Marketing Made Easy

Retailing is moving faster than ever, with more stock items, more campaigns and shorter timeframes for execution.

Centrally managed campaigns may be a fit for some businesses, but many businesses require a degree of freedom to create bespoke marketing collateral on a just in time basis. Of course, this sounds like a marketer’s nightmare, but it doesn’t need to be.

Many organisations are using the same approach to creation of marketing materials as they did twenty years ago. In an era of hyper-competition, it’s worth examining some of the technology being used to give brands the edge over their competitors measuring success with these key goals:

• Dramatically reduce production lead time for marketing collateral
• Broaden access to creation of marketing material – on a self-service basis
• Empower just-in-time marketing creation by franchisees
• Cut marketing production costs dramatically
• Ensure all marketing is on-brand.

What is the problem?

When it comes to marketing in the retail hardware industry, whether it’s instore POS, adverts in the local newspapers or on social media, there are many frustrations surrounding the entire process. You have to look at it as two sides of the same coin:

Head Office/Master Franchiser Key Goals

Ensure that their brand is protected in every instance and never misused or mistreated – so are reluctant to release the marketing control to stores.

Store Manager/Franchisee

This stakeholder has to spend a lot time going back and forth to head office trying to get updated, relevant material to promote their business, as they lack the skill and software licenses to do this themselves.

This is frustrating – a vicious circle, despite the bigger objectives of creating more sales by both parties. Regardless of whether you have an internal creative team or outsource your design/marketing work, these bottlenecks surface without fail in the form of high costs, long
waits and brand failure throughout an organisation. These problems have been relevant for almost 30 years since the introduction of the Macintosh computer, where only design trained colleagues or partners can edit details on a design.

How do we solve this problem?

These problems are proving easy to solve using Tweak Brand. This is a full brand management system that allows easy editing of design files in a web browser, with no skill needed. HQ can upload their own design files (so you are not using the same templates as other competitors in your industry!) and set editing permissions to define what can be changed and what can’t. Designs can be shared to each store and now managers can easily edit a ‘Four Product Poster’ or a shelf-talker in seconds, rather than hours of time wasted communicating or using poor, off brand self-made signage. The system is web browser ased, so there is no need for expensive design licences or software. It’s as simple as booking a flight – select your template, make the changes and print or post online.

Retail is fast paced – Can we speed up this process?

Tweak have pioneered a further step of automation to reduce errors and increase speed even more dramatically. By synchronising the pricing, descriptions and images of the products you offer, it’s a simple matter of scanning a barcode and your marketing collateral will be magically populated with this information in seconds.

Take Expert Hardware as an example. Last year they implemented Tweak’s Brand Automation feature and are saving about two hours per store per week in productivity, 5,000 hours per year that can be used elsewhere in the business. Other hardware outlets, such as Home Project Centre (HPC Group) have adapted this way of thinking, allowing their store managers to edit relevant material in an instant – but always keeping their brand number one and overall helping to bring more customers in the door, and providing their local stores with the flexibility they need to promote stock items that they need to sell and achieve the sales they need.

Value Proposition

Tweak’s software-as-a service cloud-based solutions help to increase organisational efficiency by solving a major problem in business – managing and sharing access to brand, marketing and digital assets across an organisation. A 2012 global survey published by IDC
indicates that employees lose an average of four and a half hours hours per week searching for or recreating the files they need. This is a problem that Tweak’s solutions can resolve, making every asset findable – or editable – in seconds – with sophisticated access levels for users and digital assets, with a full security audit trail.

Tweak Retail DAM

For retailers, organising and sharing brand assets can often be frustrating. With Tweak’s Digital Asset Management system (Tweak DAM), brands can now decide what assets are available to their store users – and whether they can view, download or share these assets. It acts as a self- service platform so retailers can access assets when they need to, but HQ still have control on what is being used. Giving this controlled access at store level is proving to be not only hugely beneficial when it comes to time being saved across a retail brand, but also helping to organise brand material that will be used regularly.

Tweak Brand: tweak.wistia.com/medias/hvnptgqf80
Tweak DAM: tweak.wistia.com/medias/d171ie4n82

For a free ROI calculation of the savings that could be achieved compared with your current process contact International Sales Manager, Shane Corcoran – shane@tweak.com +353 86-172 7278