CMOs split between unifying brand and demonstrating ROI
In your work, what is most important to you?
As a first step, we asked our 400 marketing leaders what's most important to them in their work. It turns out the group is split between two aspects of their jobs: creating a more unified brand experience and demonstrating ROI.
39% of respondents said that what's most important is "creating a strong, unified brand experience across all omni-channel touch points." However, another 39% of respondents said what's most important is "demonstrating the ROI of branding and marketing activities."
These two selections were by far the most popular answers, accounting for 78% of the total responses. It's safe to assume that both of these aspects are top of mind for marketing leaders.
However, it’s a mistake to believe that these two ideas are competing priorities. It’s not a pipe dream to create a unified brand experience that fully delivers ROI with marketing endeavors.
But it takes an efficient marketing setup to do so.
Defining marketing efficiency
At its core, an efficient system is one with a high ratio of output to input. If that system is a marketing department, then the output is a unified brand experience that maintains, promotes, and develops your brand. A better brand experience = a healthier brand = a higher ROI.
And what’s the input? That’s a very nebulous question, but for the sake of this article, let's focus on the budget and time you invest in the people, processes, and tools that do the work.
So, in a nutshell, an efficient marketing setup is one that takes your budget and time and turns it into a unified brand experience, thus demonstrating good ROI.
With that in mind, let's get to our survey results. We asked five questions to get a pulse on the current status quo of marketing efficiency. Let’s take a look at the answers.
58% could manage their brand assets more efficiently
How does your company currently manage brand assets?
40% of brands have the right idea of managing their assets using a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. The presence of a DAM doesn’t automatically ensure brand consistency and good ROI. If the solution isn’t utilized properly, then all you have is more steps to follow in order to turn input into output. For more info on this point, read our 6 best practices for maximizing DAM ROI.
Even more notably, nearly two-thirds of brands are still managing their assets using outdated DAM alternatives such as Sharepoint (32%) and file-hosting sites like Google Drive (26%). When it comes to creating a unified brand experience at scale, these solutions simply fall short.
How Uber manages brand assets more efficiently
By contrast, let’s look at Uber. Uber's marketing team oversees a complex, multi-brand setup with global-to-local needs. That means efficiency is a must when managing assets. Since implementing Frontify's DAM, Uber has drastically streamlined its brand experience management globally. Read our case study to learn more about Uber's success.
64% could manage their brand portals more efficiently
How does your company currently manage its brand portal?
64% of respondents said they manage their brand portals using Sharepoint (39%), Custom Solution (22%), or PDFs (3%). Each of these solutions is limited in its own way, but in general, they're all difficult to access in a scalable way.
Furthermore, investing in a completely custom-built portal (as 22% of brands do) requires significant time and costs — and those costs recur every time your brand undergoes a rebranding or brand refresh. Over the years, more and more brands are realizing it's not worth the maintenance, especially when highly customizable solutions like Frontify exist for a fraction of the cost.
How Mercedes-Benz manages brand portals more efficiently
A dynamic brand portal is valuable when there's a need to increase brand adoption, such as an upcoming rebrand or limitations with your hard-to-access Sharepoint system. Mercedes-Benz used Frontify to successfully build a customized, multi-brand portal for their ongoing brand transformation. Read the case study to learn more about how Mercedes-Benz's marketing team delivered success for the organization.
80% could manage their content templating more efficiently
How does your company currently manage templating for content?
Templates are the Swiss army knife in your marketing toolkits, representing an opportunity to really increase your efficiency if used correctly.
However, as we see here, more than 80% of respondents are managing content templates using inefficient methods, including 41% who do everything manually in-house. This is a critical area where CMOs can free up time for designers to focus on more strategic, high-impact projects instead of repetitive tasks—but that can only happen if those repetitive tasks can be handled competently elsewhere.
Two such options reflected in the survey include using a tool like Canva (17%) or putting your templating workload into the hands of an external agency (22%). While Canva can support one-off solutions, it's extremely limited in terms of scalability. And working with an external agency for every template can become costly very quickly.
How Spring Health manages content templates more efficiently
Spring Health's marketing team needed to scale content creation drastically. Unfortunately, their previous DAM enabled them to create only one template every six weeks. After switching to Frontify, Spring Health's team was able to create 75 templates in a matter of days. Read the case study to learn about all of Spring Health's efficiency gains.
64% could manage campaign toolkits more efficiently
How does your company currently manage campaign toolkits?
Campaign toolkits are one of the most overlooked areas of asset management, with 64% of brands reporting that they still share toolkits using PDFs or presentation decks. With these formats, it's impossible for users to engage with the content, such as downloading an image or creating self-service content via a template.
A positive statistic here is that more than a quarter (28%) of brands manage toolkits using a DAM. This is the best option - as long as your DAM has the form and function needed for today’s omni-touchpoint brand campaigns (and the toolkits they require).
Your toolkits should be customizable to the look and feel of your campaign while making it incredibly easy for your internal and external stakeholders to access information and assets to promote the campaign.
75% could manage their design system more efficiently
How does your company currently manage its design system?
For many organizations, critical brand touchpoints show up in the work done by UX design teams. However, there are often communication gaps between brand and design teams, which explains why 19% of marketing leaders weren't sure how their organization's design systems are managed.
Of those who do know, 38% use a custom solution, and another 37% use Figma. We've already discussed the expensive maintenance costs of custom solutions. Although Figma is an essential tool for designers, there are still limitations to giving access to brand and marketing teams. We’ve solved those limitations. Frontify's integrations with Figma and Storybook allow organizations to centralize these critical touchpoints in one place, which leads to greater brand consistency and more significant ROI because you can consolidate and complement your existing tech stack.
How Volkswagen Group manages its global design system more efficiently
Volkswagen Group used Frontify to build its design system called GroupUI. As a result, VW has been able to consolidate, scale, and future-proof its global design system, changing the way the organization works as a group across all of VW's brands. Read our interview with VW's User Experience Lead to learn more about this brand milestone.
Frontify is the DAM for increasing marketing efficiency
If you're looking to become a more efficient marketing department, Frontify is a great place to start. As a leading cloud-based DAM, Frontify makes it easy to manage your brand assets, brand portal, templates, toolkits, design system, and much more. As a result, Frontify customers can create more unified brand experiences for their customers and report greater ROI to the C-suite.
