Your brand’s marketing consists of a variety of materials and assets, including printed marketing materials, direct mailers, promotional products, and digital elements. It can be a struggle to produce and manage consistent messaging and branding across all marketing collateral, especially when dealing with multiple employees or locations.

That’s why successful companies have a Brand Portal in place. A Brand Portal helps protect the brand and makes ordering materials more efficient, strengthens management capabilities, and much more.

In this blog, we will dive deeper into what a Brand Portal is, how it works, and the benefits it offers to businesses of all sizes. Whether you're looking to improve brand consistency, enhance team productivity, or optimize your marketing campaigns, a Brand Portal is a tool that can help your business achieve its goals.

What is a Brand Portal?

A Brand Portal is an essential tool for businesses looking to establish a consistent and cohesive brand identity across various channels and touchpoints. By providing stakeholders with easy access to physical and digital content assets such as logos, images, marketing collateral, and direct mail materials, a Brand Portal streamlines the ordering process and ensures that all materials adhere to brand guidelines. Additionally, a well-designed Brand Portal can enhance collaboration and communication among teams, improve brand awareness and recognition, and ultimately drive business growth.

Essentially, Brand Portals—also known as “Print Portals,” “Ordering Portals,” and “Web to Print Portals”—are customized, private, online storefronts that house all your company’s branded assets, including printed materials, digital assets, direct mail materials, and promotional products.

These tailor-made platforms are available to your company 24/7, from any device, making it easy for employees, franchisees, and others to access and order marketing materials with branding in place. Brand Portals also give you (and any other administrators you allow) complete control over who has access to certain materials, how many materials employees can order, and which fields on certain materials are editable.

For example, new employees could order business cards and add their name, job title, email, and work number, but they would not have access to order brochures or download logos until given permission.

How Do Brand Portals Work?

Brand Portals function like an online store, displaying your company’s marketing collateral for easy access and ordering. Each item can be clicked on, customized if needed, and ordered in just a few minutes.

Here are the details on the ordering and managing side of a Brand Portal:

The Ordering Side of a Brand Portal

A Brand Portal, or Web to Print Portal, provides your company with an online platform that aligns with your brand and style. Your branded collateral is stored within the portal, including:

• Printed Materials: brochures, letterhead, posters, rack cards, etc.
• Direct Mail Materials: mailing lists, postcards, catalogs, envelopes, etc.
• Promotional Items: mugs, shirts, hats, banners, signs, pens, etc.
• Digital Elements: logos, PDFs, e-catalogs, digital ad assets, etc.

Everyone who has access to your Brand Portal can access, download, and place orders and they can even customize certain elements if allowed (such as names on business cards or addresses on postcards.)

While employees can place orders, they cannot change certain elements that may compromise your brand’s identity. For example, if a franchisee orders postcards and wants to use a location-specific image, they can choose that image, but everything else (including size, colors, logo, and message) remains the same.

The Managing Side of a Brand Portal

Brand management is essential, and a Brand Portal gives you complete control over your portal's appearance, user access and permissions, order quantities, customization options, and more. You can manage all elements and users of your Brand Portal 24/7, ensuring it scales with your company's growth.

Here are just a few capabilities of a Brand Portal that allow you to manage everything precisely the way you need:

• Limit Access: You can restrict access to specific items, so anyone in a particular role cannot place orders for them.
• Order Restrictions: You can restrict certain employees from placing orders over a specific quantity.
• Order Approval: You can require approval on orders, so you can view and accept them before they're placed.
• Order Visibility: You can allow other administrators to see orders placed by employees.
• Volume Reports: You can receive volume reports and view all orders placed monthly or as needed.
• Customization Options: You can choose and change the elements that can be customized by each user.
• Order Tracking: You can view job statuses and track orders.
• Inventory Management: You can set up inventory storage while receiving updates when inventory is low.
• Brand Approved Templates: You can build brand-approved templates to ensure consistent branding.
• Billing Options: You can control whether users are billed at checkout or track purchase orders and pay later.

What are the Benefits of a Brand Portal?

A Brand Portal provides a centralized platform to manage and distribute your company's branded assets, including printed materials, digital elements, and promotional products. With a Brand Portal, you can ensure brand consistency, streamline the design and ordering process, and save time and resources by providing easy access to all essential branded assets. Additionally, a carefully crafted Brand Portal can improve collaboration and communication among teams, increase brand awareness and recognition, enhance brand compliance, and drive more sales. By implementing a Brand Portal, you can simplify the management of your company's branding and take your marketing efforts to the next level.

Here’s a detailed overview of the many benefits of a Brand Portal:

Brand Consistency

Brand consistency is crucial as it takes 5 to 7 brand impressions for a customer to remember your brand. If a customer receives a postcard promoting a message from you, and later encounters a pop-up ad with a modified version of the colors, logo, and message, this can compromise the brand's impression.

A lack of consistency can cause your company to miss out on various benefits. Brand Portals are designed to lock in your branding for every asset your company uses, ensuring consistent branding across all elements presented to customers and prospects

Improved Efficiency

When you have a team, you need to provide them with easy access to the resources they need to promote your brand so they can do their jobs as efficiently as possible.

When your sales and marketing collateral, including printed materials, direct mail materials, and digital assets, are placed within an online Brand Portal, your team has access to those materials and can order them quickly, saving them and you time by not having to locate design templates, walk them through the steps, send billing information, and more.

Not to mention, for materials like brochures, catalogs, direct mailers, and other branded collateral that need to be printed or sent to the post office, a Brand Portal speeds up the turnaround time. This is because designs are already uploaded into the Print Portal so that as soon as an order is placed, the production time begins. You can even inventory certain materials, so that they are ready to be sent out immediately.

Decrease in Waste

Are you currently ordering event banners, brochures, business cards, or catalogs in bulk and sending them to each location, only to realize that a lot of them are going to waste? Chances are, smaller locations aren't using every material sent to them, not every employee needs that many business cards, and some franchisees' audiences respond to different marketing messages more than others.

A Brand Portal can help you avoid this issue by allowing you to print on demand and order in smaller quantities. With a Brand Portal, you can also manage how many materials someone can order and even create customizable templates, which means people can order materials as they need them instead of having a box of outdated brochures taking up space. This saves you money and space while ensuring that you have the right materials available when you need them.

Increase in Brand Awareness

Consistency is key to building a strong brand. In fact, presenting your brand consistently can increase brand visibility by 3.5 times compared to presenting it inconsistently.

When people are aware of your brand, familiar with it, and understand what it stands for, they are more likely to take action, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for your services, or engaging with your company in other ways. By using a Brand Portal to ensure all your marketing materials are consistent and on-brand, you can increase brand awareness and drive more business growth.

Enhance Brand Compliance

Brand compliance is a set of guidelines that you have in place to ensure that your brand is and remains consistent. If your organization spans across multiple employees, locations, or franchises, there’s always a risk of someone using the wrong branded assets, modifying materials, or straying from your brand guidelines.

A Brand Portal or Web to Print Portal can help you gain complete control of your branded materials, including design templates, logos, colors, and more, and ensure consistency across your entire organization.

By centralizing your branded assets in a Brand Portal, you can ensure that all employees and stakeholders have access to the most up-to-date materials and guidelines. You can even create a document outlining your brand guidelines and store it in the Brand Portal, making it easy for everyone to access and follow.

Increase In Revenue

Consistent branding through a Brand Portal can significantly impact your revenue. According to a study, brands that present a consistent image across all platforms can increase their revenue by 23%. A Brand Portal ensures that your branded assets are used consistently and correctly across all marketing channels, from printed materials to digital assets. This results in increased brand recognition and recall among your target audience, which leads to more sales and revenue.

Additionally, with a Brand Portal's features for managing and controlling branded assets, you can ensure that only approved designs are used for marketing campaigns. This can prevent costly mistakes and avoid damaging your brand's reputation. By managing your brand effectively through a Brand Portal, you can increase your return-on-investment.

Business Growth Capabilities

Whether you own a franchise and are adding franchisees or own a small business and looking to gain new employees or add a new location, a Brand Portal helps make growing your business a seamless process.

Take a franchise for example, when a franchise gains a new franchisee, that franchisee just needs to be given access approval to the Brand Portal and they are then ready to order the materials that are needed to market successfully.

Or if your company is growing and looking to rebrand, all you need to do is update the design templates within your Brand Portal with the new logo, brand designs, etc., and everyone who has access to place orders is set up with the correct branding.

Conclusion:

A Brand Portal is an essential tool for businesses looking to save time and money as well as establish a consistent brand identity across various channels and touchpoints.

By providing users with easy access to physical and digital assets, including logos, marketing collateral, and direct mail materials, a Brand Portal streamlines the ordering process and ensures all sales and marketing materials adhere to brand guidelines. Additionally, by implementing a Brand Portal, you can simplify the management of your company’s branding, increase efficiency, reduce costs, and take your marketing efforts to the next level.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of a Brand Portal, click below to schedule a quick 10-minute demo today.