Two of the areas where many companies, both fledgling and experienced, tend to falter are with their marketing and branding efforts. These two elements go hand-in-hand, but it can often be difficult for business owners to switch gears and learn to embrace and use them to their fullest potential. This is often because the business owners and managers are trained in their company’s specialty—they make certain products or offer certain types of services. Marketing and branding are not always part of their wheelhouse.
Unless they hire a marketing team—which is too expensive for many up-and-coming companies—they may not get the reach they need. Fortunately, there are options available that can make marketing and managing the marketing aspect of a business much easier. Even if you do have marketing personnel on staff, the right tools and features can help to make their jobs easier, so they are more productive.
Consider the Marketing Management Platform from FuseBox One, for example. You’ll find a host of tools that can help to improve your efforts. It will allow you to upload, store, organize, and align your marketing and digital assets. However, it offers far more than that.
Marketing and branding are essential. Below, you will find some of the ways that you can use tools from FBO to make these aspects of the job easier and more efficient.
How much time and energy are you spending creating your marketing materials? The written content isn’t usually difficult to create, but getting the design elements for things like brochures, flyers, cards, and other branded assets can be time-consuming. This is especially true for those who do not have any graphic design skills.
When you have the right tools in place, such as the Marketing Management Platform from FBO, it removes the hard work. You can use product templates that are always the right size, and you can then simply add the content that you need.
Using these product templates offers some great benefits. One of the benefits is that it will reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get your work done since the templates are ready to go. Even if you aren’t an artist or graphic designer, you and others on your team can handle the work, and you can do it far more efficiently.
The use of templates also means that you won’t have to bring aboard a graphic designer for your team. Whether you are hiring them full-time or as freelancers, this has the potential to be costly. Product templates will cut costs significantly, which should be music to any company’s ears. The templates can be used again and again. Just change the artwork and content, and you have an entirely new piece.
Today, you can’t forget about social media. It doesn’t matter what type of company you are running. You need to have accounts on social media for several reasons. For starters, you must have social media to help boost your brand recognition. Your competitors, regardless of industry, will likely have social media accounts. You need to have them, as well.
Of course, you need to do more than just have social media accounts. They have to be properly branded with the type of content you are posting and with the images you use. Your banners and images should be the same on your social media channels as they are with your other online and offline branding. After all, you need to stay on brand when you are using these channels. The right tools will help to make this possible.
If you aren’t using the same colors, style, and images, it can become confusing for your potential customers. They won’t always be sure whether they are on the right social media account or not.
What social media accounts should you have? Although you may not need to be on every social media site that exists, you do want to be part of at least some of the largest and best-known. This includes Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at a minimum.
Social media provides you with plenty of opportunities where you can better engage with your customers. You can communicate with them directly, write interesting posts, direct them to your website and blog, and even add video content.
Digital asset management may not seem like the most thrilling topic, but it is one of the most important in today’s business world. Consider the sheer volume of content your company already has and will continue to develop in the realm of digital assets.
This includes your logos, artwork, photos, videos, audio, and all of the other items you need to keep, so you can use it in your marketing, social media, blog, website, printed material, etc. The volume of content continues to grow.
While it is nice to have all of those assets available, if you aren’t storing and managing them properly, you will run into a few problems. It will be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to find what you need. Important items will go missing because they are put onto a different storage system or because someone accidentally deleted them, and you didn’t have a backup.
Without proper digital management, you will find that it’s easy to become overwhelmed. The employees who have to work with these digital tools, regardless of the capacity, will become frustrated with the lack of organization.
A digital asset management tool will make it possible to store, organize, and track all of the digital assets that the company uses. It also makes it easier to find and use those assets when they are required, such as for the creation of marketing materials. It’s easy to be sure you are using the latest versions of the file, too, so you don’t inadvertently use an old logo or photo that is no longer being used.
The platform can contain all manner of multimedia content that you may need to store. This might include videos you’ve done regarding your products or services, audio files, podcasts, photos, logos, drawings, tables, charts, etc. You can make sure that everything is properly stored.
Think about how a digital asset management tool can benefit your company.
You won’t have to worry about wasting time recreating pieces that were lost. Since everything is easier to find, it also means that productivity at the company should increase since the assets will be so easy to find.
With some of the top-quality marketing asset management tools, you can see how the various assets are being used and how effective they are. This will provide you with some insight as to the types of marketing materials to create in the future.
The sooner you get one of these tools set up in your business the better off you will be. After all, you are constantly creating more assets that will need to be organized and stored. Getting on board now will help to give you an edge on competitors that have not yet taken this step.
FuseBox One has a range of sales enablement and marketing operations tools that can help to make your life easier. One of those is called Expression, which is a feature that allows you to create beautiful, personalized marketing materials that can be used for both print and digital marketing.
This tool will make it easy to design personalized images and graphics to create products that are individualized to the recipient. It’s this personalization that helps to set this tool apart and make it such a smart move for marketers. When people receive personalized material, whether it’s through direct mail or online, they are more likely to stop and read it. Personalization can help to increase conversions and build loyalty.
The system is easy to use, and you will find a host of images available through the FuseBox One system. However, you might want to go a step beyond the provided images and choose one of your own. This is often a good idea, as it helps to make the piece unique to your business.
One of the other nice features of the tool is that it’s so simple to use thanks to the intuitive interface. You don’t have to worry about being a graphic designer, and you don’t need to spend a lot of time trying to learn a new piece of software. It should be possible for anyone to create eye-catching materials in a matter of minutes.
The marketing team will find that this tool and help to reduce the amount of time they are spending on these types of projects. They will appreciate the help it can provide.
One of the other benefits of using a system like FuseBox One is that it allows for direct job printing of your marketing materials. If you are going to be using direct mail marketing, or even if you are just making marketing materials to hand out at a convention or show, this will be beneficial.
You can use the same portal that you use for digital asset management and the other tools to submit artwork for print production. It’s fast and simple to get a print job going, and the process tends to be fast, even with larger orders.
Why would you want to use printed marketing materials in an increasingly digital world? The answer is simple. It still works, and it works quite well. Direct mail that’s sent to someone’s home is still typically read, especially if it’s something that interests the recipient. When you personalize the mail, as mentioned above, it increases the likelihood of the person reading the mail and taking action even further.
Here’s something that you might not have thought much about with marketing, but it can be a huge benefit. With the tools offered through FBO, you can create custom maps with either one pin or multiple pins. Why are these maps so helpful for your business? If you are operating a brick-and-mortar store, the answer should be obvious. People need to know how to get to your business.
In addition to having your address, using a Google Map on your site will give people a physical look at your location on the map. It makes finding your location easier. Consider that most mobile searches are related to the location of a business, this is even more important.
Having a map will also work in your favor psychologically. It encourages people to visit your business. When they know where you are located, nothing is stopping them from going. Even if they don’t end up going to your business, they might still end up spending more time exploring your website and learning more about what you offer.
The Google Maps tool can display images along with your business. The images that could show up on the Google Map could be images offered by your business or it could be images from your customers.
These are just some of the reasons that Google Maps will benefit your business and help with your marketing efforts. Consider making use of this powerful tool for your brick-and-mortar business.
In addition to having the right tools and tricks, you also need to be sure that you have an outstanding team working on marketing. They need to be able to collaborate with the sales team and others in the company to create the perfect marketing materials and to develop winning campaigns.
By providing a good marketing team with a platform like that offered from FuseBox One, it becomes easier to get a better handle on your marketing at every level. Look into the other benefits that FBO can offer, including creating promotional items, and see what it could do for you. Talk with the head of your marketing team about the solution, as well, and show them how it could benefit their team and how they are handling digital assets. Have questions? Schedule a call to learn more.
Resources: https://www.fuseboxone.com/services/#MP
https://evolve-systems.com/how-google-maps-can-benefit-your-business/