.

Marketers who struggle to manage this task risk the integrity of their company’s image and promise in the context of the market. Brand management software helps an organization manage their brand globally and market locally while ensuring 100% brand control.

What does brand management software do?

The fundamental purpose of brand management software is to build and protect your brand across all the channels used to reach and engage with customers, prospects, and partners. Unlike internally-developed processes and systems, brand management software is a unique class of content management technology built especially for the challenges facing marketers.

From Gleanster’s Guide to Content Management Technologies:

“Marketers have unique and succinct needs when it comes to content management, but organizations are increasingly finding it difficult to manage the chaos of multi-channel content production with organically developed processes (and disparate technologies) that often fail to optimize marketing efficiency or effectiveness.”

Brand management software helps marketers manage content creation and execution, especially within large, distributed teams who are using an array of online and offline channels. To manage that complexity, one key component of this technology is how it scales as part of globally distributed teams and requirements. Often, it’s used by large enterprise back-office marketing operations, who keeps the content management engine running.

Why is brand management software important?

Brand management software provides a solid foundation for everyone in an organization to communicate services across any channel, on-brand, and in a compliant way. It serves three distinct purposes:

1. Protection for brand identity and integrity – Your brand is the sum of all touchpoints a customer has with your organization. That means every asset carries an enormous responsibility to maintain brand identity. If an asset is fragmented, with incorrect branding, messaging, or design, it carries a real risk of degrading the brand as a whole.
2. Sales enablement tool – Sales teams rely on speed and relevance. They need fast access to content that is not only on-brand, but relevant for the prospect or customer they’re serving. Brand management software can help a sales team get the approved assets they need – quickly – while giving them the ability to personalize emails, PowerPoint decks, handouts, or other asset types. Without it, sales teams tend to “go rogue” and create unapproved, noncompliant, fragmented assets in their attempt to be localized.
3. Self-serve marketing portal – With approved, branded assets available from anywhere, anytime, employees in the field spend less time asking the marketing team for collateral, and more time self-serving. This reduces the need for one-off asset creation, by allowing team members to customize approved assets from anywhere, anytime.

What industries use brand management software?

A variety of industries rely on brand management software to access, customize, and distribute their marketing content, including:

• Financial Services – A brand management solution gives agents, wealth managers, advisors, and branch offices permission-based access to regulatory compliant marketing pieces that can be edited any time with client information.
• Healthcare & Pharmaceutical – Companies like Coolsculpting by Zeltiq leverage cloud-based technology to access customizable, corporate-approved marketing pieces, enhancing their healthcare marketing strategies by giving users the ability to localize assets.
• Manufacturing – Brand management software helps manufacturers increase their speed-to-market, deliver unified messaging, and ensure regulatory compliance.
• Retail & Franchise – These organizations leverage an online marketing portal to ensure brand management with qualified partners, safeguard brand integrity, and foster collaborative growth with their sales teams.
• Education – Institutions use brand management software to reduce one-off creative requests, connect their entire organization with an on-demand technology, and boost brand awareness through increased marketing efficiency.
• Associations & Non-Profits – NPOs can create a seamless, cost-effective path for members, volunteers, or followers to find approved, hyper-customizable marketing assets. They can also maximize connectivity across borders by unifying the look and feel of their brand between geographically-separated offices.

Brand management software may be one of many marketing technologies available to a marketer, but when every customer expects a cohesive, unified experience, it’s clear why this has become a critical priority for organizations.