On-brand document software (also known as document branding software) are very helpful in easily organizing, finding, managing, sharing and deploying your brand and marketing content, as well as ensuring compliance. Here are six key benefits of using document branding software.
Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand
As Bill Taylor, co-founder of US business innovation magazine Fast Company, says in this Harvard Business Review article, “Your brand is your culture, your culture is your brand.” Having a strong brand presence within the company is as important as a strong presence outside in front of the customers. When workers feel associated with the workplace and there is a unifying theme or unity in the work, job satisfaction increases as a result, and they are more likely to put in better efforts and stay with the company for longer. Reinforcing the company branding plays an important role in this process and a document branding software subtly helps that. When all the documents are standardized, it lends a sense of credibility and formality to the workplace — which is of importance in building a brand culture.
Keeping Data Up To Date
Keeping track of changes in templates in a large organization can be troublesome. This is made worse by the fact that branding needs to be applied to a large variety of documents and campaigns. There are times when only a portion of the templates need to be changed, and this should be reflected across templates of all document types at once — otherwise it would cause inconsistencies across documents. Keeping data consistent across documents is not only a concern from a branding point of view, but also from a legal standpoint. At times it might simply be a design change, but sometimes it is an important update like changes to links to policies such as Terms of Service or changes in designated signatories. With a template management software, such changes can be pushed across the organization all at once.
Smooth Transition In Rebranding
Any brand, big or small, has to change their face and public outlook every once in a while to stay fresh and relevant — maybe to attract a new kind of audience, or stay ahead of the competition, or change the public perception of the company. All of a company’s reputation is embodied in the brand name, and the prospect of overhauling it seems like an insurmountable task when the stakes are so high. The chaos surrounding a major rebranding can be tamed with the help of a document branding software. The key is to make changes across the board at once while maintaining the authenticity. Ensuring that documents like presentation decks, contracts and spreadsheets, which often get overlooked in a rebrand, are also updated to reflect the new brand is necessary.
Time Saver
The time it takes for a new design to reach a presentation deck from a designer’s desk can be crucial for the success of a campaign. Testing out the new template is also important. A document branding software helps in quick deployments of new templates and thus can enable teams to iterate quickly on branding material. Managers often find that the content produced by the staff is not on-brand or not fully aligned with the brand’s visual identity. This causes major delays in campaigns or even general office work. A document branding software prevents this too.
Integrated Workflow
Some document branding software support deep integration into Office 365 and can serve as a focal point of template management in the organization. Be it image library management, pulling in facts and data about the projects or the company into a spreadsheet or writing an official letter with company branding, all of it can be done right from within Office 365 or Sharepoint. Data can be pulled from various cloud storage providers like Box, Google Drive and Onedrive. This makes it possible to manage it all through one simple interface, lessening the need for IT involvement.
Software applications that do not have out-of-the-box integration would need to at least support API integration. This allows businesses to integrate their on-brand software with other niche third-party applications. A recruitment agency, for instance, would use such an integration to connect with their HR management or background checking app while an accounting company would integrate this app with their invoicing management tools.
Managing Legal Compliance
Document branding software makes it possible to easily manage the legal compliance of an increasingly mobile workforce. It is possible to oversee and handle the requirements of multiple regulatory frameworks from one interface — which makes it very easy to ensure that employees are playing by the rules automatically. It is not possible to measure each document individually to ensure they are correct as mandated by the regulations otherwise.
Main image courtesy of Kaboompics.