Branding UI: A Simple Solution for Marketing Multiple Brands
A Full-Service Golf Marketing Agency Looks to the Innovative Multi-Channel Campaign Management Platform to Serve Centralized Brand Management and Local Marketing Needs
The Challenges
- Long turn-around times even for simple edits
- Attempts at self-service
reduced quality and brand control - Increased cost to service clients leading to reduced margins
Growing Pains
Every company experiences them, big and small, and Indigo Golf Partners was no exception. As our portfolio of golf clients grew, so did the demand for effective marketing collateral. Our first attempt to meet the rising tide came in 2014 when we brought our design services in house. Consisting of five marketing associates and two designers, the creative services department oversaw the marketing process for more than 140 properties across America.
Initially, it was a huge success; set up more like an agency, the quality of design significantly increased which, in turn, helped attract new audiences and generate revenue for clients.
But, like with all good products, demand quickly outgrew supply. In January of 2015, our team produced custom designs to fulfill nearly 2,000 requests which included posters, golf cart signs, table tents, menus, website and email banners, and other promotional material. The collateral came in all shapes and sizes, but the key information on each (who, what, when, where, and how much) varied little. Unfortunately, due to the impressive volume of requests turnaround times were less than acceptable for our clients. Edits that should be processed in one day were taking up to three weeks. Clients resorted to designing their own collateral using Microsoft Word, and our marketing associates were teaching themselves how to use Adobe InDesign just to help alleviate designers’ oppressive workloads. Sadly, the process just led to more burnout, anger and frustration on all fronts.
We considered many solutions to address the volume issue, but each of them would have compromised the design quality. Professionally-designed campaigns are our mantra; we don’t settle for anything less. It was apparent that another approach was needed, one that maintained quality, reduced workload and minimized cost for clients.
Enter Santa Cruz Software
We met with its creators in March of 2015 to discuss the concept of self-service. With more than 30 combined years’ experience with InDesign, the team at BrandingUI had the answers we were looking for. BrandingUI allowed us to control the design while our clients had the freedom to quickly customize, edit and print collateral on demand.
Our foray into BrandingUI began slowly – knowing that to be successful, you have to crawl before you run. We added a few of our most popular designs into the digital library and launched the site for roughly 15 clients. Feedback was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Word of the new, easy-to-use platform spread like wildfire.
Within two months of our initial test phase, all our courses were actively using BrandingUI. Three months later, our team added more than 800 customizable templates and 388 campaigns were successfully completed without adding a single request to our designers’ workload. A critical requirement that the BrandingUI team met was the ability to add in key information once per campaign, reducing the workload for everyone (and avoiding the inevitable typos that occurred from version to version). Since its inception, BrandingUI has reduced our monthly, custom design request volume from roughly 2,000 to fewer than 1,000.
We have most recently taken advantage of BrandingUI’s new enhancement – the cross media integrated marketing campaign feature. It allows us to extend from print-ready designs to HTML for sites and email campaigns. We fully integrated our SilverPop email platform with BrandingUI, enabling our clients to customize and edit their campaign collateral and then directly distribute through email to customer segments.
BrandingUI goes beyond the design editing and email functionality; it provides a sleek work-flow management tool. Marketing Directors, who spend many days on the road connecting with their clients across the country, are able to review newly created designs and quickly approve – or make comments back to submitter – from their mobile devices to keep the process moving. Due dates and reminders can be created and shared among team members to ensure projects stay on track.
Finally, BrandingUI’s administration tools enable us to limit the visibility of designs to the appropriate clients – avoiding exposure of one client’s specific assets from another.
The Result
Needless to say, everyone loves BrandingUI. Clients can communicate faster with their loyal golfers, turnaround time for collateral is less than 24 hours, and our marketing and design teams can focus on doing what they do best: creating customized, high-level marketing strategy and targeted designs.