Imagine you’re in between meetings, mindlessly scrolling on Instagram, and come across an ad on the platform. Do you immediately recognize the company based on the colors, fonts, or visuals used in the ad? If so, they’ve succeeded at maintaining a strong brand identity.
Unfortunately when teams outside of the marketing department are scrambling to get projects out the door, brand identity can be an afterthought. Either they don’t have access to the right assets and tools they need, or they don’t think it’s important for their work. This could result in client-facing materials that don’t align with the business— and it’s more common than you might think.
In order to ensure consistent branding across each department, companies will usually implement some form of brand management.
What is brand management and why is it important?
Brand management is a crucial marketing strategy that focuses on shaping and overseeing a brand from creation and development to evolution over time. This includes brand identity development, ongoing monitoring, updating, and analyzing of brand performance, as well as reinforcing brand goals, design, identity, and values at every touchpoint. Typically, a creative director or marketing executive would own the brand image and enforce brand management across the organization.
The ultimate goal of brand management is to build or improve awareness of a brand, ensuring its voice is effectively communicated to and perceived by the public. Some benefits to brand management include:
Establishing brand identity
Brand management helps define and communicate what a brand stands for, its values, and its unique selling propositions. This clear identity distinguishes the brand from competitors and resonates better with the ideal target audience.
Building trust and loyalty
Consistent and positive brand management establishes trust and loyalty among customers. When a brand delivers on its promises and maintains a strong, reputable presence, it cultivates long-term relationships with clients and prospects.
Differentiation in the market
In competitive markets, effective branding helps a company differentiate itself by conveying its unique attributes. This can help set them apart from competitors in the space and influence purchasing decisions in their favor.
Enhancing perceived value
A well-managed brand can be perceived as offering higher value compared to competitors. If your brand looks more polished and professional than others, it could put your offering on a pedestal, and lead to increased customer acquisition and retention.
Brand management in Beautiful.ai
Believe it or not, brand management is just as important in a presentation as it is in an Instagram advertisement. Any client or public-facing company deck is an extension of the brand, and as such should fall in line with other marketing or sales materials. This means that there should be a cohesive flow between presentations, sales collateral, website design, and ads.
Because the average employee doesn’t have advanced design skills, departments will rely on their marketing team to finesse their presentations for them before they hit send. But that’s where designers get bogged down and the marketing bottleneck is created.
Here’s the solution you’ve been looking for to help maintain brand integrity in company decks: Beautiful.ai.
Beautiful.ai’s presentation software gives teams the tools they need to create professional decks— no design experience necessary.
Keep everybody on brand
If you’re worried about someone using Comic Sans in a company presentation, this is for you. With Beautiful.ai’s Team plan, you’re able to lock in the right logo and brand elements across your organization, so that non-designers aren’t piecing together fonts and colors for each slide. This means that every deck in the organization will only use approved brand colors, typography, imagery, and logos from start to finish. By setting Shared Slides and Shared Themes, managers are giving teammates the guardrails they need to stay visually consistent from pitch to pitch.
Owners and librarians of the Team account can control who can create templates—and who can access sensitive slides— to ensure the branding and content is dialed in.
With these features, team members can plug in their content unique to their deck without having to worry about starting from a blank slate. This helps to eliminate the marketing bottleneck because in-house designers don’t need to quality-check every deck before it goes out the door. Teams can sync, collaborate, and sign-off on deck designs in real-time to ensure every presentation is on-brand, everytime.
