By Mark Hilton
Have you ever had to wait for days while your creative design team makes small changes to something you need ASAP? If you’re a sales or marketing professional, you know that receiving branded marketing collateral can be a painfully slow process.
Customizing collateral often requires a constant back and forth with creative teams, and the final design won’t be approved for days or even weeks. This leaves many forced to create their own materials or simply proceed without their needed materials due to time constraints.
It’s not uncommon to find a bottleneck between centralized creative teams and regional marketing or sales teams. For companies with dozens or even hundreds of separate teams around the world, creating custom assets while ensuring brand compliance can be a major challenge.
Each team must have their own creative person to make timely edits, otherwise someone unskilled will be tasked with creating their own assets, often without oversight. This leaves smaller teams taking time and resources away from other important areas while struggling to create quality, localized material for their region.
In a recent survey of over 200 professionals who work in sales or business development, 63% said it takes several days to receive the collateral they need, with another 14% stating that it takes weeks or longer. And with 90% of sales professionals saying they need custom sales collateral in their role, you can see how this latency between teams is a huge issue. Because of this, 66% said they often proceed without the customized marketing materials they need, and 59% say they lose business by not having the marketing collateral they need. Branded, customizable content is a necessity, and 89% agreed life would be easier with templates. Nearly half of respondents (48%) believed they could also gain 30% or more in additional sales by having branded, customizable content templates to create sales collateral.
For example, consider KlubbSverige. KlubbSverige is the largest association of independent gyms in Sweden, operating with over 250 gyms across the country. The gym association provides structure to the business plans of individual gym owners with little to no experience in business administration. As CEO and owner of KlubbSverige Stefan Tingwall explains it, the problem is that the most independent and small-firm gym owners are primarily in the industry as fitness enthusiasts rather than as business-minded individuals. Tingwall saw the challenges the business owners were facing and took the opportunity to create a point-based fitness network for them to participate in.
However, as the network continued to grow to include upwards of 100 gyms across the country, KlubbSverige realized it was getting difficult to juggle the creation of individual campaigns for each gym tailored to fit each location’s audience and goals. While each campaign contained similar information and language, the collateral for each gym would not be the exact same. Although each gym was part of the KlubbSverige collective, each location was still independently owned with its own ideas for marketing and advertising collateral.
For these independent and small-owned gyms, it was impractical and costly to employ creative editors at each location. However, one small creative team for the whole company would also not be practical. For one team, it would be an overwhelming task to make and send the amount of edits required by KlubbSverige’s gyms, leading to gyms waiting weeks for edits that should take just a day. To keep up with the workload, KlubbSverige would need a cost-efficient, seamless solution that can be used by all members of the network.
To solve this creative bottleneck, KlubbSverige found a branded design template portal that could be accessed by each gym. KlubbSverige simply had to create and share editable design templates with all members of the network so they could easily and independently design their own advertising campaigns. There was no longer a need for an expansive design team or week-long approval processes. Templated designs empowered any non-creative team member to choose and create personalized marketing collateral for any event or promotion. An approval process ensures brand consistency, and now sales and marketing professionals get the edited and approved materials they need immediately. With the branded design templates, these Swedish gym owners can easily create marketing campaigns that fit their needs while also focusing on the things they love.
Branded marketing collateral that local teams can customize in just a few minutes can save days of communication delays between creative designers and regional teams. Quickly and easily modified templates help save time for the over 90% of sales professionals that use custom sales collateral in their role, while making their lives much easier. The efficiency of allowing anyone in an organization to have self-serve content creation on the fly is a game-changer for companies with multiple locations, and for the 59% of professionals that say they lose business by not having the marketing collateral they need.
About the Author
Mark Hilton is founder and CEO of Santa Cruz Software, which recently launched BrandingUI enabling in-house design teams and agencies to create branded marketing collateral that can be quickly and easily modified, localized and used by partners, resellers, sales and field marketing teams. Prior to Santa Cruz Software, he was at Adobe for 10 years. In his most recent role, he was the Vice President of Product Management for the Creative Suite products from the initial concept through Creative Suite 4 (CS4). He ran the InDesign business and product management teams from InDesign 1.5 through CS4.
Ingrid Maldine is a business writer, editor and management consultant with extensive experience writing and consulting for both start-ups and long established companies. She has ten years management and leadership experience gained at BSkyB in London and Viva Travel Guides in Quito, Ecuador, giving her a depth of insight into innovation in international business. With an MBA from the University of Hull and many years of experience running her own business consultancy, Ingrid’s background allows her to connect with a diverse range of clients, including cutting edge technology and web-based start-ups but also multinationals in need of assistance. Ingrid has played a defining role in shaping organizational strategy for a wide range of different organizations, including for-profit, NGOs and charities. Ingrid has also served on the Board of Directors for the South American Explorers Club in Quito, Ecuador.
