A template success story: How Leonardo Hotels drives efficiency with Frontify

Navigating brand management involves balancing quantity and quality. For teams who need to produce large amounts of content efficiently, the biggest challenge is often making sure each piece consistently aligns with brand guidelines. With Frontify, Leonardo Hotels was able to build out a fully-fledged brand portal that empowered its employees to use templates to efficienctly scale and cater for its growing content needs across all its brands and locations.

Leonardo Hotels uses Frontify since 2023

Digital & Print Templates

Creative Collaboration

Digital Asset Management

Brand Guidelines

To confront this challenge, brands often take one of two avenues. They can use an agency to build every piece of content for them. But the cost of agencies can be upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The other option? Digital & Print Templates. Templates are the unsung heroes of brand management. They allow teams to scale their marketing efforts while providing the structure and guidance needed to maintain brand integrity.

For example, Leonardo Hotels, a hotel chain with several sub-brands, needed a lot of content for its various locations. It was using an agency for a lot of this material, and in some cases, teams would create their own content. The result was a lot of inconsistent branding across these publications. Plus, it was costing a lot of time and money. Once Leonardo Hotels adopted Frontify, it was able to empower its employees to use templates to scale its efforts.

Let’s explore how this shift towards using templates has become a game-changer for companies like Leonardo Hotels.

Why do marketing and brand teams use templates?

Templates help marketers effortlessly uphold brand identity, scale content creation with ease, and improve workflow efficiency across diverse channels and collateral. Here’s how:

Ease of use: Templates are designed so that virtually anyone can use them, making it easy for your end-users to navigate and work with them efficiently.
Scalability: Brands use templates to create and publish a large number of publications and material to suit day-to-day needs and campaigns.
Consistency: By providing standard, brand-approved elements, templates ensure consistency across all materials and channels.
Customization: Templates offer flexibility and customization options, allowing users to tailor designs to their specific requirements.
Cost-savings: By reducing the need for external design services, templates contribute to significant cost savings for brands.

Frontify’s Digital & Print Templates enable marketing and brand teams to quickly create on-brand designs, freeing up time for more important core tasks. Frontify also integrates with InDesign and Sketch. So, your brand designers create the templates in the platform, and then non-designers — and even non-marketers — can use them to create content.

How Leonardo Hotels leveled up on efficiency with Frontify templates

Leonardo Hotels and its portfolio of brands initially sought a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to streamline media storage and retrieval. The team struggled with scattered content and difficulty finding the media assets they needed, especially for day-to-day publications like signs, menus, and posters. This led to a lot of unnecessary time spent searching through files.

Once Leonardo Hotels partnered with Frontify, they were able to boost efficiency in different areas.

Improved brand consistency

Templates have made it easier for all Leonardo Hotels employees to maintain consistent branding. Before Frontify, the marketing and brand teams at Leonardo Hotels struggled to emphasize the importance of a unified brand image.

By offering templates with standardized elements like logos, colors, and fonts, Leonardo Hotels ensures a consistent brand identity across all locations, materials, and channels. One location was even able to create a large beachside billboard within the company’s brand guidelines.

“One of the hotels is located at the beach and they wanted to place a big billboard close by to attract visitors to the hotel and restaurant. They created this billboard themselves in which they used the right fonts, colors, and illustrations.”

Anne Sofie Tieman

Marken- & PR-Managerin

Centralized brand management

Frontify has served as a centralized brand management tool for Leonardo Hotels. Leonardo Hotels leverages Frontify’s Guidelines, Digital Asset Management, and Digital & Print Templates across its diverse portfolio of brands. Each brand has a template library within Frontify. The platform’s user-friendly interface and accessibility have fostered widespread adoption among employees, leading to an increase in asset usage, reuse and fewer requests for new designs.

“Every brand has its own template library. We get fewer requests for setting up new designs, which is a good sign. That means that employees are making use of the existing templates.”

Anne Sofie Tieman

Brand & PR Manager

Time and resource savings

With Frontify's templates, Leonardo Hotels experienced a significant reduction in time spent on ad-hoc and hotel-specific designs. Notably, the ability to “recycle” templates has enabled colleagues to quickly create on-brand collateral by themselves.

“Before we had Frontify, I would spend 70% of my work on creating briefings for designs, sending logos, sending media, etc. Now I spend 70% on the projects that I couldn’t focus on before, so I saved a lot of time.”

Tanischa Kluivert

Jr. Marketing Manager

How to use templates like Leonardo Hotels

Templates have significantly simplified the content creation process for Leonardo Hotels. The ease with which team members can access, customize, and deploy templates, enables quick creation as end users can now easily find what they need and create new publications from those templates without compromising brand integrity.

“With the templates, we enable our colleagues to create posters, flyers, and much more material themselves, which saves us time on briefing a designer, communicating back and forth, project management, and more.”

Anne Sofie Tieman

Brand & PR Manager

Consider these best practices from Leonardo Hotels which work across all industries.

Empower end users: Enable team members to create localized designs within brand guidelines. This empowerment reduces your reliance on external agencies and accelerates your time-to-market.
Prioritize training and adoption: Encourage all your stakeholders and employees to use templates by providing comprehensive training and ongoing support. Training efforts can help ensure widespread adoption and usage across your entire company.
Implement a centralized system: Invest in a centralized platform like Frontify to streamline template management and ensure brand consistency across all marketing collateral.
Continuous improvement: Regularly review and refine template libraries based on user feedback and evolving brand requirements. Frontify provides data on your template usage so you can evaluate how useful each template is. You can also track performance on your templates, including metrics like pageviews, active authors, and unique visitors.

“Since I started to use Frontify at work my daily activity became much more exciting and it increased my variety of tasks. At Leonardo in Amsterdam City Center, I am in charge of the visual representations as a means of communication. When using Frontify, I can engage my sense of creativity by contributing to the overall guest experience. I’m really grateful I can engage with Leonardo’s brand identity with each project I start in Frontify for my hotel.”

Smaranda Sabau

Operations Supervisor, Leonardo Hotel in Amsterdam City Center

Example of how templates can improve efficiency

Templates can save your teams a significant amount of time and money. The time-saving aspect is generally a combination of reducing administrative task time (e.g. less content briefings, less lengthy workflows and processes) and enabling users to create their own content without needing and/or relying on any additional design resources. Essentially, it’s the self-serve aspect of brand management that increases long-term efficiency.

Let’s now take a deeper look at a hypothetical scenario for Leonardo Hotels.

Say Leonardo Hotels relies heavily on external agencies for template creation. Between all its different brands, locations, and teams, the company requires a lot of content for both print and digital media every month. This is a common situation for most companies regardless of size, industry or set-up.

In this hypothetical scenario, let's say Leonardo Hotels creates up to eight templates each month. Half of these templates are built externally — by an agency — which comes with significant costs and time investments. When outsourced to an agency, a template can cost, on average, a few hundred dollars, depending on its complexity and the agency's hourly rates. So if this process slowly becomes the norm across the company based on growing content needs, the time and cost investments can increase exponentially over time as teams will require more and more individual templates each time a new piece of content is needed. Moreover, this costly set-up would see more and more reliance on agencies for a lot of the legwork which would actually reduce overall efficiency, and see less repurposing and self-serve opportunities across the teams.

Now, this is especially true if you consider that, on average, more than 200 publications are created seamlessly and decentrally from those templates by Leonardo Hotels users each month – publications that previously, might have been created as single-use templates less quickly and at significant cost.

When we introduce Frontify’s self-serve capability into the equation, the time and cost investments can be drastically reduced.

“Frontify has exceeded our expectations. In the beginning, it was our goal to have a place where we store all our designs and content, mostly our media. What Frontify offers us is so much more. The template library definitely gets used the most. This shows us that a template library was very much needed.”

Tanischa Kluivert

Jr. Marketing Manager

With Frontify, Leonardo Hotels doesn’t rely as much on external agencies, since every team and location can use templates to create their own publications and content. The templates are accessible through Frontify, so end-users can use these assets over and over to create content specific to their day-to-day needs while staying on brand every time, and saving thousands of hours in the process each year.

Use templates to boost efficiency across your brand management efforts

Templates are a valuable solution for streamlining your brand management processes, saving both time and money while ensuring consistency across your marketing materials.

If you're interested in learning more about how templates can elevate your brand strategy, check out our on-demand webinar. In this session, you’ll have the opportunity to see these solutions in action through a demonstration and hear firsthand how templates have helped global brands scale their marketing campaigns.

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