According to Sprout Social, "employees are a brand's best advocates." They can help turn one-time buyers into engaged customers. Employees in all departments have a part to play in increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Still, they will only help drive brand loyalty if they understand the value of brand building and are actively engaged in it.

Employee engagement with your brand helps build an emotional connection between your team and the brand. It drives a sense of pride and ownership in the work they do to represent the brand. Without whole-company engagement, it's impossible to align on the values, vision, and messaging needed to achieve a consistent company identity that resonates with potential customers.

Companies typically go through three levels of brand engagement:

• Low engagement: Brand is seen as a "marketing strategy," with other team members assuming that brand is nothing more than your company logo and color palette.
• Medium engagement: Other teams are starting to engage in branding conversations to ensure their work looks on-brand. Engagement levels vary across the business.
• High engagement: All employees understand the importance of investing in your brand. Each department understands its role in communicating your values to potential customers and the market.

Companies need to increase the number of employees and departments that work on their brand before achieving the high level of engagement required to increase brand awareness (and the customer engagement that comes with it). Investing in brand-building software like Frontify can increase employee engagement and drive a cultural shift within your organization to make the brand an ongoing company-wide priority. Here are three ways that software like Frontify can help your company achieve this.

1. Improve Access to Brand Materials

Brand asset management software like Frontify provides a centralized home for all your brand assets (individual elements like your logo and complete designs like social media adverts) for your team and external partners. The platform helps your team easily find and use the materials they want by becoming your single home for everything brand-related.

Borussia Dortmund (BVB) uses Frontify to give their employees from all locations the ability to find and use the same brand assets. Frontify helped them improve employee engagement with the brand – even during significant international growth. Dennis Thom, head of marketing & sponsoring at BVB, said, “Frontify allows anyone – with or without design skills – to quickly access our brand world, download brand logos, fonts, and assets, and create brand visuals all on their own.” He added, “Frontify helps us bring our globalized brand identity to life. Coordinating projects with our partners, worldwide, is now a lot easier.”

Making it easier for employees (and external partners such as freelancers and agencies) to access and use brand elements and materials in their work helps increase brand engagement. It turns your brand from a nebulous concept into something concrete because employees engage with your brand in a practical way.

2. Increase Brand Adoption Across the Business

Brand ownership is the collective responsibility to develop and maintain your brand. Ownership shouldn't lie with just one person (like your CEO) or team (like marketing). Instead, every employee and department should feel like a co-owner of the brand, which is why widespread brand adoption is important. The more touchpoints employees have with your brand, the easier it is to create a shared culture of brand ownership across the company.

Improving access to branded materials, combined with an increased understanding of the importance of your brand, helps to drive increased brand adoption in all departments, from sales to product. A brand engagement platform creates a shared company culture of brand ownership as more people start using the platform – and your brand materials.

We analyzed our customer accounts to understand exactly how Frontify helps increase employee brand adoption. We found that, on average, companies start using our brand management platform with just 12 monthly active users in their first month. But by the time they've been using our platform for six months, they have 67 active users.

We see this increase in brand adoption play out for all our customers as they gradually bring more and more users onto the Frontify platform. For example, Vodafone currently has over 3,400 users on their Frontify platform. More than 1,000 of those users are active on the platform every month, showing how frequently and consistently Frontify is used by the organization.

As you get more employees using your brand engagement platform, you see a similar increase in the number of employees who understand and embrace your brand. This helps to build a shared company culture of brand ownership, with more employees using branded materials in their work every week.

3. Improve Messaging & Visual Consistency Across All Departments

To provide a joined-up customer experience, you need all departments to use consistent messaging, visuals, and tone when communicating with customers (or producing customer-facing assets). Consistency is essential for building brand recognition, which helps increase customer engagement with your products and brand.

A brand engagement platform like Frontify provides employees with marketing-approved templates to use when creating their own visuals and branded assets. This enables all employees to create their own materials – from marketing campaigns to sales decks – safe in the knowledge that they’re staying on-brand. Frontify gives employees the confidence to create their own assets rather than waiting for the designers to provide them with the materials they need.

Swiss broadcasting company SRF uses Frontify to enable their 200 social media content creators to independently create the materials they need for each social media platform or account. The SRF team explained, “Digital & Print Templates allows different editorial teams at SRF to produce their visual social media content, autonomously, regardless of their individual tool ecosystem, installed applications, or skill set.”

Frontify’s Brand Engagement Platform Increases Brand Adoption & Delivers 367% ROI

A strong internal brand and a culture of brand adoption within the business are essential for building a strong customer-facing brand. Brand engagement software like Frontify helps companies increase the number of employees who adopt and connect with their brand. In turn, this helps customer-facing employees become true advocates for the business.

Brand engagement software is essential for companies looking to increase internal brand adoption. Learn how brand engagement software delivers 367% ROI and helps companies like Telefonica and Lufthansa increase the value of their brand.