Technology for marketing has gone acronym and ‘solution’ bonkers over the last few years. We were just getting our heads around CRM and before you could say ‘big data’ we were supposed to be omnichannel experts. So for the first Brand Unify post I thought I would explain what a marketing portal is.
Who Needs a Marketing Portal?
A marketing portal is most effective under the circumstances of central marketing team of creators (the hub) and a number of satellite marketing users (spokes). Marketing users could be branches, franchises, partners, sales people etc. basically a distributed set of people that need to be able to conduct or deliver marketing locally. The central team have a constant battle in deciding what to do centrally in a one size fits all approach and what to allow their marketing users to do.
Central marketing teams in growing brands drown in a sea of emails and telephone requests from their marketing users. Requests for the latest product sheets, a bespoke email campaign, brand guidelines, corporate images. It doesn’t take much for the local marketer to take matters into their own hands and with all the best intentions strike devastating blows to your brand. Marketing managers either need to recruit an army of marketing assistants to deal with this or employ a solution that scales with the demand.
Where Does a Marketing Portal help?
A quality marketing portal provides a setting to not only host assets for marketing users, but empowers them to adapt materials for local needs. Capabilities you might expect to see in an marketing Portal include
Marketing Production – Marketing templates such as posters, direct mail and social templates with the ability to adapt images and text to a local market or promotion.
Brand Guidelines – hosted version of your brand guidelines complete with downloadable logo’s colour references and examples of best practice.
Digital Asset Management – Hosting of your corporate images, documents, videos, case studies, powerpoint decks with version and access control.
Brand Showcase – Communicate the brand in action with coverage of marketing events from product launches to most shared blog posts.
Benefits of using a Marketing Portal
1. Cut Marketing Administration and Waste
Brand Unify conducted a survey with 22 marketing managers yet to implement a marketing portal. The average time their team spend on marketing administration tasks was a staggering 47%. By making routine marketing activities self-serve your team are left to focus on the strategic activities to improve the brand. Furthermore those one size fits all campaigns and marketing materials that are out of date before they get used can be eradicated, dramatically cutting print and design costs.
2. Superior Marketing Results
Improved marketing ROI is achieved by allowing marketing users to adapt materials to territory trends and respond to market opportunities. Let users choose from 3 offer types or time a promotion with anticipated spikes in local footfall. Get campaigns to market quicker with the elimination of design processes.
3. Protect The Brand
Your marketing portal becomes the single version of the truth for marketing. Only centrally approved images are available, the latest PowerPoint decks are only a click away and product sheets have the latest benchmark figures in. Marketing templates ensure everything from proposals to linkedIn posts use the right version of the corporate logo, font and colour even after customisation.
I hope you have found this introduction to marketing resource management useful. Interested in how a marketing portal could help your business? Why not register for a demonstration of the Brand Unify marketing portal.
