Your brand has various materials and assets, including printed marketing materials, direct mailers, promotional products, and digital assets. Producing and managing consistent messaging and branding across all collateral can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple employees or locations.

That's why many companies have a Brand Portal in place. A Brand Portal helps protect the brand, 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.

What is a Brand Portal?

A Brand Portal is an online storefront built specifically for a company and stores its branded collateral, such as promotional items, business cards, direct mail materials, digital assets, and more. It creates a streamlined ordering and managing process, ensures all materials align with the company's brand guidelines, and saves the company time and money.

You may have also heard Brand Portals referred to as "Print Portals," "Ordering Portals," or "Web to Print Portals." No matter what you call them, a Brand Portal is an online platform that is private to your company and houses all your branded assets so that you can easily manage those assets and your users can easily access and order them.

These tailor-made platforms are available to your company 24/7 from any device, making it easy for employees and franchisees to access and order the items they need with branding in place. Brand Portals also give you complete control over who has access to certain materials, how many materials users can order, and which fields on certain materials can be customized, like location-specific information, contact information, or even images.

How Do Brand Portals Work?

Brand Portals function like an online store, displaying your company's sales and marketing collateral for easy access and ordering. Each item can be clicked on, customized if needed, and ordered in seconds.

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

The Ordering Side of a Brand Portal

A Brand Portal provides your company with a centralized online platform that aligns with your brand and style. Even the portal interface is customized to align with your brand, including the logo, colors, font, and more. Your branded collateral is stored within the portal, including:

• Printed Materials: brochures, letterhead, business cards, rack cards, pocket folders
• Custom Signage: posters, table tents, banners, wall signs, floor decals
• Direct Mail Materials: mailing lists, postcards, catalogs, envelopes
• Promotional Items: apparel, drinkware, pens, notepads, stickers
• Digital Elements: logos, PDFs, e-catalogs, digital ad assets

Everyone with access to your portal can place orders or download the preapproved materials. Users can also customize some aspects if allowed. For example, they can personalize business cards, affiliate companies can add their company details to apparel, or franchisees can add their address to brochures.

While users can place orders and personalize necessary materials, Brand Portals use brand templating, so modifying the overall branded design is impossible. For example, suppose a franchisee orders a postcard and needs to modify the address and image. In that case, they can select their location-specific information, but everything else remains consistent, including size, spacing, positioning, logo, colors, messaging, and typeface.

The Managing Side of a Brand Portal

With Brand Portals, managing your brand is streamlined and handled in one place. A portal gives you complete control over the portal's appearance, user access and permissions, order quantities, payment and billing, materials, and specifications. You can also manage each item within your portal at any time, including removing, updating, or adding items. You can also view analytics such as who is placing orders, what items users order, and how many users visit and use your portal. This allows you to stay on top of your branded assets and ensure your portal scales with your company.

Some capabilities of a Brand Portal that allow you to manage your branded collateral easily include:

• Limit Access: You can restrict access to specific items so anyone in a particular department or new employees cannot place orders.
• Order Restrictions: You can restrict certain users from placing orders over a specific quantity.
• Order Approval: You can require approval to view and accept orders before they are processed.
• 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 decide what elements on certain materials can be customized.
• Order Tracking: You can view job statuses and track orders.
• Inventory Management: For regularly ordered materials, you can inventory them for quicker delivery and receive updates when inventory is low.
• Brand Approved Templates: You have control over your brand templating and can request changes anytime to ensure consistent branding, even when design changes occur.
• Billing Options: You can set up terms, track purchase orders and pay later, or bill individual users at checkout.

What are the Benefits of a Brand Portal?

Because Brand Portals offer a single platform for managing and distributing your branded assets, 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 to your entire organization, no matter how many employees or locations you have.

Additionally, a carefully crafted Brand Portal can improve team collaboration and communication, increase brand awareness and recognition, enhance brand compliance, and drive more sales.

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 someone to remember your brand. Suppose someone receives a postcard promoting your message and later encounters a digital ad with a modified version of the colors, logo, and message. In that case, this can compromise your brand's identity.

Consistency can prevent your company from missing 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 your audience, no matter how large your company is.

Improved Efficiency

You need to provide your employees, departments, or franchisees with easy access to the resources they need so they can promote your brand and do their jobs as efficiently and effectively 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, your design team, and your time by not having to locate design templates, walk them through the steps, and deal with billing.

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

Decrease in Waste

Do you order bulk event banners, brochures, business cards, or catalogs and send them to each location, only to realize that many 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 one franchisee's audience may respond to different marketing messages more than another.

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

Increase 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. Using a Brand Portal to ensure all your marketing materials are consistent and on-brand 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. Suppose your organization spans multiple employees, locations, or franchises. In that case, there's always a risk of someone using the wrong branded assets, modifying materials, or straying from your brand guidelines.

A 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 can significantly impact your revenue. According to a study, brands with a consistent image across all platforms can revenue by 23%. A Brand Portal ensures that your branded assets are used consistently and correctly across all sales and 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 by your entire organization. This can prevent costly mistakes and avoid damaging your brand's reputation. You can increase your return on investment by managing your brand effectively through a Brand Portal.

Business Growth Capabilities

Whether you own a franchise and are adding franchisees or own a small business and are 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 needed to market successfully.

Or suppose your company is growing and looking to rebrand. In that case, all you need to do is update the design templates within your Brand Portal with the new on-brand designs, 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 and 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, promo items, and direct mail materials, a Brand Portal streamlines the ordering process, ensuring 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 learning more about Brand Portals, click below to schedule a quick demo today.