Brand Consistency: What Does It Mean and Why Should You Care?
The more a printer understands the business of large-scale marketing, the better that printer will be able to anticipate their needs and win their business. Once you know what marketers care about you can emphasize how you solve for their challenges.
So today, let’s hone in on one aspect of brand marketing that you as a print provider can use as a selling point for your services: Brand Consistency
Marketers care about brand consistency. This invites a few questions:
- What is brand consistency?
- Why does it matter?
- How can a print service provider help with brand consistency?
- How do you use this information to win more clients?
Let’s start with the first two questions.
What is Brand Consistency and Why Does It Matter?
Brand consistency is the practice of keeping brand messaging consistent across all channels of communication. This means that whenever a customer interacts with a brand they see and read the same logos, colors, tone, and core messages. Over time, adherence to this practice will make a brand more recognizable and memorable to consumers.
On the flip side, failing to keep brand messaging consistent can make it harder for customers to develop a relationship with the brand and can tank brand awareness efforts. And brand awareness is fundamental to a brand’s success. This is what sets a brand apart from its competition, what drives growth, and what establishes a brand in their market.
How Can a Printer Help with Brand Consistency?
Modern web-to-print solutions are designed from top to bottom with the goal of making print companies better service providers for their customers. The biggest print buyers in the world want to work with providers who can leverage technology to provide better, faster, hyper-focused service.
Giving your customers powerful marketing portals to manage their marketing asset needs does just that.
There are 4 hallmarks of a good marketing portal:
- Intuitive and Easy User Experience
- Powerful Personalization Engine
- Consolidate ALL Marketing Assets, Not Just Print
- Protecting the Customer’s Brand, Budget and Inventory
With the right solution, print buyers can leverage their marketing portal to ensure brand consistency among their marketing assets. These modern print solutions can put guardrails on the use of digital assets and the personalization of variable print. Make sure agents are always using the latest logos and other digital assets. Control what can be edited and to what degree on every personalized product.
These controls make it possible for brands to have the best of both worlds: On-Demand Assets and Brand Protection. Sales and marketing members can personalize, download, and order their materials as they need them and the company doesn’t have to worry about brand inconsistency.
Know Your Customers Needs to Sell Your Solutions
If you use a modern web-to-print solution then you know how powerful a selling tool it can be. But having the solution and knowing how to leverage it to win more clients are not the same thing.
To pitch your marketing portal platform effectively, you must do two things:
- Know your audience and what problems they are looking to solve.
- Know how to talk about your platform in terms of solving those problems.
This applies to all the ways modern web-to-print platforms help marketers and brands, which is a long list. For brand consistency, simply knowing why it’s a big deal for marketers is the first step. The second is making sure you and your sales reps know what brand compliance controls your platform has and how to show that off during a demo.
In the grand scheme of things, brand consistency isn’t the biggest thing marketers are looking for in a print service provider. But brand compliance controls are one of the many little differences that can make a great marketing solution provider stand out from the crowd.
