Who am I?

My name is Anna and I’ve been working as a designer for the past 10 years. I recently joined Matik, Inc. as our first in-house designer.

It’s my job as a designer to provide branded templates, resources, and guidance so that teams can save time and maintain a level of consistency in their external communications.

Still, I've experienced firsthand how difficult it is to maintain brand consistency throughout an organization as it grows, leading to content that's stale or not being used correctly. This results in collateral that does not fully look, feel or read on brand, employees and teams that are on different pages, and ultimately, an inconsistent customer experience.

Let’s dig a little deeper into why this is important, and how I use automation to solve for this pain and enable brand consistency.

Why is brand consistency so important?

I love this Lucidpress blog that explores the relationship between brand consistency and revenue growth.

The author writes, “Brand consistency is the key to earning customer trust and elevating your ROI. And alternatively, inconsistent branding dampens brand status and creates confusion in the marketplace.”

I’ve worked at companies with a really strong brand, and others that were just starting to get their brand off the ground.

In both instances, I've seen how important brand consistency is to the success of marketing campaigns and to reaching and building trust with your customers.

Why is it difficult to maintain brand consistency across different teams?

Imagine this scenario: a marketing & design team releases a new pitch deck template for their company's sales team. They send an email to all of the reps, asking them to switch to this updated branding.

But sales reps are busy, and maybe a handful of them don't see the email with the newest template for customers, so they keep sharing the older, out-of-date version. Or maybe they just like the old template better and so never make the switch.

As a designer, I've run up against this pain of new template adoption many times throughout my career. I would then have to spend valuable time reviewing my peers’ content for consistency and quality, when I would’ve much rather focused on creating new design elements that could improve our customers’ experience (and I bet my bosses would’ve preferred this, too)!

How do we enable brand consistency at Matik?

This pain is why I became a huge advocate for automation that supports brand consistency initiatives. As a designer, I should be able to focus on the topics that matter the most to our customers, instead of spending time checking in on co-workers' collateral, or copying and pasting information from one place to another.

Enabling brand consistency only becomes more important as your org scales. Take this Cold Outreach 1-pager, for example, that Matik's sales team uses frequently to source new opportunities:

When this template was initially created, Matik only had 1 SDR on its sales team. Now, the sales & marketing team is fully built out and going strong, and will only continue to grow.

We drink our own champagne here at Matik. 🥂 So when I wanted to revise the 1-pager to reflects Matik’s new branding, I just onboarded the new version to Matik, which instantly took the old template out of circulation and gave the whole team access to the new template below:

No emails, no Slack messages, no branding getting lost in the flurry of other day-to-day alerts and notifications. When our reps want to use this template, they simply log into Matik. The template is there and ready, without them having to search for the most up-to-date version, make a single change to their process or rely on design for extra help.

As a result, I'm able to ensure that the work that I do, informed by our company goals and vision, is put directly into the hands of my co-workers and our customers.

What strategies is your team using to enable brand consistency at your company? Let us know, we'd love to hear from you :)

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