Have you ever wondered how the world’s largest banks, credit unions and financial services firms use online brand guidelines to protect their brands and collaborate with their extended teams? Download the IntelligenceBank “10 Steps to Protecting Your Financial Brand” infographic to learn how:
- Online brand guidelines can cost efficiently keep your entire team on brand.
- Digital asset management can help a geographically dispersed workforce collaborate.
- Greater brand control can be gained over local area marketing design.
And most importantly, you will learn how online brand guidelines can aid marketing departments with a systematic and measurable way to centralize creative and manage brand compliance with workflows and approvals.
Online Brand Guidelines
Your brand guidelines are critical for setting the stage of your organization’s value proposition. They detail the framework which governs the design, tone and composition of your branding.
Your team must be able to refer to that framework at all times because it dictates the required content of a logo, blog, website, advertisement, marketing collateral, and all other executions your organization undertakes. Using an online brand portal ensures that stakeholders have access to a single source of truth and that your brand is consistent to avoid confusing your audience.
An online brand guidelines platform showcases the technical and strategic aspects of your brand with quick downloads of tools and assets which protect against off-brand creative mistakes and excuses for “not knowing.”
1. Digital Asset Management is Your Single Source of Truth for Brand-Approved Content
Digital assets, like photos, videos and other types of creative content media, are integral parts of your marketing. They need to be curated, edited and approved to reflect the true attributes of your brand to ensure compliance.
The challenge is that, even when a suite of digital assets are collected, they can often be difficult to access by your internal teams and creative agency partners. This can result in content that is off-brand, which can lead to inconsistencies.
A centralized, digital asset management platform can solve this by creating an accessible library of approved creative content, making it easy for your team and agency partners to utilize assets that are relevant.
2. Advertising Disclaimer Engine for Making the ‘Fine Print’ Everyone’s Job
Financial services marketers have the added complexity of abiding by specific regulations and legal requirements. Part of this includes placing relevant financial disclaimers onto marketing campaigns to provide further information and guidance to customers.
However, often there are multiple disclaimers that are used in different contexts. They also get frequently updated too.
Having an advertising disclaimer platform provides a self-service portal that can make marketing compliance simple by informing your team regarding which disclaimers go on which ads, across specific media, all while alleviating bottlenecks with legal approval.
3. Creative and Project Briefs to Streamline Content Creation
When collaborating between internal teams or external agencies on marketing campaigns, it’s a best practice to provide a creative brief (or project brief) that details the objectives and requirements of the project.
When people are given key messages, guidelines and goals upfront, it improves the accuracy of execution and streamlines the process.
Establishing a standard operating procedure for your team to adequately brief in projects and route approvals to the appropriate people for sign off will create a culture of brand compliance and efficiency.
4. Creative Templates to Power Local Marketing Initiatives
Similar to providing standard briefing procedures, building creative templates offers a reliable framework of pre-approved designs and layouts for all marketing campaigns.
This ensures your local marketing executions are always on brand and meet your financial brand’s standards, without grammatical errors, nasty fonts, bad clip art and misinformation. Retail banks that use this capability ensure that production is not only is efficiently localized, but creative quality is never compromised.
5. Brand Team News: To Inspire, Engage and Keep Everyone on the Same Page
The key to protecting your brand lies in educating your teams and creative agency partners. The more examples and knowledge they have, the easier it is to create consistent marketing content in a more efficient way.
To do this, send out regular branding updates which showcase best practice case studies of on-brand creative. You can also link it back to your online brand guidelines and digital asset management platform to provide more information.
These news snapshots of financial branding executions can be inspiring and improve compliance at the same time.
6. Content Risk Scoring to Elevate Content That Needs Priority Review
Financial service marketers must both produce relevant content to niche audiences, while ensuring brand and regulatory compliance. With digital channels exploding alongside the rising influence of the risk department, not getting fined over a compliance breach is equally important as producing great, on-brand creative. It’s the classic balance between efficiency and compliance.
To solve this, implement a system which automatically scores creative content based on a standing risk profile to elevate certain creative to the team for sign off. This ensures the highest profile and riskiest content is given priority and the time it requires.
7. Automate the Marketing Inbox to Save Your Team on Departmental Administrative Time
Traditionally speaking, internal teams and external agencies constantly request basic branding assets from the marketing team. However, this can be inefficient on both ends, as it can be a constant distraction and a tedious process.
In a world today where automation is simple to implement and can have such powerful results, it’s time to utilize it to facilitate more efficient communications between teams by enabling people to self-serve their requests, and lessen distractions through a dedicated marketing inbox.
8. Dashboard Reporting to Ensure You Maximize Brand Spend and Usage Rights
Strong brands come from being well-informed at all times. An automated dashboard that collates data about brand operations and compliance, interprets results and displays it to your team allows you to seamlessly manage brand budgets, talent usage rights and the status of brand approvals.
This way, insights are utilized and marketing opportunities aren’t missed.
9. Campaign Calendars & Kanban Boards for an Overall View of Campaigns in Flight
Marketing calendars provide a visual and accurate high-level overview of all brand activities planned out over specific timeframes. This ensures there is no overlap, message confusion or duplication, and everyone works to the same deadlines.
Does your company use any of the powerful brand practices above?
Implementing all of the steps will have a profound impact on protecting and managing your financial brand, while streamlining your marketing and promotional activities.