Nothing warms a brand manager’s heart more than hearing stories from their customers about distributed brand consistency. One loyal fan of a national doughnut and coffee chain recently stated in a review published on SailThru that, “Even though I live 3,000 miles away from [home], I love that I can still rely on a little taste of home.”
From the customer’s point of view, they’re not only glad to have access to a decent cup of coffee, but also enjoy the feeling and memories that visiting their local outlet of the national chain provides. This quote speaks volumes about how the franchisees are succeeding. Whether or not the customer realizes it, the “taste” of home is about more than coffee and pastries. It also involves the look and feel of the local store’s signage, and their ability to offer menus and coupons that look just like the customer’s home store. In many ways, this type of customer feedback is evidence of the value of brand templates.
Brand Templating Does the Hard Work for Your Local Marketers
Your brand’s local marketers are all individuals, and they may have some wildly different demographics they’re selling to. Yet, at the end of the day, they’re all ultimately on the same page. They’re all franchise owners, dealership owners, or local managers, and they’re trying to turn brand recognition into local sales. Templates allow your brand management team to help hundreds or thousands of local representatives do exactly that.
The most effective brand templates for digital, print, and email provide the foundation for local marketing. Your local marketers don’t have to face the dreaded blank page or learn how to use Adobe Creative tools. They don’t have to match artwork to your campaign messaging. They can simply find the right brand template in your local marketing automation tool (LMA), swap out the text that needs to be changed, and if applicable, add local imagery. The result is professional-looking marketing that’s consistent with your national brand.
Previously, we’ve delved into the “how” of template-based local marketing with Creating and Managing Marketing Collateral Templates Local Dealers Love. Today, we’re focusing on the types of brand templates that your local marketers need. We’ve included a few ideas for how almost any kind of distributed brand can achieve efficiency in its marketing collateral management.
The Best Distributed Marketing Templates By Industry
1. Restaurant Franchises
- Menus: Despite the growth of digital signage, the paper menu isn’t going anywhere. Update your menu templates often, and allow your locals to enhance their menus with regional specials.
- Table Toppers: Keep your diners engaged with table toppers that can be used to promote beverages, desserts, your loyalty program, or other localized concepts.
- Rewards Cards and Check Presenters: With an LMA tool that integrates directly with print vendors, who can create professionally-printed items like gift cards, your local marketers can promote their membership programs in style.
- Loyalty Emails: Allows local outlets to easily inform loyal customers of upcoming deals or new menu items. Guaranteed to drive repeat business and build lifelong fans.
- Event Flyers: These direct mail or in-store flyers can advertise an upcoming Mother’s Day brunch buffet, limited-time student discounts, or special local events.
2. Fashion Retailers
- Sale Cards: Allow your local marketers to mark clearance racks or promote seasonal discounts with highly-visible, store-branded cards that announce discounts.
- Window Displays: Signage in your windows allows your local fashion retailers to promote seasonal campaigns or gorgeous imagery from a national look book.
- Direct mail pieces that include personalized offer codes: Offer time-sensitive discounts to target local customers and drive repeat business.
- Email: Localize your email campaigns to encourage local participation for in-store events.
3. Hotel Franchises
- Local Area Maps: Gives local franchisees the ability to provide guests with local area maps directing them to recommended dining and amenities and enhances the local experience.
- Rack Cards: Rack cards, in-room or in-lobby, displays can present a range of local entertainment and sightseeing options.
- Keycard Holders: Some hotel and hospitality groups update keycard holders seasonally to promote campaigns or provide important information to guests
- Print Ads: Using print advertising in the lobby and elevators can support visual consistency in guest experiences, and update guests with any special events/promotions happening at the hotel.
- Digital Banner Ads: For both on-site and paid advertising, digital banner ads can promote your hotel’s specials or upcoming regional events.
- Landing Pages: Local marketers need to quickly create landing pages to reflect special deals or hotel availability for events or other campaigns.
- OOH: Out-of-home advertising can be used throughout your local marketer’s region, on billboards, and in the airport.
4. Car Dealerships
- New Model Year Launch Ads: By providing brand templates and photography to dealerships, you can support professional, brand-compliant advertising of new models via digital, print, and email marketing.
- Dealership Signage: Brand templates can be used to support window signage, tabletop signs, or signs for promoting vehicles.
- Radio Spots and TV Spots: Providing scripts, audio, or video to local dealerships can enhance their ability to perform professional, multimedia advertising.
- Direct mailers for Special Rebate Offers: Direct mailers advertising your national brand rebates may need room for modification by local dealers to reflect their own pricing or other dealership specials.
5. Insurance Branches
- Fact Sheets and Actuarial Descriptions: Not only can fact sheets provide convenient access to accurate information for your local franchisees, using brand templates with content controls stops local marketers from modifying the required disclosures. Less legal risk for your brand!
- Flyers and Collateral: For B2B insurance groups, flyers and a broad mix of collateral may be used to promote the business at trade shows, chamber of commerce events, or other in-person events.
- Banner Ads: For local insurance agents who choose to do paid online advertising, banner ad templates make it much easier to promote their local presence.
6. Spa/Wellness Franchises
- Rate Cards: By providing local franchisees with the ability to edit services offered and rates, you provide flexibility to reflect their staffing and local pricing.
- Facebook Ads: Graphics and advertising for Facebook and other social media support both paid and organic local social media promotion.
- In-Store Posters: Providing nationally-branded templates enables your local franchisees to display campaign concepts, promote national specials, and easily cross-sell services to customers.
How Do Brand Templates Affect Local Marketing Results?
Good marketing integrates seamlessly into a customer's experience with the brand.
Positive customer experiences are damaged when they notice unprofessional, off-brand local marketing. They’ll notice a hand-written sign or a pixelated logo on something one of your franchisees slapped together in Microsoft Word. It’s only the very worst, and occasionally the very best marketing that stands out at all.
Brand managers don't need to worry about customers knowing that marketing designs were created with brand templates. Using a local marketing tool with strong, responsive capabilities can prevent skewed images and other design errors that can happen when local affiliates try to modify the design. When your local marketing feels authentic and on-brand, local outlets will see a boost in foot traffic and sales.
See the power of dynamic templating with BrandLab! BrandLab helps empower local marketers across locations to deploy beautiful brand-compliant marketing campaigns.
Distributed Marketing Templates Streamline Local Marketing Efforts
The most effective brand managers use templates, and their local marketers are more likely to create compliant beautiful collateral. Almost everything that your franchisees and marketers use to promote your brand at the local level could benefit from being templated to achieve national consistency and professional-looking designs. Providing your locals with the raw materials they need, from hospitality rack cards to restaurant bill presenters, can enable them to execute local advertising well, and quickly.
Your local advertising needs to be perfect, even after your franchisees or local marketers have added their contact information. CampaignDrive by Pica9 is purpose-built to fill this need. Graphic designers can import templates in seconds from InDesign, and set rules for typography, image section, and image resizing. Once your layouts are transformed into intuitive brand templates, your local marketers can deploy them exactly when and where they need.
To learn how some of the world's largest distributed brands use templates and other local marketing technology to improve distributed brand consistency and boost sales, check out Distributed Marketing on Steroids: The Brand Manager’s Guide to Designing and Managing Local Marketing Assets Without Breaking a Sweat.
