Maintaining brand control, reducing waste, and reducing cost

Unique local marketing is often a challenge to control for central marketing teams. This often  leads to a DIY approach to marketing and brand consistency suffers and costs rise.  

Your hotels, each in different locations, with different customers have different marketing needs.  As an example, imagine one of your hotels in the network wants to produce a poster to promote a  specific event.  

They email your marketing team to the request for the poster. Your team is busy, so they don’t  get a chance to respond right away. Because this hotel needs to promote their event immediately,  they put something together themselves. The result may not be ideal.  

Or perhaps they turn to a local graphic designer and get them to produce something for display.  This comes with significant cost. And the graphic designer may not have used your organisation’s  colour palette or seen your logo usage guidelines. The poster goes up, but much later than it  should have, and its design does not fit with your brand.  

You can see how even this one simple task can become a convoluted exchange of emails, delays  and unnecessary expense – and leads to an outcome that does your brand no favours.  

Now imagine that this manager had instead been able to access an online marketing portal,  where they could choose from a range of adaptable templates, all adhering to your brand  guidelines. With a few clicks they would be able to enter the details of the event, add any images  or icons as necessary, and send their poster to print. This could include a single approval stage  with your marketing team, should you wish  

The Hotel is happy because they got the poster they needed when they needed it. And they feel  empowered to market their practice, rather than being reliant on a central marketing department  that has to juggle similar requests from across the entire network while focusing on other work.  Meanwhile, your marketing department is happy because they can focus on that other work, and  because they know that a poster produced in the online marketing portal is going to tick all the  right boxes. 

Maintaining brand control, reducing waste, and reducing cost  

You can also see exactly who is producing what, how much they are spending, and which local  users might need some help. An online marketing portal decentralises marketing effort without  risking damaging your brand’s identity. It’s easy to help each local team the power to create their  own materials and respond to local opportunities – but within an approved framework set by  central marketing. By using dynamic templates, the team can put a local twist on the corporate  message and produce brand-compliant artwork in minutes.  

SBS are experts in the Hotel and Hospitality sector. By working with SBS to deliver your print  and Marketing collateral, we can help you maximise tight budgets, maintain brand and reduce  unnecessary waste. And with sustainability at the forefront of all our minds, our FSC certification,  ISO 14001 accreditation and out commitment to carbon balancing, we are able to help you reduce  your carbon footprint throughout your estate.