To manage your brand successfully, you need buy-in, support, and skills of everyone in your organization. The reason? Everything from your products and campaigns to your frontline employees’ chosen greetings reflects on your brand. And drifting away from your core branding in any of these areas can have negative effects on your overall brand perception and customer loyalty.

But believe it or not, brand management isn’t just a task you take on to keep customers happy. It actually helps employees do their jobs better, faster, and more easily than before.

How does that work? We’ll show you in this post. But first, let’s give a quick definition of brand management.

What is Brand Management?

Brand management is the work you do to increase or maintain your reputation with your audience. This includes marketing campaigns, design work, interactions with customers, and the efforts you make to keep your employees happy and attract job seekers.

Being the responsibility of everyone in your organization (and those around it), there’s a wide variety of tasks that help you manage your brand. However, to be effective, these tasks should accomplish three things. Namely, they should help you maintain your brand consistency, stand out from your competitors, and resonate deeply with your audience. You can learn about responsibilites of brand in our Brand Stewardship guide.

How Does Brand Management Help Your Employees Do Their Jobs?

The truth is, there are a lot of factors that influence the success and efficiency of your employees’ work. But brand management does play a key role in both outcomes. Let’s look at how it works.

1. Marketers Can Roll Out Better Campaigns, Faster

Traditionally, the role of a marketer is to capture the attention of leads, nurture them at every stage of your funnel, and convince as many as possible to buy your product. But in the digital age, marketing is even more complicated. Rather than simply creating direct mailers, flyers, and billboards, marketers are now faced with an ever-growing list of digital marketing channels and content.

This means, if they want to continue capturing leads and customers, your marketers have to build trust with people over time and convince them your brand is the best solution to their pain points. That’s where brand management comes in. It helps your marketers ensure that every touchpoint – from ads to “buy now” CTAs – match your branding. And it enables them to create content that resonates with leads and customers on a much deeper level.

Effective brand management doesn’t just help your marketers create better, more consistent marketing campaigns, though. It also helps them get these campaigns in front of your audience faster by:

• Minimizing the amount of time they spend revising or redoing marketing collateral
• Streamlining approval processes involving various internal teams and external partners
• Simplifying collaboration with designers and developers to create impactful customer-facing material

And this, in turn, allows your marketers to reach, capture, and convert leads more easily.

2. Designers Can Create More Impactful Visuals

Designers have to adopt new styles and trends to keep your brand fresh and relevant. But they also have to make sure your brand is easily recognizable to customers every time they come into contact with it. And unfortunately, finding the sweet spot between the two can be incredibly difficult.

That is unless you use brand management strategies to guide your design work. Using brand guidelines, for example, designers can stay on-brand while pushing the boundaries of their creativity. They can take advantage of the latest design trends and tease out their own ideas for modern ad creative. And as a result, they can create impactful visuals for your audience and strengthen your brand identity at the same time.

Beyond design outputs, your designers can also lean into brand management tactics to streamline their workflow. They can:

• Simplify collaboration with marketers and developers
• Eliminate the need to rework designs and iterate over and over again
• And speed up the approval process for each piece of creative

This means your designers can spend more time designing ad creative, conceptualizing landing pages, and generally helping your brand resonate with people, rather than tackling tedious design tasks and requests.

3. Brand Teams Keep Everyone On Track, Easily

Brand teams are responsible for keeping your organization on-brand. They review campaigns and collateral before they’re published, track your brand perception online, and make sure your employees have access to the brand assets they need to complete projects.

The problem is: these tasks can take a lot of time – sometimes unnecessarily. And if your employees in other departments aren’t clear on your branding, project timelines can slow dramatically as your brand team slogs through project revisions and feedback loops.

On the other hand, good brand management can take the pressure off of brand teams, by spreading the responsibility for your brand across your organization. It can also speed up project timelines, by allowing individual employees to work more autonomously and create content that only needs a stamp of approval.

4. Sales Teams Can Turn More Leads Into Customers

While sales teams spend a lot of their time talking to customers over the phone or via live chat, they do play a major role in your brand. Namely, they show leads whether the brand they see in your marketing materials is genuine or not. And this is crucial because your customers are typically moving through the consideration and decision phases of the buyer’s journey at this point.

Luckily, by focusing on brand management, your sales team can effortlessly create customer experiences that match your desired branding. From the tone of voice and language choices to visuals and collateral, every aspect of the sales experience can be on point.

As a result, you can build trust with your leads and increase the likelihood of converting many of them into customers.

5. Human Resources (HR) Hires Qualified Candidates That Fit Culturally

One major challenge HR representatives face is figuring out who to hire. Not necessarily because it’s hard to attract the right job seekers, but because it’s difficult to pinpoint which candidate is most qualified for the job responsibilities.

And when you add in elements like culture, pay, and work environment, the hiring process can become a long, expensive process – requiring hours of interviewing, massive stacks of resumes, complicated skill assessments (like the Wonderlic test), and detailed personality assessments (like the MBTI).

Believe it or not, brand management can help HR teams streamline this process, long before they ever post a job, though. How? By helping HR teams focus on the most valuable aspects of their brand so they can tailor their employer branding campaigns, job postings, interviews, and assessments to match the criteria they’re actually looking for.

This, in turn, increases their chances of connecting with the right job seekers (i.e., those who are interested, qualified, and a good match for the company), while solidifying their reputation as a great company to work for.

6. Product Teams Can Develop On-Brand Products

The same way marketing collateral needs to be on-brand to be recognizable and appreciated, products need to match a company’s branding as well. If they don’t, customers can end up feeling misled or simply bothered by the lack of consistency.

But here again, brand management solves this problem by helping product developers focus on the big picture, rather than a one-off idea. How does the shift in mindset help? It gives product teams the ability to create innovative products and try out different designs, without worrying whether the product will fit the brand or not.

At the same time, brand management also simplifies product development processes by:

• Making cross-functional collaboration work more seamlessly
• Streamlining design-to-development handoffs

This ultimately enables developers to get projects (even complex ones) rolled out quickly, so both the customer and internal stakeholders are kept happy.

Conclusion

Often, when we talk about brand management, we focus on external benefits. The boost to brand perception, the larger number of sales and increased revenue, the heightened level of brand advocacy, and so on. But the fact is, brand management also plays a major role in our employee’s efficiency and impact. So while brand management can and should be used as a means to keep our customers happy, just remember that it’s made for you too.