Your business is unique, but do your brand assets reflect that? B2B buyers are bombarded with information daily, and only so many brands can stand out. When the time comes to pull the trigger and invest in a solution, those are the brands they will go for.
64% of CMOs feel that brand marketing should be given higher importance, but CFOs aren’t entirely on the same page: only 26% agree with further investments in this area. By neglecting your brand, you’re letting your competitors overtake you. But brand marketing does come at a cost – and one that, apparently, not every stakeholder may be willing to accept.
Brand marketing solutions can help you enhance your brand assets and initiatives without burning resources, money, and time. Whether your goal is to drive engagement on socials, protect your brand assets, or even revamp your identity online, there’s a tool for every need.
What is a brand marketing solution?
A brand marketing solution is a tool that enables businesses to develop, manage, and promote their brand to prospects. It covers various activities and channels, including:
Brand design and messaging
Paid advertising
Content marketing
Social media marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Community management
PR and events
Influencer marketing
Brand loyalty is becoming less of a given day by day. While it’s up to customer success teams to nurture relationships and ensure customers stick around, it’s up to marketing to ensure that prospects stick around, too. Ultimately, brand marketing tools will help you optimize, automate, and scale the marketing activities that help you always keep your brand consistent and in demand.
This is crucial, considering that at any given point, only 5% of your target customers are “in the market.” Based on the popular 95-5 rule, 95% of your target customers are not yet prepared to buy – but still need your attention. If you nurture these 95% by delivering valuable, targeted content that raises brand awareness, you’re more likely to be remembered when they’re ready to buy.
Why do you need a brand marketing solution?
Brand marketing solutions can help you develop brand consistency by providing an easily accessible centralized hub for all brand assets and guidelines. This ensures every team member uses the correct visuals across materials.
They may also offer automated management of activities, such as email and social media post scheduling, which can be a time savior for busy marketing teams. As your business expands, brand marketing tools can help you keep track of your customers’ journeys, adapt to new industry trends, and promptly adapt your content to customers’ interests.
Lastly, most brand marketing tools offer analytics and reporting capabilities, which will aid you in understanding how your audience perceives you and how they interact with your brand. By leveraging this data, you can make evidence-backed decisions to improve your brand or even map out your marketing strategy.
Key features to look for in a brand marketing solution
1. Integration with CRM tools
A seamless integration with popular CRM tools helps teams track every customer interaction and tailor their engagements to customers’ pain points. Oktopost integrates with Hubspot, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and other popular sales platforms to help you maximize the impact of your social media efforts.
2. Automation and Collaboration
Look for tools that automate your most repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as sending emails or tracking leads. Leveraging automation for such tasks will help you allocate your marketing resources effectively and focus on the bigger picture.
3. Analytics and Reporting
Most brand marketing tools will offer analytics and reporting. Make sure these are comprehensive, real-time data sets that help you track your demand generation efforts effectively. They should also be presented in user-friendly formats so that all team members can extract value from them.
4. Social media management
Not all brand marketing tools focus on social media. Still, getting features like automated scheduling, social data analytics, and employee advocacy is a massive bonus to speed up your digital marketing efforts.
5. Customer segmentation
Some brand marketing tools enable customer segmentation based on location, demographics, behavior, and preferences, helping you create targeted materials that address their unique needs. Remember that these tools should comply with key regulations such to protect your customers’ information.
Top 10 brand marketing solutions
1. Brandfolder
Brandfolder is a cloud-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that helps teams streamline brand management. It offers a centralized repository for storing, organizing, and distributing digital assets, ensuring all team members can easily access brand guidelines, logos, images, and other relevant marketing collateral.
Best For:
Large marketing teams with a heavy backlog of branding assets. It may be less suited for smaller companies that outsource their design efforts and don’t have enough digital assets to justify the investment in DAM solutions.
Customer Review:
“Brandfolder is the best way to share assets with my teammates. I love that I can load an asset, send a link, and get a thank you from the teammate who downloaded it within a minute.”
2. Oktopost
Oktopost is a B2B social media management tool that enables scheduling and automated posting, social listening, and advanced social analytics. It connects to all your social media platforms for detailed reporting, which helps teams make data-driven marketing decisions and prove the ROI of their initiatives.
You can also leverage its employee advocacy tool, which connects to your social media management platform and enables easier-than-ever social selling – crucial to raising brand awareness.
Best For:
Oktopost is specifically designed for B2B businesses. It is best suited for B2B marketing leaders who want to amplify their brand on social media and leverage analytics to drive their content strategy and improve ROI.
Customer Review:
“Oktopost has singlehandedly let me launch a social program for ActionIQ at a scale the company has never seen in 6 years. And the fact that I can do that with one platform is remarkable as one person.”
3. Frontify
Through Frontify’s centralized hub, marketing teams can store and manage digital assets, style guides, and brand guidelines. Frontify also offers design features and templates to help teams create brand materials. Plus, it integrates with collaboration tools like Jira and Highspot to streamline marketing and sales efforts.
Best For:
Businesses looking to elevate their branding and maintain brand consistency. It may be less suited for large enterprises with specialized design teams who already have a solid brand strategy.
Customer Review:
“Frontify is a very easy-to-use and intuitive interface. Assets and saving the files are very easy. Navigation Manager is one of the unique features of all the available tools that I have explored till now. Collaboration with the team is easy to invite and add.”
4. Trendemon
Trendemon offers advanced analytics for tracking and visualizing online customer journeys in real-time, from their first visit to conversion. It also integrates with the popular CRM platforms Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot (now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement).
Best For:
B2C companies looking to track and improve website metrics. It may not be suited for B2B marketing teams, as the user journey and sales processes in B2B are complex and often composed of various touchpoints across different channels.
Customer Review:
“I’m thoroughly impressed with their support team. They are incredibly responsive and helpful, answering any questions with expertise and efficiency. This level of support significantly enhances the overall experience of using their product.”
5. Hubspot
Aside from its widely popular CRM system, HubSpot offers various automation features spanning content creation, social media management, email marketing, PPC optimization, and analytics. The all-in-one platform helps businesses track customer journeys and nurture their leads efficiently.
Best For:
Large businesses looking to merge marketing, sales, and customer service efforts in a single integrated platform. HubSpot can be costly, especially with the addition of new features, so it may not be the best choice for teams with limited budgets. While it covers various marketing activities, its features may not be as comprehensive as those offered by specialized solutions. For instance, social media management or email marketing may require dedicated tools.
Customer Review:
“The most helpful feature of the Hubspot Marketing Hub is that all of the activities that you conduct as a business (e.g., communications that you send out to customers, whether it a marketing email, workflow, quote) are all tracked and can easily be transformed into KPI’s as a dashboard for your department.”
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs focuses on SEO, offering features such as backlink analysis, site audits, keyword research tools, and brand keyword tracking. Leveraging an SEO tool like Ahrefs helps marketing teams understand content gaps, identify keyword opportunities, and develop brand awareness through improved performance on search engines.
Best For:
Large marketing teams looking to improve and automate their SEO efforts. It may not be the best option for small start-ups with limited budgets and no internal SEO know-how.
Customer Review:
“From the moment I started using the platform, it became evident that Ahrefs is designed very well. The array of tools and features available within the platform. have greatly empowered our online presence and digital marketing efforts.”
7. Bynder
Bynder is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform that offers a centralized hub for storing and managing digital assets, ensuring brand consistency across marketing channels. Marketing leaders can maintain brand integrity and promote effective collaboration through features like version control and customizable permission settings.
Best For:
Large teams needing to streamline the storage and sharing of digital brand assets.
Customer Review:
“Taxonomy management is very easy; collections are useful for our sales/product/support users; it is very easy to find content using search or Metadata; it is a clean, simple interface.”
8. Uberall
Uberall focuses on location marketing, enabling businesses to engage with target customers based on location and enhance their online presence. It offers local listings management, reputation management, analytics, and reporting to review customer interactions.
Best For:
Multi-location businesses that want to improve their visibility across regions.
Customer Review:
“I like the convenience of changing operational hours and the ability to respond to all reviews on one platform instead of responding on different channels. Especially with the new Uberall CoreX app. I also like how we can now download reports in PDF/Image form (pie/graph charts).”
9. Brand24
Brand24 tracks and analyzes brand mentions across online channels. It examines the tone of these conversations for sentiment analysis, helping companies to understand how their audience perceives their brand.
Best For:
B2C Marketing teams looking to analyze and improve their online reputation. It doesn’t offer the level of integrations most B2B businesses require to track specific B2B sales processes.
Customer Review:
“Brand24 has proven to be an exceptional tool for precise keyword tracking, providing highly accurate mentions relevant to my specified keywords. Its standout feature is the ability to exclude specific keywords, ensuring focused and relevant results.”
10. Brandworkz
Brandworkz is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) and brand management platform. Its key features include a centralized repository for storing and organizing digital assets, editable templates for brand guidelines and marketing materials, and workflow tools for content approval and version control. Brandworkz also strongly emphasizes brand governance, helping you protect your brand online and stay compliant.
Best For:
Large organizations looking to streamline marketing workflows. Brandworkz has a steep learning curve and offers various comprehensive features, so it requires some internal marketing expertise.
Customer Review:
“Very dedicated customer support, through initial inquiry, to tailoring the platform to your needs and project delivery. The account manager is always available to respond. Platform met all our needs that are both simple and complex.”
No Plan B for Branding
Brand marketing is more than just well-designed digital assets: it’s about how you distribute this content, where you share it, and how your audience is digesting it. Automated tools are crucial to amplify your brand marketing efforts.
If you’re looking to invest in social media in 2024, Oktopost can help. Oktopost offers a range of features that enable seamless workflows for scheduling, posting, and sharing content. We offer employee advocacy, community management, and even social listening to ensure you’re always at the top of your game. Learn more here.
