Why is a single source of truth important for your brand?
And why is it important for your business?
A single source of truth provides a one-and-done solution for marketing leaders struggling to make each piece of communication on-brand. Even if you haven’t heard about this concept before, don’t worry.
In this article, let’s learn why you need a single source of truth for your brand and the most hassle-free way to implement it for your business.
Why is it essential to create a consistent brand experience for all stakeholders?
Have you ever wondered how a business can safeguard itself from being blown away by the strong wind of an ever-growing competition?
The truth is that businesses have no real power unless they work towards becoming and staying strong brands. Building a solid online brand is about creating systems that offer consistent brand experiences to all company stakeholders.
Every piece of brand communication creates an indelible impression on customers and stakeholders like employees, agencies, sales partners, and journalists.
The visual and verbal identity of your brand as determined by its core values, together form a distinct brand identity.
Here’s the bottomline: as a CMO you need to ensure that all communication including sales emails, digital ads, employee presentations and webinars, are all, on brand.
Brand consistency is the good old way to build trust with stakeholders and retain them as customers and partners of your business.
The challenges for marketers
If you’re a CMO, I empathize with what you go through trying to get every single person associated with your organization on the same page. That single document which talks about how your brand should speak and behave.
- Your business is growing. The number of employees, teams, and partners are growing. And you don’t know how to get them all to communicate in one single voice — your brand voice.
- You create a brand guideline document but getting everyone in the team to follow this bible is like climbing Mount Everest. Sounds familiar?
- You go one step further, and create a collateral approval process. Next, you end up pulling out all your hair figuring how to reply to hundreds of approval mail messages flooding your inbox. And if that’s not enough,
- After all the hard work you put in every single day, you realize that as a CMO of a company, your life has boiled down to just one thing: telling people when and how to use the latest version of your brand logo.
Seems like nobody’s ever bothered about being on-brand except you and the marketing team? Are you still befuddled about how you reached this despicable situation without even planning for it?
Single source of truth for digital branding: what does it mean?
“Single source of truth” means everything in one place. So you can put your brand guideline and your brand assets in a central location.
- A place where all stakeholders can access the latest versions of a company’s brand assets easily and effectively.
- It’s a hub where you also provide the brand guidelines to each of the stakeholders so they can use the content assets without any confusion whatsoever.
Here’s the rub: you can create an online single source of truth that enables all users to access and utilize the relevant content anywhere and at any time.
Why is a single source of truth important?
As we discussed earlier, ensuring that all brand communication is consistent, should not feel like plucking stars from the sky—that’s why you need a single source of truth to work as a ready reckoner for all company stakeholders.
- You need to have a productive mechanism to make sure all stakeholders have access to only the relevant branded content assets.
- Imagine a situation where an agency partner couldn’t meet the campaign deadline because they didn’t have access to the newest version of the brand logo? Or if a sales agent could not get the latest sales presentation while working on a big prospective deal closure? Such situations can be embarrassing not just for the marketing team but also your brand.
- A single source of truth does away with all that chaos connected with making communication pieces consistent with your brand’s core values.
- It gives access to all branded content assets along with detailed know-how on how to use each.
With a single source of truth, you can create a homogeneous brand culture throughout your organization and with external stakeholders like panthers, agencies, distributors, and the press. It helps make day-to-day marketing activities a breeze. And lastly, a single source of truth allows you to engage with all stakeholders so you can have a solid and lasting relationship with them.
Implementing a single source of truth with Brand Portals
Here is the brighter side of it all: you can implement a single source of truth by choosing to go with an automated brand portal solution. Such a platform helps you create a dedicated online portal that stores your branded content assets in a single online location.
Are you ready to put all that crazy email exchange behind you?
- A Brand Portal does not require you to have the technical knowledge to create a resource center for your brand needs.
- It’s a hub that displays your brand guidelines communicating to each stakeholder on how and when to use a branded content asset.
- A Brand Portal gives you complete control over each content asset. So you can manage users and permissions from wherever you are and see who downloaded which content asset.
- At the same time, a Brand Portal easily integrates with your website or your data centre, such as an ERP or a digital asset management solution.
In short, you can build a single source of truth for your brand and make it uncomplicated for company stakeholders to access and use brand assets the right way. At the same time, you can put together an automated and painless system that ensures that every communication that goes out is on-brand!
Curios what a Brand Portal can look like?
Take a look at the DEMO Oochiali da Sole Brand Portal:
With Smint.io Portals, you can build a Brand Portal in 5 easy steps — a hub that works as a single source of brand truth. Smint.io Brand Portals are cost-effective and work well for small as well as large enterprises. Moreover, because we put your needs first, you can fully customize the Brand Portal according to your business requirements.
Are you looking to build a single source of truth for your brand?
